Fairground Photography - Part 1

Some photographs taken at a (closed) fairground, around 10 at night. The next set will have the photographs from when it was open and full of people. Enjoy:

Some Thoughts on Art, Video Games and GOG.com

It is not particularly unusual to hear a particular piece of art mentioned as 'timeless'. Normally, this refers to either an aspect or the totality of a piece that transcends the borders of time to be considered as the pinnacle of achievement in a given discipline, and moreover one that is unlikely to be forgotten any time soon. However, the title 'timeless' is normally confined to generally accepted 'high' art or design – Rembrandt's Night Watch, or the Fender Telecaster.

Part of the reason for this is quite probably due to the speed at which design and creativity operate at now, and the rapid incremental improvement upon particular objects. But what about digital entertainment, and more specifically, video games? While a few breakthrough titles, such as Doom or Everquest, are acknowledged by gamers as truly inspirational, video games have not yet received the widespread nod that denotes a work of art as being timeless.

As a twenty-something year old in the UK, I was pretty much bought up around computers and games as part of my childhood. Years later however, I play games, albeit less, for the artistic value over the childish desire to blow up queuing hordes of zombies, nazis or aliens. An interesting point to mention, and one that is underestimated, is the way in which I play these games as one way of many to entertain myself – whether that be reading, playing guitar, or writing. As a form of escapism then, gaming is able to capture my imagination in a way comparable to that of playing music or reading. Ultimately, it is the presence of a compelling narrative that drives my interest in games (and puts me off multiplayer games), as well as classic novels or classic albums.

It is also clear that gaming has developed from the earliest days to the hyper-realistic graphics and feedback of the current. Not being a student anymore, I've had a little time to investigate the past 'classics' on gog.com, a polish website that aims to provide the 'good old games' with a new audience, at a discounted price. And what an investigation it has turned out to be. Despite a risky publicity stunt which involved closing the website for a few days, CD Projekt (the owners of gog.com) are reporting record traffic at 20 times previous levels, spurred by the release of classic games such as Baldur's Gate, Total Annihilation and Planescape: Torment.

The many other interesting aspects of the site, including community participation and an innovative method to fight piracy, lie outside of this essay, but are worth looking into if you have time. For now, it suffices to say that in examining the roots of various genres, from strategy to shooter, the games on gog.com provide a fascinating insight into the development of gaming as entertainment, as well as drawing attention to the artistic value of the category. Many of the games present are little available elsewhere, unless one was to resort to more shady methods, and there is some satisfaction in gaining completely legal and DRM free copies of classic games. This means that the games that I am newly appreciating are gaining a fresh new audience, who are largely fascinated by the depth and scope of many of these 'old' titles. Planescape is perhaps the most pressing case here – the text of the game (often described as 'wordy but beautiful') comprises over 5000 standard pages, far exceeding the length of many of the most ambitious novels.

The impact of gaming upon various attributes, from hand-eye coordination to imagination in daily life, remains heavily debated – not least concerning the ridiculous idea that certain games encourage crime and anti-social behaviour. However, the efforts of CD Projekt and GOG.com demonstrate an interesting response to the accusations – dropping all the sinister developments and rumours surrounding a form of art, and opening it to the world to understand. After all, Ulysses by James Joyce followed a path to publication encompassing obscenity trials and potential bans. Maybe gaming, before it is considered a legitimate form of art and creativity, will follow the same path.

Progress(ion): Conceptual Sketch

Now I have relatively little to do with my time, I sat down and sketched out a rough mindmap of the structure and themes of Progress(ion), as well as an idea of what I want each narrative to consist of. Comments, queries, moans and groans are always welcome :)

Symbols and the Blues: Who is BB King?

As is probably reasonably clear by now, I listen to a lot of Blues music. In fact, since I started playing guitar a few years ago, it's become a major part of my life. As such, it was probably only so long before a drunken conversation about music led me to make the following, rather audacious statement: “After BB King is gone, there will be noone that is able to play like he was.”

Sweeping, perhaps, but even after my hangover has cleared, I'm pretty ready to attempt to back it up. For lovers of the blues, even those that don't consider BB King 'up there', he is considered a physical and metaphorical monument to both blues music, and its traditional subject matter. Moreover, he is perhaps blues music's No.1 ambassador, still performing innumerable dates as he reaches the ripe old age of 85 or so. In terms of recognisability, many will have a familiarity that at least extends to his name and his famous guitar, Lucille, if not the depths of the music itself.

So who, or just as importantly what, is BB King? To back up such a statement makes it necessary that there is some unique quality that is BB King, that makes him unlike others before or since. It is this quality, rather than the name, that makes the venerable Mr. King inimitable, and although I can only attempt to back this up on my own terms, it'd be interesting to see how others perceive the other great icons of music and stage – Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra etc., to understand what makes that particular person a monument, a symbol in lives across the world.

Personally, I'm inclined to argue that it is, above all, his persistence that has made its mark on my understanding of blues music. While blues has remained a relatively static form over the years, young 'uns such as myself approaching the guitar for the first time might still be overwhelmed by the variety on offer, from Robert Johnson through to Joe Bonnamassa. Moreover, it is unlikely to be an original choice, with many fledgling players being pushed toward the blues as a basis for further development. King's persistence, from the post Muddy Waters days through to the present, combined with his undenied authority over the form, present a kind of anchor in a calm, but vast sea of opportunities.

The persistence occurs in other forms too. While it is increasingly popular to name particular chords or styles after artists, such as the famous Hendrix Chord, King was one of the earliest to receive the accolade, with people dubbing the upper registers of the second-position minor pentatonic 'the BB King box'. With 5 notes, it's both easy to navigate, to experiment with, and to expand. Upon picking up my first electric guitar (a 335 style archtop, of course), my acoustic-trained fingers skipped straight to the BB King box as a way of trying out that style as soon as possible. It isn't uncommon to hear the claim that you can tell BB King from other blues artists by an average playing length of 3 or 4 notes, and while this may be true for others, such as Clapton's 'woman tone', the BB King sound has been drilled into us far more thoroughly. It's also relatively easy to reach, using a minimum of effects wizardry. All of these things should, technically, make BB King's music easier to play. Nothing could be further from the truth.

While searching for ways to start absorbing blues music, I came across several mentions of a BB King album named 'Live at the Regal'. The recommendation wasn't a low level one either – both John Mayer and Eric Clapton claim to listen to 'Live...' before performances in order to set the atmosphere of their own stagework. Perhaps as expected, 'Live...' is a masterclass of blues guitar, incorporating the fluid bends and impossibly nuanced vibrato one has come to expect. More than that though, it demonstrates King's rapport with the audience, demonstrating the way that he clicks with their worldview through conversations between songs, as well as the music's subject matter. His presence on stage may have transformed between 'Live...' and his current status as Blues' elder statesman, but that rapport hasn't disappeared just yet, and I very much doubt it will disappear over the course of his latter years.

It may be possible, some day, that someone comes along who can play like BB King. Indeed, enough guitarists have taken and perfected his technique, and it is probably only the purists that can claim to hear the difference. But in claiming that someone can be BB King, we are overstating the importance of the music, and ignoring the fact that to many blues players across the last 50 or so years, including myself, he remains a person who in his manner rather than his performance, has developed a form of Grandfather relationship that extends far beyond the music.

While this is a brief piece, I hope it explains my reasoning, and I hope you go and buy a copy of 'Live at the Regal' for yourself. Listen to it on a good pair of headphones in the dark before taking to the stage yourself, and if I'm in the audience, you can come up to me afterwards and tell me that noone, in the past or present, will ever replace BB King.

Long Live the King.

Progress(ion): A 12 Bar Blues

This piece of fiction is intended to be the start of a meta-narrative that unifies part of a larger writing project I've got going at the moment - a series of 12 short stories (plus the narrative sections), based on the music and lives of 12 of the great blues musicians, from Robert Johnson through BB King and Eric Clapton. Conceived as a way to describe my own interest in playing blues music. It'll take a while, but I hope you enjoy the beginning, at least:

You can Always Trust the Blues

You can always trust the blues. Although it's got a family – the rebellious child that the new invention of 'teenager' dubbed rock 'n roll, all leather jackets and spiky hair, the anarchic sibling of jazz, tall, leggy and wearing the milliner's equivalent of Lewis Carroll's Jaberwock at a rakish angle over a pale complexion – the blues has its own structure. Rarely sticks its guitar through unimaginably expensive audio equipment in fits of rage, has no urge to delve into the realms of chaos theory and obscure musical modes. One, four, five, and the music that the songwriter loved so much rarely, if ever, reached beyond the numbers of 12 or 16 in its attempts to interpret, explain and justify the actions, thoughts and motives of individuals, communities, the world.

The more confusing thing is how this has stayed the same throughout the form's long and varied history. The old silent films hid all kinds of little tricks. Perhaps Charlie Chaplin was colourblind, we just have no way of telling because the filmreels we see in retrospective documentaries aren't telling the difference in shade or tone or fashion between his suit and tie. Spots and stripes were still probably a no-go, though. You listen to Robert Johnson, you listen to the Blues' interpretation of the nativity, all three kings and the divinely inspired child Stevie Ray Vaughan, united around the same rhythmns, the same notes. Unlike Chaplin, you listen and you see, hear, feel one colour. Blue.

So when the songwriter sat down and felt ebony and rosewood, lightly grained under his calloused fingers, he knew what was coming...

Falling in Love

Online games are strange beasts, and I was never quite sure what the point was to World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2. That and they are, in many cases, populated by complete bastards. In a peculiar way, it appears that many of the people that embrace the social nature of the internet through these games do so out of a fairly vicious competitive streak. After you've levelled up and got the best gear, or perfected a map strategy, you exist largely for either competition or bragging rights, deriving pleasure from the ability to deny the same feeling to others (BOOM, HEADSHOT!)

It is fairly safe to say that LOVE, Eskil Steenberg's one man mission against all that is continuous and rigid in modern online gaming, is different. That's hard to get used to at times. But it is, and it'll take you to places that you can't possibly imagine after spending years gulping down the victory gin that other games send your way. When I first came across LOVE, about 6 months ago, I saw it described, derisively, as 'Communism: The Game'. Being a politics student doesn't leave me automatically hostile to the idea, and in fact intrigued me further. Discovering that the game would be free to play for a time, I decided to give it a try.

So, is it Communism in digital entertainment form? Yes, no and maybe. The basic elements of LOVE consist of cooperating with other players (!!!) to build a settlement that can survive against several tribes of artificial intelligence that are doing roughly the same thing. You can move, shoot, and use various tools acquired from around the world to build, smooth, retexture, reroute, create power grids and defences, artillery and other means to facilitate your colonisation. The world is procedurally generated and persistent – seas rise and fall, settlements are wiped out and rebuilt, and hills rise toward the sky over time, ensuring that returning to the game world is both familiar and strange. Your base, if you're lucky, may still be there, but forests may have advanced or retreated, and glaciers may have grown or shrunk. Indeed, there was recently some server downtime as Eskil updated the tectonics system. Tectonics?! This is a far cry from the comfortable consistency that allows the players of other games to put down roots and stake their claim to greatness in one or more digital realms.

The biggest fascination for me, though, was the fact that the game hasn't been beaten yet. I was always put off by the knowledge that in online gaming, someone would always be ready to hand my arse to me at the tip of a hat. In LOVE, that doesn't happen. You build together and fight, not against a specific enemy, but against nature itself. This is where the communism analogy breaks down. Allowing for some politics geekery, Marx claimed that communism could emerge properly once man had conquered nature. On any of the LOVE servers or worlds, this hasn't happened yet. Even the AI, with its varying aggression toward the player settlements, is easier to understand as a force of nature, and a horribly efficient one at that. The world wants back what has changed, and this reclaimation happens with horrifying efficiency, leading to the saying on LOVE forums that 'home is where the artillery hits'. The survival of a base for more than a 24 hour period is considered an achievement here, and when it starts raining, its time to get to higher ground because without the right tools, the water is deadly. A settlement I joined once was unable to get hold of the essential configuration tool, leaving us powerless and struggling to survive, frantically shouting over a teamspeak server to coordinate some kind of plan that would save us from being swallowed up by a stormy armageddon.

As it happens, the lack of a configuration tool was a bug, which LOVE still holds in spades. This is perhaps unsurprising given the one man nature of the project, but it was at times like that the geographically disparate group of people I was playing with came together as a unit, and even moreso, my respect to Eskil went through the roof. Even the intimidating graphics, a fair impression of the LSD loaded bastard love-child of Escher, Monet and Van Gogh, create an atmosphere more comparable to a work of traditional art than electronic entertainment, and are a far cry from many of the games that independent designers consistently compromise on to push the project out.

While the free weekend won't last forever, LOVE remains well worth the 10 Euro/month cost of entry, warts and all. It definitely won't be for everyone, but it is worth a shot for at least a month, just for the fact that your ideas of digital entertainment might be blown out of the metaphorical water. Communism: The Game might just give you a glimpse of utopia. It can be found at www.quelsolaar.com.