Simon T. Kaye

I’ve scribbled a bit more over at First Drafts, Prospect Magazine’s blog. Mostly to do with Disraeli’s failed ambition to form a government with Gladstone and his angry clique of free-trading “Peelites” in 1852: has David Cameron simply succeeded where Disraeli failed?

Take a look here.

Here’s a wee excerpt:

He [Disraeli] seemed to see that coalitions indicate a recognition that differing, conflicting ideas can be equally valid. In both cases he was able to play the hand he was dealt as if it were the one he had been hoping for all along: one trait that Cameron really can claim to share.

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.

Electoral reform, improbably enough, is now at the heart of everything. This is the long-discussed ‘dream scenario’ for the Liberal Democrats, and of course they’re terrified by it, even as Nick Clegg, Chris Huhne, David Laws & co. expertly manoeuvre us into the ideal equidistant central position for the last day or so of negotiations. The excellence of David Laws’ “Seven Rules” for coalition-bargaining cannot be underestimated here.

Yesterday, Gordon Brown launched his dramatic final gambit – he sacrificed his own political career so as to increase the likelihood of a fourth parliamentary term dominated by Labour politicians. Regardless of whether this actually works, I rather suspect that Brown has secured a spot in the history books (as well as a total tenure as PM which longer than that of James Callaghan) thanks to the gentle levering from power which Nick Clegg has done so carefully over the last few weeks. We all knew Brown was going – and he used his career as a weapon.

The Tories’ response revealed for the first time the deeper outline of the deal that is taking shape between themselves and the Liberal Democrats. They have taken their common ground on environment, education and civil liberties. The Lib Dems appear to have made the large-scale concession that cuts to the deficit must begin this year, rather than next year. I can only presume that a similar concession has been worked out on immigration, as David Cameron will surely face internal revolt if he doesn’t manage to cap non-EU immigration. Issues pertaining to the EU and Trident renewal must, quite rightly, have been put on the back-burner for now.

In return for these concessions, the Liberal Democrats seem to have got their tax proposals accepted, which is a significant victory, and have also picked up, after yesterday’s Corbomite Manoeuvre, assurance of a free vote on a referendum on electoral reform to the Alternative Vote System, along with the introduction of fixed-term parliaments.

However, there is a third plank to the Conservatives’ interest in electoral reform, and it is this third plank which has spooked Labour out of wanting what must otherwise seem like an appealing term as a strong opposition party with the prospect of powerful renewal under a new leader. The Conservatives will almost certainly make radical constituency boundary changes before the next general election. By equalising the size (in terms of population) of every constituency, they will effectively destroy the source of Labour’s strength. In 2005, their handsome majority of Commons seats only existed in Scotland and Wales. This year, they kept a better grip on their core seats than many expected, but were still wholly defeated by the Conservatives in England alone. The Scottish and Welsh constituencies tend to be less populous. The great worry in the high command is that, if these changes come in, Labour would have to win the next election in England as well: no mean feat.

Scratching out a (probably) unstable alliance with the Lib Dems is therefore perceived to be Labour’s last hope before a generation in the wilderness. This may be completely wrong – the next government is sure to be pretty unpopular as it deals with the deficit and Labour could revel in chastising the Conservatives and Lib Dems together. But the electoral mathematics gets very sticky indeed with the regulation of constituency size. The tories have clearly decided that they can afford AV as a trade-off with this advantage over Labour.

This month, I got a paper published in a journal called History & Theory (the ampersand is important). It’s been a long wait – a round of revisions, some serious collaborative editing to make it consumable in America, plus the usual long stretches of peer-review and publication.

It’s about counterfactualism. Here’s the abstract as it appears in the journal and on the Wiley Interscience website, where it’s hosted for all (who have an Athens account) to see.

Counterfactualism is a useful process for historians as a thought-experiment because it offers grounds to challenge an unfortunate contemporary historical mindset of assumed, deterministic certainty. This article suggests that the methodological value of counterfactualism may be understood in terms of the three categories of common ahistorical errors that it may help to prevent: the assumptions of indispensability, causality, and inevitability. To support this claim, I survey a series of key counterfactual works and reflections on counterfactualism, arguing that the practice of counterfactualism evolved as both cause and product of an evolving popular assumption of the plasticity of history and the importance of human agency within it. For these reasons, counterfactualism is of particular importance both historically and politically. I conclude that it is time for a methodological re-assessment of the uses of such thought-experiments in history, particularly in light of counterfactualism’s developmental relatedness to cultural, technological, and analytical modernity.

As I mentioned on my facebook page, this is an article that includes Star Trek, Leibniz, Back to the Future, Plato, John Stuart Mill and Lost.

In other words, I’m very pleased, even if I am just going over it again and again now and spotting all kinds of problems, mistakes and missed opportunities. Worst parts are where something simply hasn’t translated so well into that terrifying niche-language, American Academese.

Now according to this nice contract with Blackwell, I can’t put it up on my website for another year, and even then I shouldn’t use the official PDF. But if you’d like to read it and don’t have an Athens account, drop me a line (to my usual address) and I’ll tell you how to get hold of it.

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.

First let it be established that I am by no means an expert on comic books. I read few of the super hero serials as I grew up (it’s an aspect of childhood far less common than in the states). I did read a few of Spiderman, quite a lot of Hulk, the occasional X-Men, and a few ‘themed’ graphic novels or one-offs that could be found in my local library. I was initially fond of Peter David, whom I stumbled into from his Star Trek novels, a childhood fascination of mine. Even then, David’s were just a little bit less rubbish to my developing snobrain (new word!)

More recently, I’ve made a point to catch up where it counts- Warren Ellis (in particular Transmetropolitan), as well as classics like Watchmen and some of the more celebrated Batman books (Dark Knight Returns and so on). I’m currently working my way through Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. If only my dissertation wouldn’t keep interrupting me. Oh, and Next Wave rocks. COME TO PAIN MOTHER.

So, as any decent comics fan will tell you, I am very much a newbie. Interestingly, I’m also probably exactly the sort of casual reader that comic books could really do with attracting. I may be a symptom of broadening appeal and pigeonhole disintegration. Which is new for me, I think.

Anyway, Phonogram. I read it yesterday, and it didn’t come out very long ago. It’s essentially a protracted essay on the way that music constructs us, the Britpop movement taken as a particular example. In the vivid, wonderfully pretentious world evoked by writer Kieron Gillen and artist Jamie McKelvie, music is the same thing as magic, manipulated by two groups- phonomancers, like our protagonist, and retromancers, who are to all intents and purposes the baddies. When the semi-deity patron-queen of Britpop, Britannia, disappears, David Kohl is ‘recruited’ to find out what’s going on. But his own intense personal connection with the Britpop era is involved as well, especially when Kohl realises that his own past is at stake…

It’s a quick and very easy read. Gillen subjects us to a niche culture without ever descending into the worst of geekiness, and the book is never less than accessible. The art is very clean and crisp, with a sort of graphic-design sensibility running throughout. The combination is very effective, and will surely sweeten the pill of all the philosophy which the tale carries along with it, as we deal with the nature of personal construction and, implicitly, art itself.

Happily, it all coalesces to a bit of a classic comic-book ending (insane cultists must be STOPPED!). And Kohl himself is pleasingly arrogant, the supporting cast witty enough to keep the whole thing bubbling along nicely. Laugh-out-loud moments are few, I suppose, though I’ve been spoiled by Next Wave lately.

Perhaps the greatest impact Phonogram had for me was strictly personal. I grew up during the height and tale-end of the Britpop phenomenon (I remember Common People being the first time I enjoyed watching Top of the Pops). I was only old enough to start appreciating the whole thing by the very end. I was actually rather fond of Kula Shaker, a band I stole from my older sister and which (amusingly) comes in for a pretty rough ride in Phonogram. But I also remember owning an Echobelly cassette, and my love affair with Blur kicked off pretty early. And, of course, Britpop has informed much of the music I listen to today, and my retrospective approach to many of the classics of that age is more important to me musically than any delving with truly contemporary bands. In short, Britpop was the first cultural phenomenon that I was actually aware of; the first tiny way in which I understood that there was a zeitgeist to be tapped into.

Now look what’s happened. Thanks to this comic, I’ve started digging it all out again. And it’s great.

Part of this is also because I associate Kieron Gillen quite strongly with my mid-teen interests. He’s cut his teeth as an excellent games reviewer. Specifically, he once wrote a Dear John letter to Descent 3. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that.

Anyway, if you want to see the first proper step in imbuing 90s Britain with a character, look no further. A great graphic novel, and especially worth the attention of anyone who’s even vaguely interested in music.

Here’s a nice preview to get you started.

… to the UK, and how. The first season ended on such a high; a sequence of episodes which included the high political maneuverings of Caesar, the omens of his destruction, the single most gory arena battle ever committed to celluloid, the rending of a family by infidelity, the incestuous seduction of a future emperor…

 It’s wonderful, really. Rome is interesting because it decides to be absolutely as historically accurate as it possibly can in the most weird places- setting and period detail, backdrops and sets, cultural taboos and sexual mores, while paying very little attention to the actual accepted narrative of the era it portrays. And it really does work; it feels authentic enough for us to suspend our disbelief even as it re-renders an ancient story to fit its medium.

And this is nothing new; when Shakespeare was writing his great Roman plays, he certainly only paid cursory attention to actual alliances and facts as they were then understood. When Robert Graves wrote I, Claudius- in every sense Rome’s precursor- He put his audience ahead of some bookish obsession with absolute historical accuracy. See also the new Thermopylae film, 300.

It shows an acceptance of several important points: firstly, the greatness of these original stories, these narrative inheritances, is in their themes, not their facts. The stories of Troy and Alexander, Persia, Greece and Rome are the templates upon which a narrative tradition was founded. They are blueprints, their earlier incarnations (when history was not so clearly delineated from story) as subjective as the more recent attempts to turn the past into art and entertainment (hopefully a bit of both at the same time).

Implicitly, this kind of production displays a snippet of real wisdom: that any attempt at a historical drama is immediately and automatically divorced from the literal facts of its historical context. And this does not need to be a bad thing. Historians themselves are only ever working with second-hand, subjective material. There is no ‘primary source’ which was never itself secondary Not even the buried stones of an ancient culture are immune from the fact that they were crafted.

So let’s enjoy a bit of modern, artistically driven historical truth; the kind of truth that resides in Rome’s hilariously undiluted attitude to sex (“I’m not leaving this bed until I’ve fucked something.” “Fine! Go and fetch that German slut from the kitchen…”), or in Rome’s playful references to the still-popular version of events propagated by Shakespeare (“It wasn’t a bad speech, Brutus… maybe a bit cerebral for that crowd…”).

And, best of all, it’s beautifully written, passionately performed, seductively filmed and has absolutely glorious production values.

Rome Season 2 Episode 1 repeats on the BBC tonight a little before midnight. Watch it.