Simon T. Kaye

Speaking of my occasional writing at Prospect Magazine’s online presence (see previous post), I was surprised and gratified to discover one of my articles on their end-of-year online content roundup.

I’m officially no.9 on their top ten list of online-only articles! See!

It’s important to bear a few things in mind here: first of all, while it says that the list is in “no particular order”, my splurge about the end of Lost and its important online following is still probably one place too high.

Secondly, this DOES mean that I made the list and Brian Eno did not. Brian Eno. I am not worthy.

Happy New Year!

I forgot to say that I wrote another piece for First Drafts, Prospect Magazine UK’s blog.

It’s called Shouldn’t students put voting ahead of activism?, which was (I thought) a fairly uncontroversial thing to suggest.

Here’s an extract:

Students’ tendency to self-disenfranchise may contribute to their willingness to express themselves in alternative ways. But to engage in the public sphere in a non-systemic way without participating in the institutionalised structures of democratic change seems terribly incoherent.

Old news now, I know, but any thoughts or reactions would be welcome.

I’ve written a short piece on the day’s events and our brand new governing coalition over on Prospect Magazine’s blog.

Here’s a small extract:

In fact, the Lib Dem members I’ve been speaking to are surprisingly open-minded about the future of this deal. There is a sense that the real gain here is the chance for real debate, not only in the newspapers, not only in parliament, but in the heart of government itself: debate around the cabinet table. Gordon Brown tried for a “government of all the talents,” but Cameron has come closer to achieving it.

“The next ten or fifteen years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption. It is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician.” 

These words were uttered at a hearing in the heart of Political America recently. You can see it, and an interview with Ariana Huffington of the Huffington Post, over on this webcast of a segment from MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’.

Oh yes; journalism (its nature, its state) isn’t just making news at the moment; it’s in the news. The rise of the ‘blogosphere’ has been a perennial issue for some time; as a journalism student I saw many well-known journalists speak and the one topic that they all always came back to was the changing face of their trade in the age of new media.

Alan Rusbridger failed to convince with an almost-powerpoint about how the Guardian’s transition to the ‘Berliner’ format was an attempt to shore up sales while papers do the job of convincing people that their coverage is worth actually paying for (I think I’ve complained about his talk before…). Of the writers, ‘columnist’ Polly Toynbee was particularly derisive of this challenge to her status as arch-opinion-former.

It’s at the movies, too. State of Play (which is excellent) feeds off the in-house tension between a veteran political reporter who types onto a dark screen with two fingers at a time and the young thing behind his paper’s attempt to survive online. When Crowe’s character says “You think I’m over-fed, too expensive and take way too long”, he isn’t simply referring to himself. Newspapers now cost around £1 a day in this country (which almost legitimises my ever-more-frequent splashing out for the International Herald Tribune, at closer to a quid-fifty). Why pay that to read news that was only fresh ten hours ago?

The Independent, under Simon Kelner, tried something new. Objectivity? Who needs it! News is subjective. Importance is relative. Everyone writing this paper is human; let’s not pretend we don’t have opinions. The result was the ‘viewspaper’, a concept which has slipped away somewhat since the start of Roger Alton’s reign (he prefers the more old-fashioned approach of decorating the pages with beautiful women. They “basically make the world a better place”, after all). Today I’m not quite clear whether the ‘viewspaper’ ever made the Indie into anything more than the Express of the left.

The recent outcry over Swine Flu panics on the Internet allowed every traditional-media commentator to point out what they perceive to be the inferiority of blogs, and twitter, and social networking sites. If it’s not edited, it’s not safe. No-one making this claim can have seen some of the front-page headlines I saw a week ago. “Swine Flu to kill 91,000 Londoners” is a personal favourite.

Newspapers are not immune to misjudgments, errors, factual inconsistencies and unqualified opinions. It’s pretty ironic to see the stalwarts of the printed-press attacking new information-distribution systems for inflating problems or being hysterical when the very slump in sales caused by new media is the driving force behind the popularisation, dumbing-down and spectacle-seeking that practically every newspaper I can think of has been moving towards (though I do feel inclined to point out my belief that the USA’s daily printed media are of a sustained quality compared to the papers here in the UK).

The current, excellent issue of Prospect magazine (I know, I keep linking to them) mounts a debate around and defence of ‘serious journalism’. More here.

This seems particularly timely as the Telegraph, mocked and criticised (Private Eye calls it the ‘Maily Telegraph’) for its massive staff cuts and new-found interest in celebrity nonsense, dominates everyone’s news-schedules for the second day running. Its comprehensive investigation into and explanation of Parliament’s flawed expenses system is an absolute must-read, clearly the product of prolonged research, and a genuine scoop. Are there mistakes? Of course. Dozens, I’m sure (it’s still worthwhile).

But, crucially, The Huffington Post probably couldn’t get away with this many factual issues or slightly-libellous claims without compromising its standards. I’m simply not convinced that we hold our more established online news-sources to a lower standard than we do our printed media. I’d personally trust a twitter feed more readily than an editorial in the Express.

Warren Ellis advised us in last month’s Wired (another great magazine) not to trust the new media as a source of news. Why? Because online news providers “have no interest in their minimum-wage blogmonkeys thinking about anything bigger than their hitcount”. But how, precisely, does this differ from the editors and writers of the modern-day newspaper, faced with shrinking sales and deflating advertising revenues?

Things move quickly in this new world. Amazon’s Kindle, the most successful of the e-ink reader systems, is moving toward a larger format that can more effectively accommodate the big pages of newspapers and journals. The days of getting ink on our fingers may well be numbered, and this would be no bad thing for an environment that needs its trees.

Are newspapers going to disappear? No. They’ll change, they’ll be forced to adapt. I personally think they’ll become more like magazines. I’m reading more magazines now than I have at any other time in my life; I’ve referred to at least three different magazines right here in this article.

To return to the quote at the top of this blog – is the decline of the traditional media really going to undermine the accountability of the political world? People thought this way when radio hit newspapers, and again when television hit newspapers. The truth is that it has become harder to do wrong, and to get away with it, than ever before. This fact raises ethical issues of its own.

But let us not delude ourselves that ‘serious journalism’ plays some quasi-constitutional role that more democratic systems of reportage cannot match.

Another marvelous image from XKCD

Evgeny Morozov, who writes an unmissable blog for Foreign Policy, makes a more important criticism of twitter’s current role, suggesting that it’s providing more disinformation than anything else – but also mentions the possibility that the internet could work as a fantastic finder and predictor of emerging biological threats. With the increasing integration of mobile phones and other devices, the internet ceases to be merely our nervous system, and emerges as a component of a global immune system.

Prospect Magazine (for whom I once worked! woo!) have put online a fascinating article: Mark Honigsbaum writes about the means of catching pandemics early. He points out that Swine Flu may well have been abroad in Mexico for a few weeks before the news broke in any meaningful way online. More importantly, his assertion is that the nature of the internet renders it less useful for disease detection – underinformed or worried searchers on google, for example, would distort the information on a given outbreak. Or, to extrapolate from this: the internet is too open, too democratic to operate as an even quasi-scientific virus catcher.

The logical outcome of this – and explicitly suggested by the above – is that the brains behind Twitter and Google and the rest turn their attention to a reserved system of aggregating relevant information for the purposes of planetary self-defence and early warning.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this recommendation. The advantage of the internet as it stands is that it is simply the broadest information-exchange ever constructed. I don’t see how a more limited network could articulate the information more quickly.

Swine Flu is surely the most quickly discovered and shared potential-pandemic that we’ve ever seen. If it had started in a western country, it would have broken out on Twitter within moments (though there is weight to the counter-argument that, hey, these things start in poorer countries were internet access is more rare. But that is changing…)

As for informational quality – well, this is a perrenial problem anyway. I’m not sure how comfortable I am with the blind assumption that vetted, ‘establishment’ data is always preferable.

Systems such as Digg and others have an almost marketised hierarchy built-in. The preferences of many translate into the emergence of decent and flawed information: it’s all available, but it’s clearly sorted. Such a system is clearly the next step for micro-blogging as well.

This is the kind of thinking that reminds me of David Brin’s Earth, which posited an emerging planet-wide sentience. In effect, this is a far simpler idea: our ‘intelligent’ superstructure is conscious only as its individual, reporting components are. It’s the beginnings of a hive-mind.

So – I won’t be so quick to sneer at the torrents of little fears, hopes, jokes, and links that pour through twitter on the theme of Swine Flu. It may be our fastest defence against the next big pandemic - whether that’s tomorrow, or twenty years away.

Okay, I know I’m a little behind the curve here. Everyone and their uncle have already completed Bioshock three times, one for each different ending (well… two-and-a-half endings, I suppose), and once on Hard so that they can get their final, shiny XBox 360 ‘achievement’. And a great deal of these people have taken the time to write about it.

It’s one of those games, where the disparate, hazy community of hobbyists seems to surge into debate as one. Where you don’t feel like you’re done with it until you’ve talked about it. Head over to RockPaperShotgun for a collection of excellent critiques and links to reviews, interviews etc.- including an encounter with Bioshock‘s creator, Ken Levine, that’s really a must-read.

All of this- and much of what shall follow here, to be sure- is riddled with spoilers. If you live on the moon or have no real interest in the medium, then you might be unaware of the fact that Bioshock includes one of the all-time-greatest-ever twists of anything ever, somewhere just after the middle of the game. If there’s ever any chance that you’ll pick it up to play for more than a few hours together, you DO NOT WANT TO HAVE THIS TWIST SPOILED FOR YOU. So stop reading, please. And stop reading comment threads, articles, reviews, walkthroughs or editorials from the gaming community until you’re done with Bioshock. Look, just play it, alright?

It’s unlikely that I’m going to have anything to say here that hasn’t already been mentioned by others already. All the same, and perhaps with an eye to my rant of a few weeks ago, here are some thoughts.

Firstly, I’m glad I took my time over the game. I got it the day after it was released, and have played it slowly ever since. This morning I finished, which is perfect because as of next week I’ll actually be a busy human being again. Now, the forums are stuffed with people bragging about how they completed the game in one or two sittings, with only ten or less hours of play. And there’s some strength to the argument that games, in general, are far shorter than they used to be, and whether or not this is a Good Thing. But I am very thankful that I had stuff to do, and so couldn’t follow my impulse to storm through the game in a couple of all-nighters. The richness of the environment, of the atmosphere- decaying, retrograde 1950s art-deco opulance- absolutely demands reflection.

And it’s this that leads to my first real criticism of the game. It’s too busy. I recognize that the tight, enclosed space of the game helps lend it much of its horror, and makes possible the kind of closed-circuit mechanic (gatherer/hunter/guardian) that makes the whole thing special. But it’s stuffed with action, and noise, and light, and movement (voluntary or otherwise). Momentum is one thing, yes- but there isn’t a spot in the game where you can simply observe your world without the loud buzz of a nearby camera, the maniacal shrieks of some splicer in the distance (boy do voices carry underwater), the thump, groan and miniature earthquakes of a Big Daddy that you haven’t got around to dealing with yet. There isn’t enough space to make the whole thing feel like a city, which is what it’s supposed to feel like. Horror and action work best where the breaks feel like breaks, where you can contrast the action and the fear with, erm, absence of action and fear. The game, on occasion, was simply too loud. The Thief series arguably does it far better-and freedom, too. But more of that later.

If I had created a soundtrack and effects as sumptuous as these, I’d probably play them loud as well. The voice-acting is simply the best I have ever encountered in a video game, as is the script. The game’s plot and twists are very script- and delivery- dependent, and a lesser game might have let you down on this.

It’s also these twists that make Bioshock, I suspect, the first game to contain a truly effective critique of the medium. After having my own poodleish antics thrown in my face as they were here, it’s actually going to be hard picking up another shooter anytime soon without seeing the lines, the joins, the places where all the bloody orders just stop making sense. In this sense, Bioshock is not just a great story- it’s a story that could only have been told as a computer game. This alone sets it on a plinth, in the company of very few others. That it also takes the time to say something we didn’t know we were all already thinking, to be truly reflexive, almost Brechtian in tearing down the third wall, showing us a mechanic for what it is… that’s just phenomenal.

Part of the strength here is in subverting a fundamental weakness. Compared to Deus Ex, Bioshock is practically a half-life-esque linear shooter. Slightly disappointingly, this doesn’t really alter after we have the essential nature of our hobby used as a major plot point. My initial excitement at realising I had to collect some elixir but that there were two batches of it in different parts of the game world was quickly quashed. I needed both, of course. What looked like a big decision turned into a minor one- not ‘what would you like to do?’ but ‘what order would you like to do it in?’.

This holds true throughout. Real divergences and areas not required by the main plot are few and far between. This is a retrospective qualm, however, as I felt constantly driven by the game’s plot- even in the final third. There was enough emotional investment to make me seriously want to push through to the end. Most games don’t offer you such a compulsive experience. If they do, you can be damn sure they won’t give you much of an option to ignore it. Bioshock does, in places, and that’s nearly a miracle.

And the key mechanic for the game’s compulsion is where Bioshock‘s ‘spiritual successor’ status comes in. Both of your key enemies in the game are essentially godlike, and this is a direct echo of System Shocks 1 and 2. Atlas/Fontaine (note the references to Rand’s books here in the monikers of our key nemesis) and Andrew Ryan all, inevitably, remind us of Shodan. And the best thing I can advise you to do here is read and enjoy Kieron Gillen’s essay on the queen of all game villains, here. Come back when you’re done.

Shodan, of course, was the real Deus Ex Machina – or Deus Est Machina. As a gameplay mechanic, she was a stroke of genius. We fear specific things- death, the unknown. More than these we fear a malevolent god. And Ryan, in the first part of the game, fulfils these same roles. As you progress, he mocks you, taunts you. He sets traps for you, punishes you for resisting him. When one god is felled- not because you defeated him but because the bastard ordered you to, to prove a point- our new, worse deity takes over. This one really is the devil, because he’s a trickster. Like any trickster, he gave you all the clues you needed- visual suggestions- the tattoos on your arms, the momentary flashbacks, the repetitions of that phrase.

This is why I don’t think the game’s finale- the much admonished Boss Fight- was a bad idea. In fact, I enjoyed it. I’m not a truly skilful gamer, and so found that the difficulty was pitched just right- frustration vs. excitement. The plasmid/tonic technologies even give a decent in-game excuse for such a titanic figure to struggle against, which is more than I can say for most games. Like every other part of Bioshock, this last section was self-aware. It was The Way Games End. It was a Boss. The removal of your regeneration system was important here. too. You fought, you died, you fought harder. Eventually you won, and you felt that familiar flush of victory- and then you hated yourself for it, because the game’s just told you that you’re playing a game. But critically, in an experience where you can’t die, not ever, where all your fear and anger stems from a sequence of gods- you are given the power and the opportunity to destroy one. Not because you were told to- but because you wanted to. That’s satisfaction.

Andrew Ryan’s ‘utopia’ of Rapture is an explicit and repeated homage to the works and philosophies of Ayn Rand. To what extent is it a critique of them? As the man himself intones: “It wasn’t impossible to build a Rapture at the bottom of the ocean. It was impossible to build it anywhere else.”

Levine has said that he is attacking absolutism- in that any absolute ideology is dangerous. But I believe that Ryan represents the impossible predicament of a totally anarchistic society. He betrays his own ideals in order to attempt to do away with Fontaine, nationalising assets, forming armies, even introducing state-led capital punishment. Bit of a departure for the ultimate libertarian. The destabilising element is, of course, a twisted side of human nature. Fontaine is a crook with ambitions. Within a super-capitalist society such as Rapture, he is free to become the biggest fish in the pond. The ultimate flaw with Objectivist ideology, as with any, is that there will always be someone willing to subvert it to their own ends (in this case, a nihilistic con-man).

There’s so much to be said about this great work. It neatly summarises everything a piece of interactive art should be. Embrace it, love it like a brother. Lose yourself to Rapture. I really feel that there’s no coming back. The only first-person games that appear remotely palatable after this are Half Life, Thief, the first Deus Ex and maybe sandbox games like Oblivion or GTA.

Rapture really has changed the world.