Simon T. Kaye

‘Game‘, noun.

1. An amusement or pastime, eg: children’s games, party games.
2. A scored, competitive activity or sport between two or more players, often played before spectators.
3. An activity which is played in strict accordance with a set of rules.

My name is Simon Kaye, and I am not a ‘gamer’.

I play many ‘computer games’, and ‘video games’; more often than not, on a PC with a microprocessing core. I have been playing these ‘games’ since I was twelve. Indeed, I often read a magazine entitled PC Gamer.

But I do not consider myself to be a ‘gamer’. Because the word ‘game’ in ‘video game’ or ‘computer game’ is desperately misapplied, inadequate in describing the sheer breadth of the industry.

Type ‘Game’ into an online thesaurus, and what do we get back? Amusement. Distraction. Diversion. Festivity. Frolic. Merriment. Piddly.

‘Game’ is a dismissive word, and it allows others to be dismissive and condescending of our hobby. Some might point to Deus Ex, others to System Shock, again others to the simple beauty in certain arcade classics. Ours is a truly interactive medium, a collaborative art that is the first to involve the direct collaboration of its audience. It deserves, in cases of excellence, to be taken very seriously indeed.

‘Game’ is an immature word, and it allows others to assume that our hobby is completely immature, or played by the immature. Which, admittedly, it often is. LOL n00b headshot haX WTF? etc. But this is an age of 18-rated releases. It is an innate feature of our hobby- our ‘gaming’- that allows the Daily Mail to claim that it is destroying the ethical framework of a generation, or Hilary Clinton to take cheap shots at it on the campaign trail. If our hobby’s noun did not directly imply a youth audience, how could such ill-conceived, nannyish positions remain viable?

‘Game’ is a word that brings with it connotations of childishness, of unreality, of cops-and-robbers. Worse, it linguistically implies competition and scores, rather than experience and spectacle. Who, precisely, am I competing against in Bioshock? The computer itself isn’t an adversary, it’s a platform. Too often do I hear talk of someone ‘beating’ a new ‘game’. Yes, there is a competitive element: online, or multi-player, we are often vying to display the greatest skill or attain some vaunted position or score, and against other human beings. Yes, even single-player ‘games’ usually involve an element of tactical or physical conquest over ‘enemies’ which are controlled by the software’s AI. But this by no means covers the whole gamut of modern video-’gaming’.

And yes, I’ll say again: there’s a whole load of crap titles out there. And after that, there’s a lot of titles that are good, or even brilliant, but are still essentially ‘games’. But every time the word ‘game’ fits a new release, it fails to apply in another case. What about super-realistic simulations? What about strategy titles with many, many times the complexities of chess or Risk? What about plot and dialogue-based titles like Planescape or Dreamfall? And what about the masterpieces of emergent interaction - modern or ageing - like Deus Ex or Bioshock? 

In these cases, the word ‘game’, as a label, is simply wrong. Describing Half Life 2 as a game is like using the word ‘cartoon’ to describe the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Except more people worked on HL2, and arguably for longer.

It’d be very easy at this point to simply accuse me of linguistic snobbery. What does it matter, after all, right? It’s just a fucking word. A game by any other name would play as sweet.

If only this were true.

Firstly, ours is a hobby under siege. In Britain in particular, as the press and the politicians begin their latest frenzy over youth violence and gun/gang-culture, out hobby is clearly in the firing-line. And, for a moment, let’s be fair: computer games have been full of violence from near the very beginning. They are stuffed with killing. The problem here isn’t with simulated violence, it’s with a public assumption that the violence is designed for the consumption of children. Children who buy and play games.

Secondly, and more essentially, our words make our reality. Our labels are half of our perceptions. For a growing but still minority medium, video ‘games’, thus labelled, are set up for a fall. People cannot help but approach with a preconception of silliness, of lightness. God help anyone who picks up Bioshock expecting a ‘game for Windows’ and is given an intensive, horror-driven, beauty-filled art-deco romp instead. Along with a strong critique of Ayn Rand and absolutism in ideology.

Of course, all this leaves me without a new term for one of my favourite pastimes. Suggestions welcome.

But whatever we opt for- isn’t it high time we re-branded?

As I crossed the border from Germany into Austria, a thick fog descended upon me. And, within minutes, peaks loomed out of the mist, gathering on the horizon on either side of the train. They were varying shades of grey, a surrealist impression of a mountain-range, an illustration on the wall of a one-night cheap hotel.

I was pretty foggy, as well, and the strange mist helped me realise it: foggy about how, exactly, Austria is distinct from Germany. Just how much do they share, culturally, other than a language, and an oft-unified history? I have heard it described as a ‘historical accident’ that these two countries are politically seperate at all. But that sounds a little familiar; Ein Reich, anyone?

Immediate first impressions may count for nothing, but here they are anyway: with the geographical differences comes a psychological difference. People here seem a touch closer to the German Swiss here, in terms of temperament at least. Also like the swiss, they clearly favour the lifestyle of apartment-living; the outskirts of every town we passed through, and Salzburg, the one I stopped in, was filled with blocky, carefully clean apartment buildings.

As a final goodbye to Bavarian Germany, here is a poem that has generously been shared and translated for me. It is by a man called Alfred Mombert, is untitled, and fairly characterises a style that my correspondent describes as ‘Schwaermerei’, or extreme, inspired enthusiasm. My best advice would be for you to read it aloud, even if your German pronounciation isn’t the best. These words, especially before translation, carry an incredible amount of aesthetic appeal: the weight of them, the shape of them. At least I think so; see what you reckon.

Einsames Land! Einsamer Baum darinnen!

Suess ist das Stehn und Sinnen

unter deinen Zweigen.

Aus deinen Wipfeln sinkt es nieder,

das Selig-Daemmernde und Schweigende.

Die Haende stgrecke ich aus, und sie fuellen sich

mit unsichtbaren Blaettern, und ich fuehlte das ganz

im reifgewordenen Herzen.

O Baum, an deinem Stamm, unter deinen Zweigen

ward ich ein blinder Mann, und sammle ein

die Gaben, die aus deinen Wipfeln niedersinken.

Das Herrlichste, es sinkt mir auf das Haupt,

und auf die Schultern, liegt zu meinen Fuessen.

Es verschuettet mich.

Reicht eine Harfe! Das Tief-Ewige

umschauert mich.

Es dringt ein Glanz in eine Nacht.

Das muss die Traene sein, die draussen auf der Schwelle

des Hauses lagert und den Mond anblickt.

Reicht mir die Harfe! Glaenzender war ich nie!

Schlliessd die Pforten auf! oeffnet die Fenster!

Ihr Alle, Alle kommt zum grossen Fest!

…

Lonely land! Lonely tree within it!

Sweet is it to stand and meditate

under your twigs.

From your tips it sinks down,

the Holy-Darkening and Silent.

My hands I stretch out, and they fill

with invisible leaves, and I would feel this completely

In my ripened heart.

O tree, against your stem, under your branches

I became a blind man, and gather in

The gifts that sink down from your tips.

The lordliest (most glorious), sinks onto my head

and onto my shoulders, it lies at my feet.

It engulfs/overthrows me.

Hand me a harp! The Deep-Everlasting

encloses me thrillingly.

A glory presses out into the night.

This must be the tear that rests on the threshold

of the house and contemplates the moon.

Hand me the harp! Never was I more bright/brilliant!

Throw open all the portals! open the windows!

All of you, all, come to the great celebration!

Pretty melodramatic. But such a beautiful language, and so well applied here. It’s easy to detect that very German love (almost worship) of nature, of the forest, in this work; the great cultural history of the Jaeger (hunter). And easy to imagine it springing from the Tolkienesque countryside of Bavaria as well.

A learned friend and ally of mine was quick to point out some thoughts which arose from yesterday’s remarks about the politics of embarrassment. Specifically, he pointed out that in public notice there is the politeness common in English signs, but also the constant application of what he terms the “imperative mood”; so that they imply, again in my friend’s words, both “permission and command”. This, clearly, is something which I would have otherwise missed, Germanically illiterate schweine that I am.

Also in the public comments for yesterday’s post, we have the suggestion that my observation is reinventing the wheel- even more than is usual for me- in that psychologists and sociologists have considered ‘uncomfortableness’ as a possible explanatory factor in German social history for some time. I have requested an expansion on this point.

Good lord, I think there’s something of a… dare I say it?… correspondence society in the offing here!

Here are a few more thoughts around the uncomfortableness thing. It should be stressed that tolerance is a tricky word to apply here. Let us say that, while the threshold of tolerable embarrassment may vary generationally, demographically and regionally; may even be, on the whole, higher than that in the UK; the tolerance of embarrassment-causing behaviours above that threshold is sharply lower, both in terms of prescription and warning, as my first friend points out, and in terms of ‘punishment’. Thus we demarcate between sensitivity and tolerance.

After all, nobody who has visited a German city of anything over 100,000 inhabitants can claim that the modern public mood is anything other than eclectic and vibrant. Berlin is now known as the party capital of Europe; German counter-culture is fierce and more widespread than elsewhere. There seems an acceptance here of things that are still, in Britain, tarred by the brush of noncomformity and ridiculousness; videogaming is practically a national passtime, for example; rock music and its subcultural trappings have never gone out of fashion here as they seem to have further west.

So we see an acceptance, a malleability of society to accept aspects of culture and counter-culture that cannot be surmounted, to accept into a greater in-group the subgroups that compose broader German society. This (surely unconscious) mentality of accepting the ‘other’ when it is widespread enough, or well-established enough is simply another solution to the problem of embarrassment.

And perhaps we see the evidence of this solution in the last century of German history. For what else was the success of Nazism than the quick blossoming of a new ‘in-group’? The desperation not to appear alien to the ermergent new order explains how it was the German people, the formerly moderate majority, that made the Third Reich into what it was. By moving the goalposts of normalness and uncomfortableness, Hitler and his friends were manipulating the psychology of the German people.

Apologies if the above seems either too blunt, too circuitous or too obvious; I am suffering from a lack of sleep through a combination of a worsening head cold and the incredible snoring of a 60-year-old Italian architect who slept in the same dorm as me last night. I have never encountered such snoring before. It was almost a relevatory episode; I thought, for a moment, that I detected in that regular, whinging groan of nostril-impelled air a secret code, a demon language happily forgotten by the scholars of mankind. That was at about 4.30 this morning.

Regensburg is a nice city; compact, walkable, somehow exhibiting its own slightly mediterranean atmosphere (never mind that it is nestled in the northern foothills of the alps!) It is also the nothernmost point in the entire course of the river Danube, which is absolutely glorious here: fast, sparkling, split by islets and reflecting the majesty of some of the great architecture here.

Where Bamberg was cute, Regensburg is dramatic.

I believe I am beginning to scratch the surface of understanding the psychology of the German people. I haven’t much time to mark my thoughts right now, so expect this post to expand pretty massively later today or tomorrow.

It sort of clicked with me as I sat on a small local bus this morning. There was a rare English translation of a small notice above the ticket verification device. It detailed that there would be an automatic fine for invalid ticket-holders. And it closed by saying “please save yourself, and us, the embarrassment”.

You would never find a similar sentiment on a British public notice- nor, indeed, a French one. Perhaps it is an implicit statement, and I am being obtuse. But to now re-approach German people, their culture, their behaviour and interactions, their efficiency and cleanliness, even their humour – it all appears to be a study in a socially-constructed aversion to embarrassment.

This takes two forms. The primary, or cultural, established form is that which constitutes the traditional Germanic cliche: in a word, conformity. The second response, if you like the counter-cultural or reactionary response, is a hardening, a thickening of the skin against those behaviours or activities which might otherwise be a cause of embarrassment. It would be incorrect to assume that this non-tolerance of embarrassment constitutes a specific sensitivity to the same; thresholds naturally must vary enormously.

A society where embarrassment is the key social factor of institutionalisation and cohesiveness- where embarrassment provides the externalised psychological pressure required to enforce a sense of fraternity, of the vastly extended family, of the Hobbesian ’sovereign’ and the Lockean tolerance. It’s just a theory, at the moment, but one I intend to spend some time considering.

The German term for embarrassment is ‘Unbehaglichkeit’, a term which (I think) literally means ‘uncomfortableness’. Imagine a world where the rules are obeyed- and disobeyed- based on a desire to not feel uncomfortable. Perhaps that is the world anyway- our little universe of in-group and out-group discourses- and the German people are just a little more aware of it than we are.

More soon.

‘Movie’ is a beautiful and evocative word, and a pretty good example of why I like American English so much.

The standard label in use over here in England is ‘film’, of course. This has always struck me as being somewhat pretentious, as if a ‘film’ is something which might get shown in Cannes, something with texture, a serious work with artistic intent.

However, the term is slightly flawed: many ‘films’ are no longer ‘films’ at all, these days- digitally recorded rather than photographically, even projected differently at the local cinema. But while ‘celluloid’ (as in ‘committed to celluloid’) has not aged in its usage- since celluloid itself is inefficient and dangerous, the word itself has transformed in meaning to become a catch-all for this medium, an analogue for ‘canvas’ in visual art- ‘film’ certainly has, a preserve of snobbery mainly maintained in order to implicity disparage the Americanism of the ‘movie’, which becomes synonymous with entertainment-only, blockbusters, explosions and popcorn.

So ‘film’ isn’t an apt description for all of the works in the medium any more, and it carries connotations of snobbery. The word ‘movie’ does not suffer in the same way. It delightfully connotes a sense of the spectacular, of wonder that the images being shown us are moving, are in motion, at all, harking back to the earliest days of the cinematic media without the pornographic connotations of the word ‘flick’ or the lumbering self-importance of ‘motion picture’.

‘Movie’ also alliterises well (movie magic!). But that’s beside the point: people seem to cling to the word ‘film’ as if it’s a serious, technical piece of terminology, when in fact it is more outmoded a description than any other. ‘Movie’ reminds us of the golden years, and should be considered as useful for pieces of art-house cinema as for the latest special-effects riddled record-breaker.

Now; I’m off to see a movie. Who’s with me?

First of all, apologies for a second fallow period in the blog. I shall attempt to be more dedicated now that the exams are finally over and done with. Despite the lack of updates, this site attracted its thousandth hit sometime yesterday evening. Which is obviously very very cool.

Pub discussions are awesome. One of my housemates maintains that the pub is the essential backbone of British culture- that all the very best ideas either did or must have occurred during one of those tipsy, excitable conversations that never seem to cease occuring at your local Wetherspoons or Greene King- or, if you’re feeling a bit posh, maybe even an independent establishment. It’s atmospheric, rather than alcoholic: an environment conducive to saying ridiculous things and then working hard to justify them afterwards. From such is the greatness of mankind born.

Well, we were only one drink in the other night when I and two very close friends of mine settled at an outside table at one of our preferred Leytonstone inns to observe the sunset over the motorway barrier and bus shelter and turn to a discussion on linguistics.

We were discussing ‘grammar Nazis’- that is, people (like ourselves) who find it very difficult to put up with incorrect spelling, syntax and so on. Pedants, basically. And of course, it being that kind of evening, someone had to ask just what constituted ‘correctness’ in communication.

I managed to alienate myself fairly early on by expressing my preference for Americanism and Americanised English. It’s actually a two-way advance, if you like: not only does the opening-up of the vowels and re-acceptance of certain pronounciations (lieutenant, anyone?) give the Americans the claim to traditionalism. The modifications of spellings, fuller use of the alphabet, curtailed and abbreviated words and more frequent use of elision and neologism all combine to ensure that American English is evolved English; the logical next step.

With the formation of the BBC in this country, and the conscious cultivation of an upper-middle-class, the “Queen’s English” or “BBC English” is arguably far more artificial an approach to the tongue than many a regional accent or dialect. It was, and is, a conscious attempt to engineer the nature of English, to standardise it, critically, at a level ‘above’ the education of the average English speaker. Along with the rest of the BBC, it remains a form of social-education control that is now slowly eroding. Now, it seems, BBC newsreaders must have regional accents and help in celebrating the diversity of the UK. Not only that, but all newsreaders must now also be journalists as well. Not that there’s any specific qualification required in order to call oneself a journalist. But that’s another essay. Please believe me when I write that the BBC will be mentioned again in this Blog.

American English is a democratisation of the language. Someone once described it as English with its gloves off. It is a dialect that simplifies our language without (usually) shearing away its meaning, that makes sentence structure more accessible and closer to the form of naturally spoken English. It is a dialect which adores shortenings and nicknames, each one loaded with as much connoted meaning and implication as any mile-long German word.

Limitations are present in definition rather than in the structure of the language itself. One of my friends reminded me of the perversion of the use of political terminology on the other side of the Atlantic- ‘Liberal’, for example, is a word which now means something quite unique in our respective cultures. There are other examples.

I do not write this Blog- or much else- in American standard English, mainly due to force of habit. We are creatures constructed by our words and our language. The nature of thought-processes before they are transmuted into linguistic code are almost impossible to imagine. We must remember that we are evolved and engineered by our languages, not the other way around: to resist change in pursuit of some purism or misplaced traditionalism is to miss the point of language entirely. To dismiss American English as inferior is a mild form of patriotic bigotry.

And just remember this: the new lingua franca shall be defined not by the number of people speaking it, but by its relevance and use in and by the cultural zeitgeist. American English is, and shall remain for the foreseeable future, the logical base-language of the Internet. The internet is, of course, the single most important communications system that this planet has ever seen. It is the cultural and the counter-cultural melange all at once, the industrial and the informative, the diplomat and the debate, top-down and user-generated. And, at its heart, is American English. Try changing the “colour” of text in HTML and see how far you get.