Antichamber

As a boy I played The Legend of Zelda, in which appears The Lost Woods.  A forested area that repeats unless a specific path is taken, effectively trapping our hero in a non-euclidian nightmare.  What followed for my young mind were actual non-euclidian nightmares in which sections of what I perceived to be the real world repeated (often infinitely), making it impossible for me to escape disorientation.  I lost sleep, and my psychological state deteriorated.  In this state of increased fragility a wrong turn into unfamiliar territory could induce extreme anxiety. I became obsessed with maps and avoided streets that did not run parallel as often as possible.  I traded the game away, but the dreams never stopped.

It is 2013.  More than two decades have passed since the cartridge left my possession, and in that time I have played a number of games that have toyed with unmappable areas, and changing space, but there is something so base about what happened in those woods.  My dreams had grown worse, and these games couldn't keep up.  The real-world had been stripped back and my repetition was now hued in one shade each of pink and blue that consumed the black as they built themselves into the infinite.  No shadows.  No detail.  No texture.

When I first saw a video for Antichamber, I recognised something.  Something that held greater familiarity to me.  It was the very core of those dreams.  When they were at their darkest.  A world stripped back to the only things I would ever need to be afraid.  Everything styled as close to nothing as it could ever be.  If Escher had made horror movies they would've looked like this.

The game itself feeds you the pavlovian crumbs of small victories to keeping you moving, but the process repeats and a whole new level of cyclical gameplay is revealed.  At every point you are taunted with hints to solutions that you have just found, all delivered in the smug tone of a fortune cookie. It even has the gaul to give you map.

Antichamber is consistent in everything that it does, from the moment you launch the game to the moment that you quit.  It is the perfect nightmare.

I highly recommend it.

Means? Justified!

Anyone who has been, has had or has known of a teenage boy anytime in the last two decades can attest to the life consuming talents of videogames.  Somewhere along the line of one of the aforementioned was some kind of educator, or perhaps just a doe-eyed idealist who believed that there was some positive lesson to be taken from the beast and reapplied to a productive purpose and educational videogames were born.

For decades edutainment in all of its forms has generally been regarded as a fool's errand.  The kind of thing that committees push at board meetings six months before their entire department/company is looking for new jobs as they watch whatever isn't nailed down get sold off to pay each hand that is owed.

It could be argued that there have been some few success stories in the past, like the Carmen Sandiego  games that sometimes came packed with single volume encyclopaedias, but for the most part any educational content in a game that could be be deemed even remotely entertaining was purely incidental.

Then there was Duolingo.

Duolingo launched just over a year ago, and comes at it from a different tack.  Instead of starting from a desire to entertain, it starts with those core game mechanics that not so subtly engage our pavlovian responses.  The very same ones that have been employed to encourage us to drop coin to reach the next level or earn extra skills in World of Warcraft or Farmville.  Except Duolingo has a far more insidious agenda.  Polyglotism.  Yeah!  I'm not kidding.  They actually want you to learn and use languages other than English.  In the real world!

Whatever you do, do not go to duolingo.com and sign up to learn French, Spanish, German and/or Portuguese for FREE in an addictive format that will leave you conjugating verbs in your kitchen, on the bus  and in front of your children/parents.  You'll tell a friend and they'll tell a friend.  Lovers will meet up in darkened hotel rooms to master German nounal genders while the muted tv flickers in the corner washing their multilingual debauchery in a pallid light.   This is a disease.  This is a danger to all people.  Languages other than English could become an epidemic.  Imagine the havoc that would be wrought if this kind of thing were to spread. This is the nightmare.  The one they spoke about.

Duolingo is crack for people who like to travel.




For 10 points: An english word that pluralises by inserting the 's' into the word instead of at the end.

Fifty ways to get yourself to Disneyland

I soliloquise from time to time on the topic of what ever happens to be going.  There are some topics that tend to reemerge more often than others, and the quality of books I have not read is definitely an area in which I will often make out as though I am some sort of expert.  More so than, say, someone who has read the book in question.

I bring this up not as a confession of some wrong doing, but as a lead in to something I said in a recent installment of my regularly scheduled episodic verbal opinion piece I like to refer to as Bit Shit Lit. Crit. for people who have had a drink (or two).  The way I remember it is little bit like, "From what (few) excerpts I have read, when you hold Fifty Shades up against anything by Hemingway, it is just not very good."

This has been edited slightly, because I may have compared it to another book (yes, that is what I did), that perhaps not a lot of people have read or even heard about.  Instead I chose yet another book that my experience has lead me to believe is more widely commented on than it is read.

This is a true thing, but Fifty Shades of Grey doesn't sit up next to A Farewell to Arms in the same way that Debbie Does Dallas doesn't sit up next to Citizen Kane.  I draw this comparison because Fifty Shades of Grey seems to be encouraging people to get themselves to Disneyland.  It also seems to be encouraging people to experiment with other ways of getting themselves or others there, and some people are finding that they need to strap themselves down hard to the roof racks to ensure that they make it all the way to Disneyland without getting left behind.  Maybe you need the Lonely Planet Guide to Disneyland in your life more than you need an emotionally and psychologically taxing ending that might put you off the concept of parenthood altogether.

I know which one I would give to an expectant mother.

George and the Mouse

You may or may not have heard that George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to Disney for $4.05b.  A deal which includes all of the Lucasfilm franchises and subsidiaries, which means that Disney now owns Star Wars.  Not ones to waste time, Disney have already announced a release schedule for future films in the franchise starting with Episode VII in 2015 then followed by one new movie every two or three years.

There seems to be a great many fans who have some concerns about the direction in which Disney will take the franchise.  To them I say, 'It couldn't be worse than The Phantom Menace'.

Disney aren't bad at this sort of thing.  They don't buy up franchises just to fill them with mice and ducks.  Recently they have let them run pretty much as they did before, except giving them the benefit of having one of the world's most prolific and successful branding machines behind them.  They bought Pixar in '06 and Marvel in '09, and no one seems to have been complaining about the quality of those franchises in the meantime.

It is also worth mentioning that with the purchase of Lucasfilm, Disney also now owns Indiana Jones, Monkey Island (through LucasArts) and Willow.  WILLOW!  I want Willow 2: The Peck Returns.  Madmartigan could also have his own series of spinoffs where he just gets into trouble and then fights some guys then gets the girl.  That is the bigger picture here.  In the same way that they opted to get behind the film adaptation of an obscure Marvel property like Guardians of the Galaxy (yes, that is a space raccoon with a blaster), Disney has the resources and the man power to milk all of the Lucasfilm properties, not just focus on George's personal need to justify the entire prequel trilogy debacle to the fan base.

Monkey Island/Pirates of the Caribbean crossover!  I'm done here.

In hub we trust

Dear Blizzard Entertainment,

I'm on to you. You're really serving some sort of vowelless Lovecraftian elder god aren't you? Which one is it? Kth'Kchtjk, devourer of the willing? I bet it is.

You used to be cool.  Once upon a time you would allow the undernourished to gather together in a sort of communal appreciation of your products.  There we were huddled around the hub for digital warmth and reduced lag.  Hours and occasionally days would disappear as we fought back the Alliance or the Federation, or battled shoulder to shoulder through the conveniently layered depths of hell.  Did you know that you can play Diablo with one hand, leaving you free to eat pizza with the other?  Was that deliberate?  Time would evaporate leaving only the smell of takeout and the sweat of panic.  Only to emerge upon noticing the glistening sunlight reflected in the grease slicked forehead of the player sitting opposite us.

Apparently you would rather we did all of this from our own little suburban isolation tanks.  Kept far away from each other in case we accidentally bust out some d20 and pen and paper that shit, or even play us some Scattergories.  Imagine all those minutes of real human interaction that might happen, weakening your overlord until his tentacled maw can no longer reach across the abyss of space and feed on those of us who play female characters but are actually not female at all.  Not at all.

Surely there is someone still working for you who can figure out how to have LAN support while you big brother our fun with your persistant internet connections.

Yours sincerely,

Jacob "Katpanic" Henwood



P.S.
I bet your mum is at someone else's house on a reasonably priced rig for some tea and Torchlight II right now.