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calacuspr · 4 years ago

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PR lessons from the European Super League announcement

Fans were allowed back to watch football in person for the first time this year at the weekend when the FA Cup semi-finals took place at Wembley Stadium.

In normal times, that would be something to celebrate and a key story dominating the sports headlines.

But when news broke on social media of the breakaway European Super League (ESL), fans and media alike could talk of nothing else.

Clearly some senior sports news journalists had been briefed, based on the accuracy of the financial information that they shared.

Many of the revelations, which were subsequently confirmed, suggested a tone deafness on the part of those clubs involved, some of whom have instigated redundancies, player pay cuts and even applied for staff furlough grants from the UK government, while millions have struggled during the pandemic.

The story also showed serious communications errors by the organisers and lessons that all sports organisations can learn from when it comes to issues and crises.

TIMING

The news of the proposed European Super League broke on Sunday afternoon but it was not for some hours until the official statement was released to the public.

This gave plenty of time for the news to be digested by media, fans and players alike, who almost universally expressed outrage and fury at the perceived greed and senselessness of the proposals.

Governing bodies, fan groups and politicians were united in their anger and opposition.

A plan should have been in place to ensure that a comprehensive statement was made available at a pre-agreed time to put the ESL’s views across at the point when the story was expected to break.

As it was, the official release was published late at night, ignoring one of the basic tenets of PR that you don’t leave others to fill the void with negativity when controversial developments take place.

NARRATIVE

Whether fans like to admit it or not, they love to see the top stars of world football playing for or against their team.

In the past week, seeing Neymar and Kylian Mbappe going toe-to toe with the might of Bayern Munich’s array of stars, for instance, provided a mouth-watering and engrossing tie that had everyone salivating at its spectacle.

But the Covid-19 pandemic has seen clubs lose tens if not hundreds of millions in lost revenue from ticketing, merchandise and food and beverage which have presented all sorts of financial challenges for clubs, particularly at the top of the game where salaries are sky high.

While some of this could be recovered once fans are allowed back into stadia, UEFA’s own new Champions League proposals appeared not to have convinced the 12 ESL clubs enough to gain their support when it came to it.

The initial ESL statement included: “The formation of the Super League comes at a time when the global pandemic has accelerated the instability in the existing European football economic model.

“The pandemic has shown that a strategic vision and a sustainable commercial approach are required to enhance value and support for the benefit of the entire European football pyramid.”

Given the parlous financial situation most clubs find themselves in, particularly the giants in Spain and Italy, claims that this is motivated by anything other than money lack credibility.

Florentino Pérez admitted as much when he finally spoke to a Spanish news organisation more than 24 hours after the story first broke, citing the need to recover lost earnings caused by the pandemic.

The ESL did not focus on the challenges facing the clubs and the reasons why the UEFA proposals did not make sense.

In doing so, they handed the moral high ground to their critics and rivals who themselves have not always taken into account the views of fans, players or clubs when making their decisions.

LEADERSHIP

The ESL statement quoted just three ESL executives, Real Madrid’s Florentino Pérez, Manchester United’s Joel Glazer and Andrea Agnelli, Chairman of Juventus.

When the press release was published on each club’s website, there were no individual quotes from executives of those clubs (even if they were not included in the original statement) with the curiosity of United’s Glazer even quoted on the website of arch-rivals Liverpool and Manchester City, something that would previously have been considered unthinkable.

With such considerable financial backing, why were the executives of each club not guided on the key messaging so that they could engage with fans and media who are interested in their specific perspectives the day after the announcement?

If their executives really believe in the proposals they are seeking to implement, why not have the confidence to put the ESL case forward in person?

With no Video News Release or interview opportunities – remember that Zoom has been used in these socially-distanced times to great effect – the organisation gave the impression of arrogance and hiding behind its corporate backers at a time when the clubs’ fans are confused, angry and in need of direct engagement.

ENGAGEMENT

Talking of engagement, the late, great Sir Matt Busby, who led Manchester United to the title and European Cup as it then was, once said “Football is nothing without fans.”

What the Covid-19 pandemic has confirmed is that football’s global appeal has not waned in empty stadia, despite the clear lack of atmosphere without fans cheering on their heroes.

The scheduling of matches over the past few years has made the loyal, died-in-the-wool match-going fans feel disengaged and ignored, with long journeys at inconvenient times required to accommodate television schedules in lucrative overseas markets.

Is it any wonder that in his statement, Perez said: “Football is the only global sport in the world, with more than four billion fans.” Hardly a ringing endorsement of those in Madrid who live and breathe their club and undermining his later comments that audiences were falling.

While football tourists make up an increasing number of those who attend matches in person, clubs used to rely on a loyal, mainly local fanbase, whose traditions and rituals are the fabric of the atmosphere and intensity which makes top level football such a spectacle.

Granted, fans have never been an integral part of the decision-making process for clubs and football administrators, but so many of the leaders of the ESL clubs rarely, if ever, give media interviews or talk directly to the stakeholders who should matter most.

No wonder the scenes at Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge were so dramatic, with former goalkeeper and now Technical Director Petr Cech having to plead with fans who were peacefully protesting and blocking the route for team coaches to enter the stadium car park.

The fact that fans from each of the six English clubs came together in a combined effort to thwart the ESL plans and even hold a Zoom call with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson showed the depth of feeling and the importance fans have in the game.

Coaches of the English ESL clubs claimed not to have known anything about the plans until they were revealed at the weekend. Liverpool coach Jurgen Klopp, forced to speak ahead of the Leeds United game when his club’s owners had not yet faced the media, said: “People are not happy with it, I can understand it. I can't say a lot more because we were not involved in the process - not the players, not me - we didn't know about it. We will have to wait how it develops.”

What of the players? Threatened with the prospect of being excluded from international competitions, how would they feel about these developments that they have had no opportunity to discuss before they were seemingly confirmed?

Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson reportedly led a captains’ call before a co-ordinated campaign by him and his team-mates to express their displeasure on social media.

Liverpool sponsor Tribus pulled out of their deal before the ESL project collapsed. Time will tell how other club sponsors feel given the negative feedback towards their partners.

VISION

Football is all about entertainment, rivalry, and the jeopardy that can see a club win a trophy and be relegated in quick succession.

There is an argument that top clubs playing against top clubs in a closed format without relegation may lose its novelty, but even without engagement, the initial communications did nothing to excite and inspire the fans who loyally follow their teams home and away.

At a time when the football family should be working together to support all levels of the game from grassroots to elite level, these developments showed how little club owners care about their traditional fanbase.

The prospect of shorter games and other rule changes to suit a younger audience whose attention spans are supposedly limited added to the uproar and underlined the lack of understanding of the fundamentals that make football great.

As Adam Crafton, from The Athletic, put it: “It’s amazing. I just spent 48 hours thinking ‘surely there’s more to this? Surely they have a plan to articulate the vision?’ And then you realise, there really isn’t.”

It has been said that football clubs have been brands for some time, and if you subscribe to that train of thought, how much damage has been done to those brands and how will they recover?

***

When clubs started pulling out of the ESL on Tuesday evening, it did not take long for more to follow and forced the ESL to make a second, late statement which was so rushed, it did not even go out on headed notepaper.

Tellingly, almost 24 hours later, the ESL had not been updated to include the latest developments.

The ESL debacle raises further questions about the importance of club owners as custodians of these great institutions rather than simply using them as income-generating playthings with no consideration for culture and tradition.

While there has been widespread criticism and this has continued to be handled poorly from a communications perspective, too many organisations have been sleep walking to the point where this has now happened.

And as a result of that apathy, football’s reputation has been tarnished and it will take a long time to repair it.

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kyndaris · 4 years ago

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A Hero Lies in You

On April Fool’s Day 2019, a video was released showing the latest game in the Yakuza franchise. Many thought it was a prank. The reason why? The sudden change in combat. Gone was the brawler beat-em-up that was associated with the series. In its stead was a turn-based system reminiscent of role-playing games. Characters waiting for their turns before utilising special skills? In a franchise known for its hard gritty storylines about gangs duking it out in the streets of Japan? ‘Haha Ryu Ga Gotoku. You thought you could fool us, but we see right through you. This isn’t our first rodeo and you’re not Square Enix,’ was many a thought when the footage had been viewed by thousands online.

What gamers did not know was that this was no gag. Fast forward several months to August 2019 and it was confirmed that Yakuza 7: Like a Dragon, starring new protagonist Kasuga Ichiban, would actually incorporate turn-based battles. There would even be JOBS!

As I had just finished playing through Kiryu’s story, as well as Judgment, in 2020 I was eager to see what new protagonist Kasuga Ichiban would bring to the table. From trailers, I could already see how much livelier Ichiban would be in comparison to the more stoic Kiryu. And, in contrast to Yagami, he was definitely more of an idiot. A lovable idiot, to be sure, but an idiot nonetheless.

Yakuza 7: Like a Dragon released in a huge week for video games. While I would have preferred to play it earlier, I had other huge titans to wrestle into submission first. Once I had managed to satiate my Ubisoft open-world needs with Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, I dived head first onto the streets of Yokohama, ready to bust some heads.

The game opens on a play. For a moment, I thought I had somehow purchased the wrong game. But as the lengthy prologue progressed, it was very clear that this was most definitely a Yakuza game. It just needed to set up a little bit of the tale, starting with Arakawa Masumi - father figure and role-model for our erstwhile hero. It isn’t long before players are introduced to Kasuga Ichiban with his trademark ‘punch perm.’ Born in a soapland and raised by those that lived on the fringes of society, Ichiban, rather than being hardened by his experience, is empathetic and not afraid to show emotion. Tasked with collection, he interprets his orders in a way to benefit those that are struggling. His goofball attitude immediately makes him a character one can connect to. And it doesn’t hurt that he’s a bit of a nerd, having played Dragon Quest during his childhood and likening many of the people around him to things in the game.

It’s not long before the plot escalates and Ichiban volunteers to give himself up to the police. Sentenced to fifteen years in prison, he inadvertently extends his sentence when his Patriarch is insulted by one of the fellow inmates. After nearly two decades spent in prison for a crime that he did not commit, Ichiban is released with little fanfare and no waiting convoy. Disappointed, he takes it in stride. The first thing on his order of business: to get his signature punch perm and reconnect with his second father-figure and Patriarch of the Arakawa family.

Along the way, he is dogged by a former policeman: Adachi. At first, it isn’t made clear why Adachi seeks Ichiban for help. After all, Ichiban had supposedly killed another yakuza in Kamurocho, Tokyo. Adachi, on the other hand, was a detective in Yokohama. Why would he have any interest in uncovering the truth behind what had put Ichiban behind bars?

After a few shenanigans are had in and around Kamurocho, our protagonist is shot and left for dead - waking up in a homeless shelter in the heart of Isezaki Ijincho. Climbing his way from rock bottom, Ichiban embarks on a journey to uncover the truth, stumbling upon a series of events and unearthing a vast conspiracy in which he was to serve as a pawn.

Many of the earlier chapters felt a little contrived. In particular was the death of Nonomiya. While it served to move the narrative forward, it was most assuredly a means to an end that didn’t highlight any significant character growth. Poor Nonomiya was fridged just to bring Ichiban into conflict with the Liumang branch of the Ijin Three.

It was only in the later chapters that the story picked up steam - with the confrontations with Bleach Japan and the encroachment by the Omi Alliance. Joined by a menagerie of characters like Zhao, Saeko, Han Joon-Gi, Nanba and Eri, there was a lot to keep track on as the plot barrelled forward at a breakneck pace, connecting Ichiban’s past with his current present and all the while setting up a juicy conflict between two men that could have been brothers. And honestly, the ending with Arakawa Masato and Ichiban got to me. I loved how that Ichiban was finally able to reach his old charge by being vulnerable and finally letting out a little of his resentment at the life Masato led, despite the fact that he could not use his legs.

The characters were superbly written and their motivations were a good reflection of the human condition. The themes of family and finding a home were evident, right from the start, even though a lot of it was glossed over by Ichiban’s desire to be a hero in a video game.

(I also really liked Seong-hui and would love to see her be an actual playable character in possible future instalments. On a side note, Arakawa...you cannot simply say: ‘See you tomorrow, Ichi,’ and expect to walk away. You basically wrote your own name into the Death Note with that line!)

As far as aping Japanese role-playing games go, however, Yakuza: Like a Dragon falls woefully short. While the Tendo twist was a good one - it was pulled a little too early. Worse, there was no world-ending threat. Everyone knows that a Japanese role-playing game MUST HAVE A VILLAIN/ EVIL GOD FIGURE THAT INTENDS TO DESTROY THE WORLD. Yakuza: Like a Dragon was too focused on old childhood rivalries to extend it further afield. I mean, yes, Aoki Ryo hoped to pull the strings of the Japanese government as chair of the CLP, but WHERE WAS THE METEOR HURTLING TOWARDS EARTH?

Honestly, 1/10 for holding true to Japanese role-playing games.

Other than that, the summons with Pound Mates was amusing. As were the side stories. Honestly, there can never be enough side stories to flesh out the wacky world of the Yakuza franchise. So many old favourites made their return. From Pocket Fighter (now dubbed Dragon Fighter) and Gondawara Susumu with his baby fetish.

Also, I didn’t think I’d be so obsessed with it, but I think they cracked property management this time round. Ichiban Confections, later known as Ichiban Holdings, was a blast to manage and accrue juicy money for.

The bartender of Survive also looked very familiar. I mean...what with the huge scar across his face. My suspicions were confirmed when I searched up Kashiwagi up on the Yakuza wiki page and was awarded with the fact that HE MANAGED TO SURVIVE THE ASSAULT HELICOPTER FROM YAKUZA 3!!

Other than that, my few other gripes involved the implementation of the levelling system and the way area of effect skills were handled. In particular, the pathing for how characters moved around the battlefield proved, at least to me, a bit of a frustration. Often, characters would be blocked by a knee-high fence or a corner. Sometimes they would be able to go around, but other times the game (after several seconds of watching them fail to walk through a solid building) warp to the enemy that I had targeted to launch their attack.

And even though the combat is turn-based, most of the enemies tend to walk around the battlefield - either clumping together or distancing themselves from each other. What truly annoyed me was when there were moves that could be used as an area of effect, with the MP cost to go along with it, but were limited by their effectiveness when the enemy combatants were too far away. Yes, it makes sense, but golly gosh, how much of a pixel measurement does it have to be for it to not hit?

Besides that, the levelling was also a bit of a tedious chore. Were it not for the invested vagrants, I feel like I might have put the game down with how much grinding there was - particularly when it came to the various jobs. The biggest hill to climb was from 20-30. Without the exp (experience point) boosting items, it would have been a torturous slog. I know that in the original Japanese release of the game, the cap for jobs was level 30, but if you change it to 99, please, for the sanity of all the gamers out there, tweak the requirements to make it easier. And maybe give normal trash mobs a bit more experience points for the playable characters to munch on.

Goodness, imagine having to grind on level 55 Ornery Yakuza and receiving a paltry 1000xp for each battle (when, in order to level up a job, you needed almost a million).

Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a break from the traditional formula that’s been a staple of the franchise for many years. Much like Ichiban, it’s a bit of fresh air to liven up the experience that might have gone a bit stale after I slogged through the whole Kiryu arc last year. With a few tweaks, and a few more Persona 5 CD soundtracks, I’m eager to see how the story evolves and whatever contrivances Ichiban will somehow force him into.

Although, to be fair, is it still appropriate to call this franchise Yakuza when the game literally saw the dismantling of the two biggest clans? Then again, Civilian: Like a Dragon 2 just doesn’t have the same ring to it. In any case, I hope the next one comes soon and we’ll be able to have Seong-hui in our party. I feel like she’d be wielding a gunblade.

(Did I just use a lyric from Mariah Carey? You bet I did! I had been tossing up the idea between this line and ‘I need a hero.’ Why? Well, I think that would be self-explanatory after knowing Ichiban’s proclivities. And it fits so, so, so well!)

#yakuza 7: like a dragon #yakuza #video games #i need a hero

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duhragonball · 4 years ago

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‘21

Amidst all the popular hype for seeing the end of 2020, it didn’t hit me until about lunchtime what the real highlight is that I’ve been waiting for: For the first time since 1999, the year finally ends in “numberty-number” again. It low-key irritated me that we had to call it “two thousand three” and I was relieved when “twenty-thirteen” caught on, but it still wasn’t right because it was too short, and now we’re back in the sweet spot, and I should be safely dead by 2100, so that’s one less thing I gotta deal with.

Really, even “numberty hundred” rings true to me. “Nineteen hundred” sounds like a year. “Twenty-one-oh-six” sounds like a futur-y year, which is even cooler. So did “Two thousand five”, until I was actually living in it, and it sounds even worse now that it was a long time ago and adults will talk about their childhood happening in that year. Daniel Witwicky would be old enough to get married and grow a fancier beard than me. That’s nuts. My point is that, honestly, it’s the year 3000-3019 that I have to worry about, so if I ever decide to go vampire, those will be the years I hide in the ocean or force society to reset the calendar, whichever’s easier.

I spent New Year’s Eve finishing Superliminal, which I bought on Steam after I watched Vegeta play it on YouTube. It has a similar look and feel to the Stanley Parable, so if you liked one you’d probably enjoy the other, although Superliminal has a different theme. I kept hoping I’d find some secret passage that I wasn’t supposed to take, and a narrator would scold me for finding the “Chickenbutt Ending”, but it doesn’t work that way. Superliminal’s all about puzzles and awesome visuals, but it does have the same soothing design aesthetics as TSP. Honestly, I enjoyed just wandering around in Stanley’s office, and Superliminal does the same thing with a hotel and several other settings. It’s nice.

This got me thinking about how I kind of did everything there was to do in The Stanley Parable, and I sort of wished they would add new stuff to the game, but I’m not sure there would be much point to that. I could play the older version, but it presents the same message, just with different assets. The Boss’s Office would look different, but it’d be the same game. And this got me thinking about various “secret chapters” in pop culture. Secrets behind the cut.

I first heard about this idea in the 2000′s, when fans invented this notion that there was a secret chapter of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I read a website that tried to explain the concept, and of course it lauded J.K. Rowling with all this gushing praise for working an Easter egg into the book, a literary work of “well, magic.”

That pretty well sums up my distaste for Harry Potter, by the way. These days, JKR has thoroughly crapped all over her reputation and legacy, but in the 2000′s it felt like half the planet was in a mad rush to canonize her as a writing goddess, to the point where fans were congratulating her for writing secret chapters that didn’t actually exist. The idea was based on lore from the books about Neville Longbottom’s parents. They were patients in a mental hospital, and he’d go to visit them, and they would give him bubble gum wrappers, intended to demonstrate how far remove they’ve become from reality. The secret chapter lies in those wrappers, which all read “Droobles Best Blowing Gum” or some such. What if Neville’s parents were only pretending to be mentally ill, so as to throw off their enemies? Naturally, they would want to stay in contact with their son, so the bubble gum wrappers would have to contain coded messages. Said code involves unscrambling the letters on the wrappers to make new words, like “goblin” or “sword” or “Muggle” or “Dumbledore”. The problem is that you can also use it to make other words like “booger” or “drool” or “booobbiess.” Play with it enough, and you can make the code say anything you want it to say, which means it’s no code at all.

But the idea was that the not-yet-published sixth HP book would reveal all of this gum wrapper nonsense, and Neville would decode the messages and discover all of his parents’ super-cool adventures. I’m not sure why we needed a secret chapter if Book 6 was going to explain all of this anyway in several not-secret chapters, but that was the whole point. Fans didn’t have Book 6 yet, and they were so desperate to read it that they started trying to extrapolate what would happen next based on “clues” from the previous five. That’s like trying to figure out what Majin Buu looks like by watching the Androids Saga. I guess some wiseguy would have guessed that he’d resemble #19, but that’d just be blind luck.

And when you get down to it, this whole secret chapter business is really just a conspiracy. This is literally how Qanon works. Some anonymous jackass posted vague “hints” on an imageboard, and people went goofy trying to interpret them and figure out what would happen in the future. They call it “research” because they spend a ton of time on this, but there’s no basis to any of it. It took me a few minutes to figure out that you can spell “Muggle” with the words in “Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum”, but that’s not research and it doesn’t prove anything. But all these guys keep looking for “Hilary Clinton goes to jail next week” and lo and behold that’s all they ever find.

In the same vein, the gum wrapper thing was really a complaint disguised as a conspiracy, disguised as a “magical secret chapter”. At least a few fans wanted to see more Neville in their Harry Potter books, they wanted Neville’s parents, or someone like them, to have cool spy adventures or whatever else. The point is, they clearly weren’t getting what they wanted out of the printed works, but they didn’t want to turn against their Dear Beloved Author, so they started casting about for an alternative reality, one where J.K. Rowling wrote a cooler story and hid it in the pages of the one that actually went to press. So instead of just saying “Hey, Order of the Phoenix was kind of a letdown, I hope there’s more ninjas in the next book,” they said “Rowling is a genius because I wanted ninjas and she’s definitely going to give them to me, I have the gum wrappers to prove it.”

The same thing happened all over again when the BBC Sherlock show took a turn for the nonsensical. I don’t know from BBC Sherlock, but I watched the fascinating video critique by Hbomberguy, and it sounds like the show did tons of plot twists until it stopped making sense altogether in the fourth season. If you skip to 1:09:00 in the video, you’ll hear about fan theories that suggested that season four was supposed to be crappy, as part of a secret meta-narrative plan that would be paid off in a secret, unannounced episode that would not only explain everything, but retroactively justify the crappy episodes that came before. But it’s been a few years and it never came to pass, so I think we can call this myth busted.

Most recently, I think we’ve all seen a lot of talk about the final season of Supernatural, where I guess Destiel sort of became canon but only one guy does the love confession and the other doesn’t respond. But I guess he does say “I love you too” in the Spanish dub, which means the English language version was edited for whatever reason. It’s not exactly a secret episode, but the implication is that there’s more to this than what made it to the screen. So the questions turn to what the screenplay said, what the writers and actors wanted to do, etc. etc. My general impression is that SPN fans are a bit more used to crushing disappointment, so they’re not quite as delusional about this show being unquestionable genius, like Sherlock and Harry Potter. Maybe this is an Anglophile thing? Like, if you suck at something with a British accent, people will accept it more unconditionally?

I had seen something on Twitter about how there should have been a secret Seinfeld episode in the 90′s. Someone suggested it at the time, they tape a whole episode, then wait until 2020 to air it, because by then it would be worth a fortune. But they didn’t do it, because it costs a lot of money to make a TV episode, and if you don’t air the show right away, you aren’t making that money back any time soon. Yeah, you might recoup a fortune someday, but Seinfeld was making a ton of money then. It exposes the fannish nature of the idea. A fan would love to discover a cool secret chapter, but a content creator isn’t necessarily keen on making a cool thing and then hiding it where few people would find it.

I thought about doing this myself recently. Maybe Supernatural gave me the bug, but I thought “I’m writing this big-ass story, so what if I wrote me a secret chapter for it? Wouldn’t that be cool?” But no, it wouldn’t be cool, because it’d be the same work as writing a regular chapter, and the same stress I feel when I hold off on publishing it. Except I’d just never publish it, I’d put it in some secret hole on the internet and hope that some superfan who might not even exist can decode whatever clues I leave.

I mean, it’d be awesome if it got discovered and everyone loved it. “Hey, I found this hidden chapter! Mike’s done it again!” And I could bask in the glory. But what if no one finds it? Then I just wasted my time, right? I want people to read my work. My monkey brain needs the sweet, sweet validation of those kudos and comments, folks. Once I realized that, I understood why no one else would want to do a secret chapter either. Easter eggs are one thing, but the bigger bonus features they put on DVDs were pretty easy to find, and with good reason.

I think that’s what made the Stanley Parable so appealing to play, because it teases you with the idea that you can “break” the game and find some extra content that you weren’t supposed to see, but as you go exploring all those hidden areas, it gradually becomes clear that this is just part of the game; you were meant to find all these things, and that’s why they were put here. It’s hidden, but he secret aspect of it is just pretend.

I suppose that what I like about games like TSP and Superliminal is the illusion of secrets more than the secrets themselves. I like roaming through the hallways, having no idea what I might find ahead. I kind of wish I could open all the doors, and not just the ones the game designers put stuff behind, but the reality is that there’s nothing on the other side. I used a cheat code once to explore the unused doors in TSP and it’s just a bright white field on the other side. Interesting to look at, but not much of a reveal. Honestly, the doors themselves are more appealing than anything that could lay behind them.

And that’s probably what makes secrets so fun. They could be almost anything, but once you open the present, the number of possibilities drops to one. If they had ever made that Secret BBC Sherlock Episode, I doubt it would have lived up to expectations, but fans could amuse themselves by imagining what could have been in it. In the end, though, things usually don’t justify the hype. For every Undertaker debut at Survivor Series 1990, there’s a Gobbledygooker debut at Survivor Series 1990. It’s impossible to manufacture a secret with a guaranteed payoff.

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violetsystems · 4 years ago

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#personal

The holidays are quiet if not a little more restful than usual. I facetime’d my dad and his wife and talked to my mom on the phone. Since I left my job way back in July I haven’t had much video contact with anybody. Everybody is too busy baking banana bread on YouTube I guess to check in. The final days of my employment had devolved into a virtual SCRUM twice a day led by myself on camera. It was exhausting at times to lead but kept people focused. That is when they bothered to show up. One of my employees was off making music with my boss half the time I was trying to lead those discussions. I’m beginning to sense a theme. People saying they are there but not really. Maybe the mic is muted. Maybe you can’t see behind the screen. All I know is the follow through lately with people is missing entirely. I spent a good hour the last two days trying to decouple a credit card from my old job’s contact info. I’m locked out of both the phone number and the email attached to the account. I got the run around trying to provide a US passport to confirm my identity. It was good enough to enter China alone. The first call that ID was sufficient. They had said they sent an email to follow through with the process to two different emails I provided. The email never came most likely because neither had been tied to the account previously. I called back on Christmas eve and suddenly the passport wasn’t good enough. Neither was an expired driver’s license. The woman actually asked me why I hadn’t renewed my driver’s license. I told the truth. My ex girlfriend stole my car. That didn’t really help the situation. I sent a passport photo to unlock my facebook but they never followed through. I had an easier time unlocking my Fortnite account with it although that took a full week. I ended having to call the police on Christmas eve to explore filing a report for fraud and identity theft. The police officer on the phone pretty much gaslighted me at the end of the questioning. “Nothing criminal.” he stated plainly. I didn’t get mad. I didn’t even complain. I simply said Happy Holidays and hung up. Much like I’ve hung up on the last twenty years of my life at this point. Nobody seems to want to answer the video call. The opening introduction if they did would be something like “What exactly have you done with my life?” Maybe they’re afraid to confront the truth. The media, the government, and even the police seem to not want to believe evidence that contradicts their narrative. I guess you could throw up your hands and revolt. But the holidays have been peaceful and quiet enough to simply roll my eyes and move on. I’ve had years of failures to connect. COVID has taught me a lot of things. I heard the mantra in all the mandatory corporate webinars. This pandemic has brought to light structural problems we were never aware of before. Sexual harassment in the workplace. Check. Organizational corruption. Check. The fact everybody is full of bullshit and will just mute the mic and pretend it never happened. Check. People feel invincible behind a screen and think they know it all. Check. Now that we’re aware. What do we do? How do we move on with our life now that we have all this space? How do I even care about participating in a broken process when I have no debt and fiscal maturity? How can I go back to being the old me when I’ve been completely erased and conveniently forgot about? Why would I even bother?

Mostly I take the time with this process to make sure my identity is completely secure. Which is why it’s not really fun to be locked out of twenty years of your own information in the form of an email account and forgotten about for six months. But this is just the structural reality come to light. Much like the rest of America is waking up to the reality of what greed really does to people. That was my Christmas present this year aside from the coffee that never came and that Cyberpunk game that I don’t really have the time or the subpar computer setup to criticize. I’m guilty of tricking myself into thinking people care about me. I have statistical data from the last six months that proves otherwise. I also have financial data that points to whatever hustle I have been hustling during that time has paid off and will continue to. But I don’t really have an answer to anything. I’m in the worst kind of limbo. I don’t get the sense these days that I should even remotely worry until July. Which is kind of like saying fuck you to the world for the next six months. I spent the last six waking up from a nightmare. The only times I look back is to clean up the mess. And a Christmas Eve call to the police is kind of messy. But the result is more of the same for me. An extravagant “I told you so.” I’ve been telling myself for awhile now a lot of things. Some of them were kind of unbelievable. Now those very dreams are all I really take comfort in. The limbo I’m in is more pointed to the light at the end of the tunnel than the void. But I can’t say the same for everybody else. I work for myself for the time being. It looks really nice on paper. I can even pay myself if it fits into my organization’s financial outlook. But none of this matters when you or your struggles don’t even exist to people other than to mock or judge it. All the work we do to survive. All the work we do to create art and to be beautiful in the face of chaos. All of that is negated by a loud mouthed jerk who can bark you back into submission. A mob of dumb ass fraudsters that talk over and mute any opposition without any warrant or merit. The press follows this mentality pretty clearly. Everybody has a hot take and a theory. But nobody wants to sit down and listen to the culmination of lies spread about people and situations. Everyone is too emotionally interested in sharing their recipe for banana bread to an invisible audience. I guess I could be guilty of that too. Except that I share actual human emotion and care with a community of people who pay attention week to week. For a person like myself who has no real need to worry about money for the foreseeable future what’s the value of care and attention? A lot. I don’t feed myself with vapor or fake sentiments. I take it all at base level as real as it gets. You can’t build a future on speculation. You can technically if you are in the stock market. But risk is risk. And money is money. No one can be me at the end of the day. Sometimes I can’t even prove I’m myself. My mom reminded me I had to provide ten pieces of documentation to renew my passport ten years ago. The reasoning was simple. The government did not believe I existed. No bullshit. A decade later nothing really has changed. I’ve been to Shanghai by myself and eaten McDonald’s. I read all these Republicans talk about how you put your identity at risk just setting foot in that country.

And yet when does the rhetoric and brainwashing fall flat on it’s face? When you can’t pass economic stimulus to not only save your own people but the fragile stock market all this bullshit is built upon. I could keep telling you I told you so. Or I could save my own ass. And largely I did without really owing much to this country whatsoever except taxes in Q1. Taxes billionaires don’t have to pay because they offer us so much relevant employment and benefits that fit on their bottom line. The real truth is that America would rather not face the truth. It hasn’t for years. It’s built on this kind of thing. It always has been. And the world gets bigger and the excuses get worse. And so what does anyone expect a person like me to do after you openly admit that there’s nothing criminal going on here. How does that sound when you’ve been treated openly like a criminal in so many unsettling ways that you just don’t want to participate in society anymore? Not that anyone really asks me to participate. They’re too busy signaling or whispering secret messages. Is it suggestion or valid communication? I’m the one that has to shift through it all and detangle the mess from what is real and what is some sort of mass hallucination. An alternate reality hunger game that the rich have been playing for years without any punishment or oversight. When you get caught up in the crossfire they expect you to know the drill. Keep your mouth shut if you know what’s good for you. None of this is good for me. You could argue it made me the beast that I am. But I am the one who had to actively make that choice to adapt and survive. But I’m not like any normal person these days. I refuse to admit it anymore. They say the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. I have a problem. One that it seems I cannot fix. And if you isolate and quarantine yourself from an entire twenty years of nostalgia what is left? Where are the texts of merry xmas from yesteryear. Probably pinging my old work number. I can’t access my facebook. Maybe that’s for the best. I can’t shut down lines of credit until I renew my state ID. I could jump on a plane and visit Shanghai Disney quicker than I could prove I’m alive to the US government. And when does the constant gaslighting break down? When do we realize that people gaslight to cover up an elaborate lie that has gotten out of control. That we are not all in this together. Not by a longshot. That the problem of connectedness is right there in front of our faces. We’re exhausted propping up entire infrastructures that keep a bloated empire alive. Family fortunes built on opioids and war strewn out across the landscape in trusts and elaborate tax schemes. Oligarchs that have generational wealth that buy our politicians and scam people into debt and forced labor. This is America. This is the systemic problem the pandemic brought to light. This shit was built this way. And like any fort constructed with shaky foundations, good luck hiding from the storm in that shit. At least I can still access my Epic account. What am I going to do for the next six months? Complain about something I can’t fix because everybody wants to consider me part of the problem? I don’t know what to do anymore except move forward and lead by example. There’s enough quality people who follow to keep me warm with those thoughts through the holidays alone. I won’t be drunk on a zoom call. I’ll be in bed watching Wonder Woman or something. When everyone you worshipped comes out of this looking fake, tired and exhausted you’ll know where to find me. Unlocking more accounts tied to an identity that doesn’t exist anymore. Nothing criminal. Hopefully people will stop treating me like one eventually. <3 Tim

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emisonme · 5 years ago

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PR time line.............

Some can't seem to understand, how Shmila could have helped Camila get out of the PR with the con man. Let's explore the time line and maybe you'll have a better understanding of where I'm coming from.

Camila's debut album, had an original release date, of September 2017. She would have signed a PR contract with Ew, probably late August. These PR contracts are usually for a period of time, but the start and end dates, are flexible, because of the release dates of the Artists music being flexible.

Camila probably found out, sometime in late August, that her release date was being pushed, to November. That's why she followed the con man on SM, in October. They were preparing to unleash the PR, after the release of her album, in probably early December. Just in time for the holidays.

But, her album got pushed, yet again. The new date was January 12, 2018. She does the Elvis Duran radio show, on January 11. That is the first time we hear her or anyone else, utter that fuckers name.

The next morning, she does GMA. They schedule Con to appear on the same show. Why? To give us a PUBLIC reason for them meeting and the ensuing "relationship".

Three days later, Camila does Beats 1, with Zane Lowe. That's when we got the "maybe" when asked if she had a special someone in her life. Also, the whole, "I can't say your name without smiling" bullshit.

Then on February 9. 2018, we got the E-News exclusive Mexico beach photo-shoot. That's the day the actual PR began. They had signed the actual contract, MONTHS before, but because the album kept getting pushed, so did the start date for the PR.

That being said, I'm almost certain, they only signed a 1 year contract. I'll explain. We got their one year of public bullshit, but it really got laid on thick towards the end. If you notice, they did the same thing with Lauren and Tyrone. (It stayed pretty much SM until closer to the end, when they started doing red carpets and showing up to Industry events together.)

They did the "family" holiday thing, with both families, in December and January. Then on February 1, we got the pap pics of them leaving the movies, where Camila looks upset, and Con looks pissed. We also get turfers and "fans" taking to SM saying they had been arguing and Camila had been crying. That was the start of the "trouble in paradise" narrative.

The 10th was the Grammy's. After that, they both left for Dubai, and Camila's performance at Red Fest. They spent a few days hobnobbing around the Arabian Desert, taking lots of pics. Supposedly all happy. Then on February 25, Camila took his ass to that Vanity Fair shin-dig. That was their supposed public coming out, together. Camila had zero desire to be there with that fucker, and it showed.

Then, we got Camila's birthday post, on March 3. The things she learned when she was 21. A very interesting post, indeed. Number three, on that list, was talking about how complicated life and relationships are. How the right opportunity comes at the wrong time, and having to do something hard and uncomfortable, to be happy. (yeah, like PR)

Then she talks about how falling in love is the best thing ever. That leads us to number 8. There she says, life is to short, to hang with people you don't like, be in relationships with people that don't make you happy, or do things you hate. (yeah, like PR with an asshole)

Then MFP was released on March 25. In a song, with a video dedicated to people in relationships, Camila tells the world, she dedicated MFP to her favorite person, her little sister. (that's so sweet...but also very telling)

Why are those two things important? Because I firmly believe, the "split" announcement, and the official end to her PR, was supposed to happen in March.

So, what happened? Just like there is no official start date in a PR contract, there isn't an official end date, either. It's just a suggested time frame, of 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, etc. There are no hard dates built in, because in the Music Industry, everything is about timing.

Here's how I think it was supposed to go down. I think the announcement was supposed to come, just before the release of MFP. That would have explained the dedication to her sister, and would have given that song more promo.

But probably more importantly, It would have been perfect timing for FYA, if things had played out the way they were supposed to play out. She recorded that song with Mark, back in January. I think FYA was the song Mark was planning to release, with the pre-order link, which was on April 12. It would have been the best song to release with the link, and a public "split" would have been perfect timing for the release with the pre-order link. It would have gotten a shit load of media attention.

Instead, Epic got pissed, because Camila wasn't doing what they wanted her to do. It wasn't a damn song with Canada, Camila didn't want to do. She's game to collab with Canada, and just about anyone else who wants to collab with her. It was a PR relationship with him, they wanted her to agree to, but she didn't want to do.

When are some of you going to open your eyes and realize that. Her and Canada are real life friends. She'd probably agree to release a collab a year with him, if that's what he wanted. It's just music. A PR relationship, on the other hand, is a completely different story.

Epic, Island, and maybe Andrew, didn't JUST want a song. They wanted that song, to come with the bullshit we are getting now. Camila agreed to the song, but not the PR. So, what did Epic do? They delayed the official "split" with the dickhead.

Camila bought her house in April. They delayed the announcement of the purchase, until May 13, and had his name inserted into the damn article. Making it sound like she was going to be sharing her house with his ass. Did he ever step foot in her house?

Camila went to Italy in early May. They made it look like he went with her. He may have been there, but he didn't go "with" Camila. He was there to promote one of his books. She was there to get away from all the bullshit. They did have her walk through the airport with him, when they arrived back to LA, on May 12. The 13th, we got the article about the house. May 14, was the last pics we got of the two together.

On May 20, Camila posted one of the saddest pics, I've seen. You could tell, she was anything but happy. That's the day they want us to believe Ewmila "broke up". So, what could have happened between their supposed happy romantic trip to Italy, and the 20th? Absolutely nothing...with Ewmila. They were nothing to each other. Camila just wanted that motherfucker out of her life.

On May 24, we got the post saying, "the calm before the storm, with the 6 tornado emoji's. 4 days, after that very sad looking pic, she warned us this shitshow was coming.

On May 27, we got the pics of Camila and Canada eating outside, and the first media hits, asking "are they dating". Publicist planted that shit. May 30, FYA was released. June 8, Camila went to perform on stage with Alejandro Sanz, with no con artist in sight. June 18, she went to have her little chat at Cannes. She posted a pic, with the caption, "looks put together on the outside, but a mess on the inside". (or something close to it) That's also the day we got the first teasers of Senorita. The song and video was released on the 21st. Nothing but PR bullshit after that.

That's the time line, of how all this shit went down. That sad emotional pic, on the 20th, was a genuine sadness. She was an emotional mess, and NOT because of a "break-up". I think, that is the day, she gave in to the pressure, and made the decision to do the PR with Canada.

She wanted out of that PR shitshow with dickhead. The Label could have kept it going, as long as the dickhead agreed to keep it going, and why wouldn't he. It was getting him the attention he wanted. He didn't give a shit, it was causing her anxiety and emotional distress. (Matthew Hussey is a NARCISSISTIC PRICK, that's all about himself. The Label didn't give a shit, either. They just wanted their artist to do what they wanted her to do. IN MY OPINION!!!)

It really doesn't take that long to record and master a single. By the time they were seen eating together, on the 27th, they had probably already recorded the song, and were discussing the visuals for the video. They filmed it the first week of June or so.

I'm pretty sure, in my thoughts, that Camila only agreed to do this shit, if it was the song of her choice, the video visuals of her choice, and her team doing it. The song she chose, was HER song, Señorita. It wasn't difficult to figure out who that song was about. That's why Epic wouldn't allow her to release it, on her own. But, in a duet with Canada, they were fine with it.

This was all decided on, and done very quickly. That's how they were able to keep it a "secret". From agreement to roll out, it was all done in a months time.

So yeah, that's how I came to my conclusion, that Canada actually "helped" her get out of her PR shitshow with the Con man. How it was her song that was chosen. Her Label was pressuring her, to do this PR stunt with Canada, since 2018. Island and Epic, both wanted it. The song was just the pathway to get the PR started.

Camila is getting shit on, for something BOTH sides were pressuring and down right manipulating/coercing her to do. SHE DIDN'T WANT TO DO IT!!! Canada didn't really want to do it, either. But he's so damn scared of getting publicly outed, and it ruining his career, that he was willing to do anything to keep that from happening.

The only BAD GUYS, in all this shit, is Epic, Island, Andrew, and Roger. THEY are the ones so hell bent on keeping their clients "straight", and making a shit load of money off them, while they are being locked in their glass closet.

Roger should have put his foot down, and told Epic to make the public announcement, of the "split" back in May. Hell, he should have "leaked" the shit himself, on the 20th, when Camila posted that pic, if nothing else. That's why I place blame on him, for the way Camila is being portrayed by others.

The Sun, had the information for a while. They were told to sit on that information, until Epic was ready for the public announcement to be made. That's why the report started with, "I can reveal ...". Not, "this just in", or "Sources have confirmed", but "I can reveal".

The definition of reveal, for those who aren't sure...reveal: make (previously unknown or secret information) known to others....Yep, they sat on the info, until they were told to "reveal" it.

Agree or not, believe or not, that's my take on all this shit. This is how my mind connected all the fucked up dots.

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glitchonline · 5 years ago

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How Marvel’s Spider-Man Saved Me.

By Eammon Jacobs

For as long as I can remember, Spider-Man has been my favourite fictional character of any medium. I related to the struggles he went through away from the mask: bullying, social awkwardness and the pressure to succeed at the things he excelled in. But he was inspiring too, because above all of that Peter still managed to don the iconic suit and soar through the streets of New York to defeat his colourful set of villains. So when Insomniac announced they were bringing a new Spider-Man game to the PS4 back in 2016 I couldn’t be more excited, with every new trailer, I knew I was all in.

In 2018, I moved to London for a new job, and within a few months - clearly, I wasn’t right for the role. After being let go on the spot in August, I was completely lost without a social circle in the big city, I felt incredibly isolated. I had yet to start my freelance career and the hundreds of job applications I filled out were going nowhere. Throw in a breakup for good measure and I was soon struggling with depression, truly feeling like a failure. However, an email came out of the blue relating to a podcast I hosted: would I like an advance copy of Marvel’s Spider-Man to review? I’ll give you a guess at my reaction.

From the moment I started playing, it was as if everything else in life shrank away and became background noise. But it immediately captured the relatability of Peter Parker that I felt as a kid, only this time as a struggling adult. The opening cinematic sees Pete briefly torn between dealing with a final notice warning about rent and leaping out of his window to fight Kingpin. Given that no job also meant I had no money, this immediately felt like a pretty realistic take on my favourite hero.

The story kept delivering beats that hit closer to home a lot more than I expected. In particular, Peter is in danger of losing his job working with Otto Octavius while he struggles to deal with his fractured relationship with MJ. The dialogue masterfully delivered by voice actor Yuri Lowenthal showed the all-too-familiar difficulty of attempting to make it through your 20s. Given that I felt like all the plates I was spinning had come crashing to the floor, Peter’s story helped me come to terms with it all and accept that the only way out was through - I just had to roll with the punches. Only mine were metaphorical and weren’t being thrown by supervillains.

Then there’s the incredible gameplay. Even just swinging across New York City, running across rooftops and leaping from the tallest skyscrapers was incredibly freeing at a time when I felt the complete opposite. Whether it was hurling Spidey from the top of Avengers Tower to snap a selfie in front of the iconic ‘A’ logo or switching between the incredible roster of costumes, the game instantly became the escapism I needed after losing control over my situation. And sure, my life wasn’t quite as dire as Peter’s - I still had a roof over my head, while he was sofa surfing after being evicted, which almost provided a simple ‘hey, it could be worse’.

I’d often find myself just travelling from one end of the huge map to the other because there was a strange sense of calm that came from being in control of Spidey swinging through the city like I’d envisioned for years through the comics - drowning out the noise of my own problems.

After feeling so isolated living in London without a group of friends around me, I spent any spare time I had (which let’s face it, was a lot) getting to know Spidey’s New York as best as I could. Finding the tallest building to perch on and dive from before swinging away inches from the street was instantly fun, as was trying to reach the infamously hideous ‘boat people’ sailing just far enough away from the city to avoid scrutiny. Plus, with Spidey constantly talking about his worries and problems, it felt like a close friend understanding what I was going through while being by myself. He unknowingly offered a webbed shoulder to lean on.

I remember losing several hours at one point just searching for the easter eggs that teased the wider in-game Marvel Universe, like Doctor Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum or the offices of Nelson and Murdock - Attorneys at Law, a simply perfect Daredevil nod. It was astonishing to me at the level of care and precision that the developers had taken into crafting this world. The easter eggs that fill the landmark hunting side-mission often pushed me to explore other Marvel characters I like, whether that was watching Black Panther or reading more of the Jessica Jones comics by Brian Michael Bendis. It offered so many different avenues of escapism.

Aside from my incredible friends and family, it’s one of the things that helped me get back on my feet. After dragging myself to abysmal interviews, applying for jobs, pitching articles or even just emailing editors - it was the thing I turned to so I could switch off and just breathe. I’d pick my favourite costume (the first Scarlet Spider suit, by the way) to run, leap and swing through New York just to dull everything going on in my head when I was too stressed to sleep. It’s still the game I turn to when I’m unsure what to do or if I just need to wind down after a long day.

Sure - this tale would’ve made a great comic book, but it’s the immersive nature of being a video game that made it so powerful. There’s something narratively perfect about the character I’ve loved since being five years old being there when I needed him most, in a way that I never expected. So thank you Insomniac Games, Yuri Lowenthal, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and obviously - Peter Parker.

#Spider-Man #Marvel #Marvel's Spider-Man #PS4 #Playstation #insomniac games #Features

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nigelgodrichproducer · 5 years ago

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Nigel Interviews Dan Snaith (Caribou, Daphni)

SOURCE: https://www.interviewmagazine.com/music/caribous-dan-snaith-and-producer-nigel-godrich-unravel-the-mystery-of-making-music

Wonderful interview with Nigel and Dan (Caribou/Daphni) who as you might recall has previously spent some time working in Nigel’s room at Strongroom. Plus, Nigel is a fan, having referenced Caribou and Daphni recently in Ultraista-related promo. I find this to be one of Nigel’s more revealing interviews in that he explicitly outlines his role and what he brings to Thom Yorke and other artists.

Reproduced here for posterity’s sake:

NIGEL GODRICH: Do you have a studio here in your home?

DAN SNAITH: I’ve only ever worked from home. I’ve never worked in a studio apart from in the final stages. It used to be in the bedroom where my wife was sleeping, and I’d be trying to record something in the middle of the night. In rural Ontario, I couldn’t conceive of having the money to pay for time in a studio. Your way in was to work in a studio. If I listened to Pink Floyd, I was like, “I’m never going to make that record,” because that cost a million pounds in 1971. But electronic music at the time was being made in somebody’s bedroom. So as a teenager, I started working in a bedroom.

GODRICH: Totally. And that’s something that I find fascinating from the other side. I definitely went the other route in terms of getting into recording. And I’m a little older than you. That means that by the time you were coming of age, you had more technology, which meant that you could do a lot of things at home that I wasn’t able to do at all.

SNAITH: I came in at that exact moment in music recording history when all of a sudden it was like, “Hey, wait, we can do this.”

GODRICH: There’s a certain kind of approach which requires a lot of equipment. I’ve followed that always. But you have a computer that can do all of these things that emulate things that I would do in the studio. I don’t know how you do it, but I love the end product. I like that I don’t know how it’s made.

SNAITH: I started making music with zero gear, like the microphone that a telemarketer would use to record my vocals.

GODRICH: I meet people who have not worked with professional gear, and they always want to ask, “What mic should I use on the drum kit?” To me, it’s irrelevant. Before you had the good equipment, you were still doing what you do, and it worked. It’s a musical thing. It’s about your brain and how it interfaces with the computer.

SNAITH: I would counter by saying that when I listened to the records that you’ve produced, they have a quality that I’m certainly chasing, and I think I’m a long way off. But I work within those limitations and that’s part of what is stimulating and exciting.

GODRICH: It’s very important to have those unattainable goals as artists. I’m inspired by the thing you’re doing, but I can’t do that either. I think that’s a fairly common trait of anyone that’s creative.

GODRICH: You’re an expat from Canada. How long have you lived in England?

SNAITH: Since 2001.

GODRICH: Do you feel that this is home? Do you feel English?

SNAITH: My parents are English and moved to Canada before I was born. I sound very much like a Canadian. I came back to do a PhD here in 2001. When I was in Canada, I always felt a bit British. I felt like I had a foot on both sides of the Atlantic. And now as long as I’ve been in England, I feel more Canadian, maybe. That’s interesting, because my whole life, my dad was like, “This would be much better in England.” It drove us all crazy. He’d never enjoy the place where he was, and now that he’s moved back to England, it’s exactly the opposite. It’s the grass-is-greener scenario.

GODRICH: Human beings tend to do that. There is something very specific in your aesthetic, which is not actually British. There’s this kind of crossing point, a quality to your programming and some of the sounds that you choose and the aesthetic that you have, it’s from over there, in a good way. Are you aware of that, or is it just what comes out of you?

SNAITH: When I’m recording in general, I’m so bad at conceptualizing or planning what I’m doing. I’d imagine people who approach you want you to have a kind of picture of what you’re doing.

GODRICH: That’s always my first question: What is it that you think I’m going to do? It’s a very good yardstick to get a grip on what they actually understand about what it is that I do. Because if they’re completely off the mark, it’s kind of a waste of time.

SNAITH: Interesting.

GODRICH: They might not have an answer to that, which is fine, too. It’s an interesting question to ask because you’ll get an answer, or a look of confusion. The other thing for me, because you get associated with something so strongly, so it’s the guy guarding the cave saying, “Do you just want me to make you sound like Radiohead? I’m not going to be able to do that. So if that’s what you’re after, you’re wasting your time anyway.” But what I was saying was you have something over other British artists. What do you think about me saying that? Are you surprised that I think that?

SNAITH: I think you’re right. Even though it doesn’t come out consciously, at some deep level, so much of my nostalgia is built up around North American music. When I was growing up, one of the big turning points in my learning to love music was getting into hip-hop, and through that into old records: “What did this Wu Tang record sample? Let me find the original record.” But also, if you start buying records in flea markets, the records that are in the flea markets there are different from the ones here. You’re not finding a Smiths 12-inch, you’re finding The Byrds.

GODRICH: Hip-hop especially, we all have a taste for it here, but we can’t make it.

SNAITH: Or it’s a British version of it.

GODRICH: But a British version of it has the Jamaican influence that makes trip-hop. We slow it down. There’s this other version of hip-hop in the mainstream, which doesn’t work here, I don’t think.

SNAITH: It’s better when it’s a homegrown thing, like grime music, which does a different take on hip-hop.

GODRICH: Exactly. Grime’s roots are in reggae and Jamaican music, a completely different thing. We can do that and Americans can’t do that. They can’t do jungle. But you can do more than we can do because you’ve got the American gene. That’s kind of what I hear.

SNAITH: The one thing that I thought I would never be able to do from day one was hip-hop. It was untouchable. I’ll never produce like DJ Premier or Q-Tip or Madlib. It was like, don’t even try, because when people in my world try—

GODRICH: It’s the worst thing in the world.

SNAITH: The worst thing ever. There’s a song on this album called “Home,” based on a loop from a Gloria Barnes track, an old soul record, and I heard the track and I was like, that needs to be looped. That’s the impulse of somebody who’s listened to a lot of hip-hop. I don’t care whether I’m going to make a track out of this, you’ve just got to take that bit and hear it on a loop because it’s going to be perfect, and then put a kind of hip-hop breakbeat under it. I had that sitting around for a couple of years before I figured out how I could a track out of it.

GODRICH: Do you think in terms of singles?

SNAITH: I have a sense of what tracks are more immediate than others. That was the first single. It made sense when I played that to people and then asked them, “What do you remember from what I played you?” They’d be like, “Oh, that track ‘Home.'” It’s just in there immediately and it’s because it’s an incredible loop. People will want to hear this over and over again. But I really think in terms of albums. I’ve grown up listening to records like the ones you’ve produced. When I came across Radiohead’s music, I was just like, that is like a journey, a narrative arc the whole way through. That’s the classic conception of an album. And I know that people don’t necessarily listen to music that way anymore.

GODRICH: So they tell us, but I don’t even believe it.

SNAITH: At the beginning, I was like, who am I making music for? I’m making music literally for me. But then, if somebody else is going to listen to it, it’s going to be somebody who loves music in the way that I do, not somebody who’s just hearing it on the radio. That’s changed. The more your music expands into the world, the more people have different ways of approaching it. One of the biggest things that ever happened to me, and I had no idea that this was going to be a thing at the time, was a track called “Odessa” that was on FIFA 11 video game. People talk to me about that all the time. When I was asked about it, I was like, “Okay, yeah, sure, whatever. That’s fine, I’ll give permission.” But I kind of love that that happened and people came across this music that would’ve never come across my music. It’s nice to embrace the way that it’ll travel in this weird way through the world.

GODRICH: That’s fantastic. I think we have to do that now as well, because of the world we live in. When you’re a record maker like you or I, it’s changed to the point of music just being so ubiquitous that everybody’s so saturated, so you can’t be blamed for using an avenue like that. Back in the day it was a dirty word to do something mainstream and allow somebody to promote something with your music. But nowadays, the whole experience of culture is just so multifaceted and fractured that I’m personally very pleased that “Odessa” ended up on FIFA, because that means more people heard your music.

SNAITH: I should say that I still have an old school mindset where I don’t want it to be associated with corporate interests and moneymaking in various ways. I still am picky about it.

GODRICH: FIFA is pretty cool, though. The album made me think about the art of creating pop music. It’s an art form. There’s something about being able to create this joy in music. It’s very easy to make sad records. Melancholy is quite easy in my experience. Making things that make you want to get up and jump up and down, that’s harder. Do you see yourself putting out a load of singles? Do you get involved in that process?

SNAITH: I do. There’s another track called “Never Come Back” that’s a more straight-up euphoric dance-pop thing that’s going to be the next single. But none of them represent the record in its totality. “Home” was going to make people think the record would be one thing, but if we’d released something else first it would have meant that it was something else. Do you get called on to make that call very often?

GODRICH: Historically, it’s been the most unpopular part of the process, because essentially what happens is you have somebody telling you, “We took it to radio and they think we should use this song.”

SNAITH: Oh, really?

GODRICH: It’s always a bit like, “Really? We should use this one.” And they kind of turn around and say, “Well you can if you want, but if you do that, and it doesn’t work out, you employ these people to do their job.” We all wanted to put out “Reckoner” as the first single for In Rainbows. And we were told no, which we thought was quite weird. In America, they have different taste from here, so they generally go for the most rock-y, generic thing. Which is quite frustrating. I’ve never really been good at singles.

SNAITH: When you hear an album that really is an album from beginning to end, you kind of assume that the person who made it had a conception of that arc when they were making it. That’s not the way it works for me at all. It’s all jumbled together and it’s all finished and then I put it in an order.

GODRICH: Subconsciously you’re making a thousand decisions every minute, and slowly that stuff is being sieved into things that make sense. I also know the experience of working on a song, and in my head I’ve already decided this is the first song on side two. You’ve started doing it unconsciously. This is how you’re supposed to work as an artist. You’re not supposed to write down a formula. You just have to follow your instincts.

SNAITH: There’s a lot of stuff on this record that’s more personal than ever, about deaths and my wife’s family and health crises with my parents and losing friends. How does anybody ever get that stuff out with a producer in there? I could only imagine doing that when I close the door in my studio and I’m the only person in there, and I can kind of trick myself into thinking that this is just for me right now, and I’m never going to release it.

GODRICH: Well because you’re writing, so you can write something that can press those buttons and make sense to you and make you feel that feeling. And then it exists and you can go and frame it in a different way. And maybe you could work with a producer in terms of framing it, if you didn’t have those skills yourself, but you do. It’s about relationships, really. When you’re in a working relationship, you literally are wearing each other’s underwear. It’s very, very intimate. So you have be comfortable enough to bare your soul.

SNAITH: I’ve got the impression that some of the Radiohead albums are being created and written at the same time that they’re being recorded or demoed.

GODRICH: Radiohead is different. I grew up with those guys. It’s more intimate.

SNAITH: Still, I think that would be hard.

GODRICH: Thom Yorke has a notebook and he’s spewing out lines and I go, “Yes, no, yes, no.” He’s able to put himself in a room and really go into himself. He’s just a person who can do that. He can write 30 verses of “Dawn Chorus,” and it ends up being really long, and then he’ll chew on it. Thom always used to just carry notebooks with him everywhere we went. We’d be eating, and he writes stuff down all the time. For “Everything In Its Right Place” it was just me and him in a room, and he’s like, “Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon. Oh, I can’t say that.” And I’m like, “Yes, you can. That’s great.”

SNAITH: That’s the thing I don’t have.

GODRICH: That’s just a creative partnership. That also comes down to the equipment, the fact that you need somebody to interface technologically to this enormous universe, and that’s what I’m good at. I’m strong technically, but I’m not interested in gear. I don’t find equipment sexy. People are always asking me about microphones, especially people making music solely on computers that I think is absolutely mind-boggling, but has nothing to do with my business.

SNAITH: Right.

GODRICH: My skill is knowing how to operate all of this equipment. I can make it do things that if we’re in a collaboration and you’re throwing things in the air and I’m catching them, I can make things happen which you will get excited about and make you do something else. It’s a studio collaboration, which I think you leapfrogged, because your method is a one-person thing.

SNAITH: I’m sure you’re also selling yourself short in that a lot of what you do must be to do with the people and making them feel comfortable.

GODRICH: I hope to think that I’m not a horrific person to hang out with, and I have a lot of empathy with artists and people who make things. We all want to make something beautiful so we’re all here for the same reason. Relationships are very complicated and the psychology of the whole thing is very complicated. But that works better with people that you don’t know very well. Relationships that are very long in the tooth, like 25 years of hanging around with Thom Yorke, we’ve rubbed each other the wrong way enough times to know who we are. Do you go back to the things you did like two albums ago and pick them up?

SNAITH: I know that’s happened with Radiohead, but this is the first time that’s ever, ever happened for me. There’s a track on this album called “Magpie,” which is from the pot from my previous album, Our Love. Its mood didn’t fit that album. It was just a loop, but I thought I should finish it, and I think it does fit the mood of this record. It’s an anomaly that that’s happened, because I always felt that’s kind of cheating. I’m desperate to not repeat myself. Pick your favorite artists in the world. Look at their discographies, and 95 percent of the time you can chop off the last half of it, put it in the garbage, and you haven’t missed anything. Radiohead is kind of the exception to that. I’m so desperate not to become that person. Do you ever think, “I’ve made so much music but I can still make the best piece of music I’ve ever made today?”

GODRICH: It’s that thing you just said where you’re like, “Fuck, I don’t want this to not be as good as the last thing.” It’s that.

SNAITH: I got that from you guys actually on tour. It was just like, this has to be still fucking totally killer.

GODRICH: I’m very fortunate, because since I was young, I was exposed to people like Thom. These are art school people, but I never went to art school. I learnt about it from them. That exact thing that you’re talking about. When we finished Moon Shaped Pool, which I know is a really good record…

SNAITH: Sure is.

GODRICH: But if you start at The Bends and you get to here, that’s 21 years, and every 10 years we do an exceptional one, like OK Computer and In Rainbows. I felt like Moon Shaped Pool was up there in that respect. I think it’s kind of incredible that we’ve managed to do this.

SNAITH: You’re already way past the sell by date for most artists.

GODRICH: My analysis of that is that, I think Thom is very prolific, but we’ve not rushed the records. Your 900 ideas that took you four years to go through, that’s all right. That’s sort of how you do it. You just keep the bar high. There’s two reasons for doing things. One of them is to have fun and enjoy the process, and the other reason is to create something that you think will outlive you.

SNAITH: My process with making these 900 things is always fun. If you leave me alone, I’m going to go down in that room in the basement and I’m going to make something. I turn off my critical faculties and I just make something, and that thrill has never left me. Even if it’s mediocre, it’s still fun. Then it’s agonizing over, how do I assemble it into something bigger

GODRICH: I wanted to ask you about your PhD. It’s not a coincidence that you have a mind that makes music like this.

SNAITH: I genuinely have forgotten everything in my PhD. If I read it now, I would not understand it, which is weird. It’s like a language that I haven’t used for 20 years. Pure mathematics is so esoteric, so in this other world, that it has no relevance.

GODRICH: Can you understand that it gives you this enigmatic quality?

SNAITH: For sure.

GODRICH: It’s like, if you scrape away your skin, there’s some sort of metal…

SNAITH: People expect me to be taking apart a synthesizer and that is not me at all. I’m not a lab guy. I’m terrible with that kind of physical object.

GODRICH: You’re not practical.

SNAITH: Not at all. But a word like “symmetry” appeals to me in both music and math. Symmetry is a key concept in mathematics, that things have a kind of elegance or beauty in the way they’re symmetrical, the way they’re congruent, the way two ideas will fit together perfectly. That’s so satisfying. These abstract things that people have dreamed up, now just fit together in this beautiful way. That’s what a theorem is. I feel like music has that, the “kerchunk” moment, when two things work together in a way that’s beautiful and often not too obvious.

GODRICH: If you think about the action of just throwing a ball, the amount of trigonometry and calculation that we do unconsciously in order to just catch a ball, we have all of this sort of stuff going on in our heads. Music is so intangible, it’s the least understood art form. It’s like magic. But I do think there is mathematics in that magic.

SNAITH: I’d agree with that. But the thing I love about mathematics is when you get past the stage where you’re like, “Answer these questions that you should already know the answer to, like memorize your times tables.”

GODRICH: The boring shit.

SNAITH: Then you’re like, “Okay, here’s a question that nobody’s actually thought through and figured out the answer to yet.” And then it’s a kind of search or play, a kind of exploration. And that relates to me with music, too.

GODRICH: So you are Dr. Dan Snaith.

SNAITH: I am Dr. Dan Snaith.

GODRICH: Then that’s how I’ll always think of you.

#nigel godrich #daphni #caribou

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newmoneytrash · 5 years ago

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Death Stranding

I had to write about Death Stranding to get this not very good game out of my head and soul

(this has spoilers I guess but honestly who cares)

I was going to wait to play Death Stranding, if I ever even played it at all. I had barely seen any trailers outside of the first couple. I remember seeing them and thinking “this isn’t going to be the crazy, weird experience everyone thinks it’s going to be”. I didn’t think that I knew better than anyone else, or that the people who were excited were stupid to feel that way. I just felt like I could see what it was and knew that, having played the majority of Kojima’s work, that this probably wasn’t going to be the experience that people thought it was going to be.

And I was comfortable with my disinterest, content to know that this thing existed, that I was fine with it existing away from me. But then a week before release when the review embargo lifted and people started posting their impressions and experiences and reviews my interest was piqued in a way that no trailer or announcement had interested me before. It wasn’t the glowing and fawning reviews that drew me to the game, the people who played and loved the game. It was, weirdly, the negative ones that changed me from not having any interest in playing Death Stranding to going to the store on the Friday morning it was released and standing in the rain waiting too long for an Uber so I could get home as fast as possible to start playing.

The reason the negative reviews drew me to the game so much is not because they were negative, it’s not that I was taking some joy in getting to play something that I thought was going to be bad and now I had an opportunity to be vindicated by seeing for myself that it is bad. It was the things that they were negative about that sounded so interesting. The idea that a group of people would spend so much time and effort and money in creating a large premier video game experience where the main crux seemed to be tedium is an inherently fascinating concept.

The kind of elevator pitch descriptor that interested me the most (that was used by people both derisively and positively) was that it was a post-apocalyptic truck simulator. Travelling a dead or dying world as a UPS driver. Mad Max meets King of Queens (that’s a comparison that I made and I’m too proud of it not to use it). What if a development team who made one of the great action games on the last decade (Metal Gear Solid V might be a terribly lacking narrative experience with some frustrating mission design, but the core gameplay is extremely good) and funnelled all of that energy into something intentionally boring and monotonous?

Not only did that help reset my expectations of what this would be, it made me feel excitement for something that I had previously thought I wouldn’t be able to feel excitement or anticipation for.

I spent 40 hours with it over the course of a week. That might not sound like a lot of time in video game speak, but I don’t remember the last time I spent that much time with a game over such a short period of time. Over the first weekend I had it I played for just over 20 hours. Twenty hours. I don’t know if I’ve ever been that focused on a game in my life. But still when I reflect on my time with it, and especially when I try to recall those initial 20 hours which were far and away the most fun I had with the game, I feel nothing. It’s like static, like someone has gone back and just erased that time from my memory.

That’s maybe not entirely fair. I remember general things, just not specific gameplay moments.

I remember the gameplay loop. It’s less a truck simulator game and more of a hiking game, at least initially. And this was appealing to me. You’re slowly traversing across these barren, empty environments delivering packages to and from outposts and shelters. You’re packing a huge amount of garbage on your back and climbing up mountains and down cliffs and wading through rivers. You’re given ropes and ladders to try and ease your journey, and later you’re able to build greater structures like bridges and towers to help you more easily navigate the environment and scout your path ahead. Eventually you’re given access to motorbikes and trucks that can both help and hinder your deliveries, depending on the paths you take and forge. You even get a chance to help rebuild an actual honest to goodness highway, creating it piece by piece by providing an increasing amount of materials to each section. Maybe the greatest accomplishment I felt playing this game was spending a few hours creating large sections of the highway and then getting to just fly down it on a motorbike. It really did feel like I hate created something big, that I not only radically changed the world by creating this, but that I had bettered it.

And there’s there community aspect of the game. Having others donate materials to your structures as well as seeing structures others have built and abandoned vehicles and packages in your world is all really neat and interesting. Everything positive I have to say about this game is wrapped up in these systems, because there is a lot of the game that feels like you’re on a genuine journey. Taking a package over the peak of a snow capped mountain for the first time can feel like a legitimate achievement, it was rewarding just walking from one place to the next. Seeing a bridge helpfully placed in a frustrating location made me feel real gratitude toward that person, and receiving feedback that other people were using and liking things that I had built made me feel good, as if I was paying forward the help that I had received.

For a long time I didn’t even think there would be combat in the game but it gradually increases as you go along and, while it’s never good, it’s still serviceable and easy enough to never really get in the way. The shooting and melee combat feels off, and I might have had a better time if it wasn’t there at all, but a few boss encounters and combat vignettes were interesting and would occasionally help when the monotony of just delivering packages started to grow.

But after 20 hours of this nothing really stood out to me, there’s no one gameplay moment that will stay with me. I won’t reflect on this game and think “wow, remember that one journey I took by following the coastline?” It’s all just a long, sustained blur.

And it’s not that I don’t remember the story or the characters either. Those are all easy to recall. The story is especially easy to recall because, over 40 hours, it’s just basically telling you one thing over and over and over. It’s hard not to recall it, because there is only one thing to recall.

The thing that I was worried about before the game came out was that the story was just going to be a huge mess. Kojima’s games are always functionally good to great, that’s never really been an issue I’ve had with his work, it’s always been the stories he tries to tell and how he tries to tell them. From the first Metal Gear Solid through to The Phantom Pain there are always misgivings I’ve had with character representation, general themes, and just the delivery of that narrative. I know this isn’t a unique position to have regarding his work (sexism and his consistently awful portrayal of women is a pretty famous issue he has, even among his biggest fans), but beyond that I just never felt that anything he was doing was particularly special. They were different and almost always interesting, but a lot of people would like to tell you that Kojima was doing masterful video game storytelling that no one else was capable, that he was single-handedly raising the medium of video games to something as artistically valid and viable as cinema or art. But, to me, he was never doing that. He was making fun and compelling video games, but they were inconsistent and messy and overly verbose and self-righteous.

So my concern was that, now that he was the head of an independent studio that for all intents and purposes answered to no one, he would let that his storytelling get further away from him. In an attempt to prove his level of creativity, maybe to even prove his worth, he was going to put all of his ideas on the table and the result was going to be an indecipherable mess. When they would release a trailer of a naked Norman Reedus on a beach holding a baby attached to him with an artificial umbilical cord, or Guillermo Del Toro standing in a sewer holding a baby in a jar while Mads Mikkelsen is covered in black tar leading a bunch of skeleton soldiers a lot of people responding with a variant of “wow Kojima is going to make something crazy, this is going to blow my mind”. But all I saw was a giant red flag.

So when I finally experienced the story of Death Stranding I was kind of taken aback. Not by how crazy or nonsensical it is, but by kind of how… boring and one note it is? There isn’t really any room for interpretation in this story. It’s all very, very literal. It tells you how and why things are happening, and if you missed the exposition the first time don’t worry! Here is another twenty minute info dump reiterating the same boring, one note narrative over and over.

The game just tricks you into thinking it’s being more creative than it is because it’s filled with endless jargon. There is timefall, void outs, BTs, BBs, Beaches, repatriates, chiral energy, and extinction entities. Ha and ka. But it’s all in service of creating a world and a narrative that ultimately says nothing, and spends dozens of hours painfully and slowly telling you nothing. It’s borderline torturous.

There is also some high school art level social commentary on social media. Likes are a huge commodity in this world, with people becoming addicted to the feeling you get when they receive one. And instead of having a smart phone or whatever you have Cuff Links, which is a literal pair of handcuffs that, when strapped to your wrist, functions as a way to communicate with people through the Codec or email. Because our phones are a prison, right guys? Pretty deep. In Kojima’s world we truly do live in a society.

But it’s not just the small stuff like that that’s so literal, every part of the game is literal. You’re Sam Porter Bridges, a porter who has a contract with the organisations Bridges, created by someone named Bridget, to create bridges with people across America (both figuratively and literally) to create a network across the continent that will bridge everyone together. Every metaphor and theme in the game is so painfully literal that the game never gives you the opportunity to interpret anything else. The only time there are moments in the game when you don’t know what is happening is when characters start talking about things that you could have no way of knowing about as if you did know about them, but even then these moments of mystery are immediately undone because they always immediately explain the thing that you missed. You will have a cryptic conversation with someone about something you have had no opportunity to deduce or discover on your own, but it never matters because it’s followed up a few minutes later with a flashback or exposition that lays everything out on the table.

Instead of Kojima creating something nonsensical and imaginative and impossible to follow, he managed to make the world’s most shallow metaphor about really nothing in particular. When he said that the game was inspired by Donald Trump and Brexit he meant that it was inspired by the division that these things caused between people and how we need to create Bridges to reconnect with people.

That’s it, that’s the game. That is its message. And it’s not interestingly presented, there’s nothing more to it than that.

One of the podcast conversations I listened to before released (that was largely critical of the game) that drew me toward playing it ended with one of the people saying “It is a game that I think everyone should experience, but not one that I could ever recommend” which is a perfect way of articulating how I feel. It’s a unique experience that does things that a game of its size has never really done before. I don’t think there’s merit in being different for differences’ sake, but this isn’t that. The gameplay is considered and deliberate and purposeful, but that doesn’t mean that it’s fun and it doesn’t negate the parts that are tedious and tiring. Just because you make something boring and annoying on purpose that doesn’t make it good.

If you had asked me six months ago if I think I would like Death Stranding I would have said no. I probably would have qualified it by saying I hope that I was wrong, that I would like it to be good, but that I was probably more likely to hate it.

I didn’t love it, and I don’t like it. I don’t even hate it, but in a weird way I wish that I could. Because then at least I would feel something toward it. Instead Death Stranding leaves me feeling something much, much worse.

It makes me feel nothing.

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jugs-and · 5 years ago

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climb.run.hike (a la eat.pray.love)

G-d saw all that he had made, and it was very good. - Genesis 1

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I don’t know how to write anymore. I’m 27 now, but writing, blog writing specifically, has been habitually part of my life since I was 14. Writing is very much a muscle which needs to be worked at and maintained. To say the least it all used to flow, and the process of writing, more than the actual writing output, was an essential part of how I unwinded from the happenings of life. I’ve missed this, it has sort of fallen off the radar this year, and the narrative have swirled around in my mind. For the moment, the editing process seems to garble and confuse, more than clarify and expand the language which I employ. The feelings and emotions in myself - I can’t just describe. This is about the fourth or fifth time I’ve written this post.

The final four weeks before Christmas have been pure routine. Drifting, dilly-dallying, floating - I have fully embraced my inner alter-ego lifestyle which laid dormant this year. This other-me who leaves work early, and plays video-games late, and eats and imbibes freely. It is quite the contrast to the past six months of regiment and focus, the past few weeks have been completely restful, reinvigorating and refreshing - and, frankly, quite welcome. In all of my limited existence (27 years <gulp>), I don’t think I’ve ever been so busy or occupied in my life as this past six months.

I have a hard time letting go because the final few weeks of the year have still been exceedingly busy. The last weekend in Auckland, I hopped between four Christmas parties on Saturday and Sunday, and finished with a late night working on Sunday. In all of these social gatherings, I was faced with many questions about my year, and I spent a lot of time recounting my adventures this second half of 2019. At Anna’s 30th birthday party especially, I hadn’t seen her in months, and the conversation is always tragically short when she is that popular.

Social-jugs can handle the small-talk conversations at parties, however vapid and soul-crushing, but it was the mental mind contortions regarding finances and relationships which slowly eroded my sanity. The past six months has not just been the normal event after event after event, but it was like each event was suffocating on my own sanity. The way that money was constantly at the mind’s forefront would affect my ability to enjoy life. Restless sleep counting money instead of sheep, while my mind was full of shopping lists and balance sheets brought me no rest. The nights were long where I would replay conversations and then drift to semi-conscious dreams of impossible segues and circumstances.

The second half of this year was, in one word, bizarre, with A-. I was increasingly frustrated and filled with despair. For someone with a infectiously sunny disposition, she’s very good at pushing people away. Her continued longing for her previous boyfriend who was clearly abusive and emotionally manipulative broke my heart. Really.

I began to pine for the peaceful activities - I need the hiking alone and terrible renditions of my favourite nostalgic songs with a Bob Dylan rasp. I need the moment where I wake up and lazily watch the sandflies dancing on the tent fly. I need the Saturday morning brunches and afternoons laying in bed till the evening hours reading in a foetal position. I need to walk through the supermarket in my pyjamas and nights refreshing the same webpages as if the news that the world has ended would drop at any moment. I miss the pull of the dark corners of clubs where I move with my eyes shut, hair swaying in front of my face. Just normal things (right?!).

I learned discipline and perseverance in financial matters - I tell myself that because, otherwise, 2019: Part Two ran me ragged. I longed for the days to just climb under the sheets and draw them over my head as if I could avoid the problems in life just for a moment and just be. Climb under the sheets and maybe stay there for a while, instead of falling asleep into dreamless sleep immediately.

In November, I took my big holiday of the year: two weeks in the South Island -- a mountain-climbing course with Colin, and hiking by myself in the second week. During this time, I realized just how complex and busy the six months prior were. Hiking, in contrast, is simple. It is just one foot in front of another, and a simple existence of self-sustenance. Without the noise of information everywhere, there is just the conversations inside my head when hiking alone. There is only the crinkle of your own sleeping bag and never moment of loneliness in the solitude. Somewhere during the nine hour sleeps and genuinely feeling exhausted more than I can ever remember - I realised I haven’t had the time to appreciate this year for what it was worth and how much I have to proud of.

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As someone who has frequented the climbing walls at least twice a week for the past 6 months, I am still terrible at rock-climbing. Granted, my frequency and motivation for climbing, really does wax and wane like the moon. And lately, as my main source of exercise, due to this knee injury, it has been waxing. Nevertheless, I never really saw the improvement I would expect someone else to have with the frequency and focus on the sport. To a large degree, the social element of climbing really brought me back repeatedly to the same crags. We spent many Sunday afternoons and evenings just chatting and doing very little actual climbing. But we were each other’s greatest cheerleaders in finding every little scrap of willpower and confidence to hold on to the little scraps protruding from the wall.

Sometimes you have to remind yourself to breathe before a big move and just stick it. Sometimes you have to remind yourself to look down and see how terrifyingly high you are. Sometimes you have to take a break and shake the blood back into your hands.

I learned it is okay to fail.

As someone who falls a lot, I can confirm that the falling gives me confidence because it means that I believed in myself enough, albeit maybe too much. I backed myself to make a move with confidence. The next attempt meant that I could attempt more and grow more in strength and resolve. The second time up would assuredly be better with experience, and there is a certain relief where you finally accomplish the right contortion of body to get past a section.

Trad. climbing still terrifies me, but even with sport climbing and lead roping, it is still a delicate affair. Gathering at the bottom of a crag, checking each other’s knots, and double checking I locked the carabiner around my harness bell - it is a solemn routine. It’s a more serious sport and there is a lot more faith in each other and self-belief required in the equipment and process. Outside, the falls are bigger and the fall is a couple of metres to the last anchor point, which can be more than a moment in the air. I can only just breathe and trust in others to catch me. If climbing was an analogy for life, they would be my support system.

Beyond climbing, I have found that people are a lot more compassionate, kind and exceedingly more patient than we can ever expect from someone like ourselves. If friends are ever an indication of the type of person we are, the bounds which feel almost endless, I am climbing far beyond my own character.

At the top of an outdoor crag, I learned self-confidence.

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The Saint Heliers turnaround is the moment of reckoning and Armageddon. The entire way out to Saint Helier, it’s pulsing through my mind that I’d have to return this path and retrace my steps to finish. The people ahead of me are on the other side of the road, returning to the finish line, looking worse for wear. The turnaround is where the final nine kilometers starts, and the mind resets and forgets about the previous 33km which should have been easy-going.

At this point, the race really starts to feel like a marathon. No amount of training prior could prepare for the tortures and endurance of this section. If I could describe the feeling - it’s like trying to spread peanut butter on toast from an empty jar. The opening to the jar is tiny, only enough for a butter knife to fit inside, and it continues to scrape the bottom of the jar. The bottom of the jar makes a screeching noise, and every single urge is to stop scraping, but for some reason we continue.

I changed the music to my specially prepared list of tracks, rummaging through my pocket of half empty gel packs, to change to the final track in my <Marathon 2019> playlist. At 33km, I made it up to this point feeling mostly okay -- so I went for it.

I made it four more kilometres with a negative split, running past multiple people who had started walking, before falling back into a numb survival mode. The sort of survival where you grit your teeth and and look for energy and strength you never knew you had. Digging deeper into the jar for one last push with two fingers jammed into the opening.

I ran alongside someone else who looked like he was struggling as much as I was, and we stuck together. I even had a little kick of speed about one km from the finish, near Britomart, before falling behind him again. Abby found me at the finish line, but I couldn’t move any closer to hear what she was saying. Nick came and found me to congratulate me, and I gave him a ride home via church.

The last 9 kilometers was truly one of the hardest things I have finished, but I was so happy at the finish line. I don’t think anyone else could ever understand the tears of joy -- I could do it.

On the Auckland marathon, I learned self-belief.

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I think people who have hiked with me can assure you that my hiking style is best described as obsessive. Nearly all can affirm this, the rest never really made it back. When I returned to Auckland in November, I remarked that to Y- that I was genuinely just exhausted, Y- was astonished,

> I cannot fathom what kind of hiking could make you exhausted

The Cascade Saddle day-trip was rough. It wasn’t the day trudging through knee-deep snow, or the sunburn starting to form on my cheek, right below where my cap did not provide shade -- but it was the collective two weeks of hiking and climbing, and finding my limit at the end of three long ten-hour days with a full pack. The entire day was full of the highest highs and the lowest lows.

The Dart Glacier, arguably the centre-piece of this hike was stunning. The entire hike was designed around tracing the Dart River upstream on the true left of the river to its source. It was easily the most awe-inspiring thing I have seen this year, in terms of majesty and beauty. There is nothing on earth which makes me feel so small or insignificant, as standing at the base of a glacier and looking at the timeless, frozen rivers that run around me.

The lows followed quickly after, descending from the mountain saddle, toward the end of the day and rapidly losing daylight. Fully knowing there was still 5 hours of hiking left in the day, slightly worried about the pace of the day quickly ending.

I can still vividly remember the shape of the broad, flat rock which looked slippery, and despite making the mental cost-benefit analysis, still carelessly putting my entire weight on the rock. In true laidback-jugs fashion, I just decided that the problem would sort itself out. Unsurprisingly, the foot did actually continue slipping, and with zero points of secure anchor, on the side of the mountain I continued to slide down the hill for a couple of metres somersaulting over exposed rock and snow.

I cursed myself with some very self-deprecating language to numb the pain down my shins and landing on top of my camera bag. In the back of my mind, I knew that I was hiking alone, very far from the closest person. Something about the self-sufficiency in the wild makes one increasingly irritable at every oneself, and every bad decisions. The rest of the limp back was miserable and I was exceedingly negative to myself.

The next morning, I made it as far as the Rees Saddle before returning to the hut. I started at 6am and vowed to myself that I would only go 3 hours because I had another 3 hours return and another 5 hours to the next hut. I made it two and half hours of climbing and walking along the narrow mountain route before stopping. I rested.

I felt not so alone as previous days, but in such solitude for that short half an hour, just watching the sun come over the mountains and giving my body rest. From the Intentions Book I knew that I was the first person to come across this mountain pass for four months, and I took heart from that.

In the moments where I could stop and see creation, remembering why I was out there in moderate-high danger, crossing waist-high water, and walking for hours with what seems like all my possessions - I could see that, in that moment, it was good.

On the Rees-Dart track, I learned self-love.

-----------------

This year has been good, even great. It’s been the best one yet, and I know I have grown so much as a person.

About a month ago, E- said I am often pretentious and this operated as a defense mechanism. It still slays me on the inside somewhat because it’s something I’ve battled my whole life. In reality, there is pretentiousness in me, but can that exist if I vow there is no pride?

There is urgency in everything I do, because I like to think that I doggedly pursue and am surrounded by so much love, peace and joy. I don’t know how anyone could settle for anything less, I struggle to translate that sentiment into words and actions that other people could understand. I don’t know how I can put the thirst in me in a normal way, without resorting to l'appel du vide and feeling I’m crazy or weird (or inferior) compared to everyone else because I feel more than other people do.

Life is merely what God has planned for each of us, and I’m just here to experience every drop of it.

On some level, I long to share it with someone. There is so much of my life which is guarded and the way her words still have so much power over me -- I think I still have some residual feelings for her.

#2019 #that long post #i'm just going to post this

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levelstory · 5 years ago

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Music Reflection I, The Cringe is Real

The other day, my mother made a comment to me that there really is no sense that can bring back memories quite like your sense of smell. I agreed with her, but commented that sound and music may be tied for that ranking. Smell certainly brings me back to certain moments of my life, in ways I can't always explain to myself. But music brings back memories in a different kind of way. Songs are attached to specific thoughts and actions, to who I was at the time of listening.

I thought it could be fun to revisit some of these songs from the past and talk about my feelings toward them, then and now. I imagine this will be a series of blogs so you can always look forward to more...

No Strings Attached by NSYNC

One of the most loaded questions you could ask a nine year old girl in the '90s was: do you prefer the Backstreet Boys or NSYNC? I was a hardcore Backstreet Boys listener. I owned all of their albums (except Millenium which was a damn shame) and listened to them rigorously, practicing for dance recitals next to "Quit Playing Games with My Heart" and making up dance moves to "As Long as You Love Me" and "Get Down." When my brother received the Chapter One album for his birthday, our home videos show my face sink into a pit of jealousy that he got the album instead of me. We even had Backstreet Boy action figures from Burger King which I am sure can be found somewhere in our basement to this very day, as well as a poster that had a button that when pressed would play a clip from "Don't Want You Back."

I had an intense loyalty toward them, for reasons that are very unclear to me as I never outright disliked NSYNC's music. I heard them enough at the skating rink and at birthday parties. For some reason, all I can remember is disliking their look compared to BSB. Both groups were distinct in this regard, and I very much clung to the group I had spent most of my elementary career listening to on repeat.

One of the cool toys in the late '90s, early 2000s was called HitClips, little cartridges that would play 30 second clips of songs from popular artists like Britney Spears, Hanson, and of course BSB and NSYNC. I remember a girl in my fifth grade class bringing her hit clips in and being nice enough to let me borrow them and bring them home. Of course some of them were NSYNC and I remember replaying "Bye Bye Bye" and "It's Gonna Be Me" over and over, aching to listen to the full tracks. Shortly after returning them, I imagine I got my mom to take me to Target (which was my go to music store at the time) and used my allowance money to purchase the NSYNC album, No Strings Attached.

There are so many memories I attach to listening to this album. I had just gotten my very first desk for my bedroom and I remember my boom box sitting at the back of the desk where I would pop in CD's and cassette tapes. This was also around the time my room was painted from plain white to a soft pink. One of my best friends at the time also owned this album. Her father owned a camper that sat in their driveway, and we would sit inside with her stereo and listen to music while we pretended to be camping far away from our suburban reality.

"No Strings Attached," the titular song in which the album was named, was not always a favorite of mine. At first it was the well known tracks that held my interest before I gave the rest of the album a chance. Songs like "Space Cowboy," "Digital Get Down," and "That's When I'll Stop Loving You" were tracks I came to love later, along with "No Strings Attached." The song is one that so easily gets stuck in my head (along with "Just Got Paid"). Once I hear it, I can't unhear it for some hours and I find myself humming it throughout the day. More than anything, this track in particular seems to be the most nostalgic. Whereas songs like "Bye Bye Bye" and "This I Promise You" I have returned to regularly throughout my life, "No Strings Attached" is one that I love all the more because it isn't one I necessarily return to all that often, and in that way it feels rare and distant, and therefore nostalgic.

Listening to this track with the modern ear does not do it any favors. Sure it sounds good, if not a bit chaotic like much of this album, but the lyrics lean toward the "nice guy" narrative which I am so over in 2019. I appreciate it from a distant, but can't say it has aged particularly well. NSYNC sing to this supposed lady that they want to have a relationship with her, with no preconceived expectations, or no strings attached, unlike the guy she is currently with who doesn't pay her any attention or return her calls. It all feels very '90s...and if I am being honest, returning to the '90s is one of the main reasons I return to these tracks. While I can't give it too much credit, I won't deny that it is a banger to listen to and enjoy. No Strings Attached remains one of my favorite albums from the ‘90s.

Why Not? by Hilary Duff

As a teen, I never really got on the Hilary Duff / Lizzie McGuire train. For reasons that are way too dense and difficult to unpack here, I really disliked the live action Disney "sitcoms" as a kid. Many of my friends watched and enjoyed them, while I hated them. So when the Lizzie McGuire movie came out to theaters, it was the last thing I wanted to see. Yet I did end up seeing it...at least, I feel like I saw it in theaters. I don't remember who convinced me to see it or why I gave in to my dislike, but I did see it. I also remember being at a friends house and she wanted to watch the DVD while I adamantly didn't and it caused a bit of a rift between us for a few hours. We got over it of course, and to go into all of that would be another tangent so I shall move ahead.

My friend who loved the show bought the movie soundtrack and we listened to it constantly. I remember sleeping over her house and making up dances, jumping on the bed, and running around like crazy kids with a ton of energy tend to do. "Why Not?" was my favorite song from the Lizzie McGuire soundtrack. I remember I loved Hilary Duff's voice, and was convinced that my own voice was almost identical to hers. I have a distinct memory of sitting at my bedroom window and singing her music to myself, carefully measuring my voice and making sure I sang just like she would.

This song was heavily marketed upon the release of the Lizzie McGuire movie. The music video was on TV all the time. In many ways it fit very well with the film's core themes - why not take chances? Why not do the thing you are most afraid of? If you don't take the chance, you may never have the opportunity to do so again. The lyrics are a mixed bag. One line that I never grow tired of is, "you always dress in yellow, when you want to dress in gold, instead of listening to your heart, you do just what you're told." It is certainly not a lyric that contains much depth and I assure you it isn't the message of the lyrics that have always captured me, but rather how they bounce and flow and how effortlessly Duff approaches them. It is a portion of the song that I always enjoy.

The bridge, like most pop songs, is tragically boring. I enjoy Duff's humming (is that the word for what she does immediately after the bridge? What would you even call that?) but then the lyrics move toward the point where the song writers must have been on a time crunch saying, "You'll never get to heaven, or even to LA, if you don't believe there's a way." This lyric caught me off guard recently because I never really thought about it before but I just find it funny that the song talks about going to heaven, something that contains so much religious meaning and cultural significance, and then immediately puts going to LA on the same scale. Like, you'll never escape eternal damnation if you don't take chances, but you might also not make it to LA where you could become famous...yes, those are equally important. Sure I knew the song was generic, but my god it just drops into the absurd and pitiful by the bridge.

Despite this, I still really enjoy the song. It isn't perfect but it speaks to a particular time of my life and I enjoy the memories associated with it.

I'm With You by Avril Lavigne

Avril Lavigne's album "Let Go" was a big deal when it came out. It has a distinct place in my memory, coming out the year I moved into a new house, went to a new school, and started entering my teenage years. This was a time when burning CD's was still considered legal and so I never actually owned the album. My cousins burned the album on a CD for me, and I made a cover in Microsoft Word compiled of the album name made in Word Art and pixelated images of Lavigne scattered about. At the time, I thought my album cover looked really cool.

"Let Go" was released around the same time Lizzie McGuire was on the rise, but unlike Hilary Duff and the Disney Channel, Lavigne made us 12 year olds feel like we were listening to adult music. Listening to this album felt hardcore at the time. It was low key grunge music, with themes and ideas far more sanitized than we knew.

I can remember a friend I made at my new school and going to her house where we listened to Avril Lavigne, rocking out to "Sk8ter Boi" and playing air guitar along with "Complicated." But "I'm With You" took on a much darker tone than either of these songs, and used a word that was off limits, "damn." There is a home video we have, which I believed I tried to tape over and remove from existence in case of blackmail, where I filmed myself singing the song and every time Lavigne belts, "It's a damn cold night!", I would fall silent at the "damn" and not say anything at all, for fear of being heard by my parents.

I can't say Lavigne's album has aged all too well. It isn't horrible but it is also nowhere near as good as we believed. Full of angst and "edgy" guitar, it definitely remains a product of its time. What is strange is that Lavigne's album is not one I have felt the need to return to much as I have grown older. The strongest memory with the album is listening to it in the car on my portable CD player on the way to North Carolina in the summer. Apart from that, my memory usually paints in broad strokes and just remembers the album being super popular when I was a sixth grader. All of the girls my age loved it, as did I, and my friends performed "Sk8ter Boi" at a lip sync competition.

"I'm With You" stands out for its slow pace when compared to all of the other tracks. "Losing Grip" is sharp and industrial sounding, "Complicated" is the soft rock track that fits perfectly on the radio, "Sk8ter Boi" is the song to rock out to, and "My World," my personal favorite as a kid, is a fun guitar jam. But "I'm With You" isn't fun. It really showcases Lavigne's vocal range as well as her vulnerability as a songwriter. It builds up slowly and concludes with a strong crescendo of instrumentation. Okay, that might be overstating things just a tad. But there is something about this song that always gets me and I know that is the nostalgia talking.

Lucky by Britney Spears

I have something to admit...I never owned a Britney Spears album. How can I call myself a real '90s kid if I didn't own a Britney Spears album? It is embarrassing. There were plenty of her songs I loved, but I guess I got by with her song "Sometimes" being on the compilation record, Now 3, which I listened to quite frequently.

When "Lucky" was released, I really loved it. It was one of those songs that I loved so desperately that I am surprised I never got around to asking my parents for the album it was on. Luckily, a friend of mine owned said album and brought it over for my 10th birthday party. I imagine we listened to the album a lot that night, but all I can really remember is me dancing to "Lucky" on my screen porch while my friends watched, giggling. In fact, we have video evidence of this and it doesn't embarrass me...well, it embarrasses me a little. The video is somewhat cringy in that I am not a good dancer, but I make up for it with silliness for sure.

"Lucky" tells the story of a celebrity who isn't happy. It comes off as very Marilynne Monroe; you expect this person to have it all but actually they don't and it makes them very sad. It isn't a very complicated song (though I guess none of the songs I am writing about are complicated). The storytelling is straightforward and easy to grasp.

It is expected for listeners to wonder if the song is autobiographical and if Britney really was unhappy in her current predicament. Hindsight certainly reveals that this was most likely the case in some regard. Seeing where she is now and where her career has gone doesn't bode well for this song which makes me much more sympathetic toward her as a human being. If this was the case, listening to the track makes you sad. Still, if you can look past the blatant message, it is a track that remains catchy though I don't find I love it as much as an adult. The song just doesn't sound as catchy anymore, and it only makes me feel sad for Spears.

All for Love by Stevie Brock

This track is easily the most obscure of the bunch. Stevie Brock never acquired the same celebrity as the other artists on this list. However, he did enjoy a few good years of teenie bopper fame and air time on Radio Disney. He was one of the many Aaron Carter wannabes that arrived on the music scene. This isn't to say he didn't have talent. His still immature voice was catchy enough and he was clearly a great performer. But like many child artists, his record was generic and…well, bad. Very bad.

One huge trend of the '90s and early 2000s was this weird thing where young boys on the verge of becoming teens would sing songs about getting the girl and dating and complex romantic topics that made little sense to a teenager. The result is that the songs are super hetero-normative and a bit creepy. I am sitting in the car, reliving my childhood memories by listening to this song, and I can't help but think, "is it weird that I, a 29 year old woman, am listening to a 13 year old, whose voice still hasn't matured, sing about his 'romantic troubles' with a girl in his class who clearly doesn't want to date him but he wants it so it is okay that he keeps pursuing her?". Yes, it is a little weird.

What is really weird to me is that I remember this song as if it came out way before it actually did. The album didn't properly release until summer of 2003 and I seem to recall listening the year previous. This could be because when I bought the album I was 12 going on 13 and thus I associate it more with being 12 than a 13 year old middle-schooler. But it would make sense. After all, the whole reason I even heard of Stevie Brock was because when on vacation in 2003 in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, my family ate at the Hard Rock Cafe and on the big screen where they played music videos, Brock's cover of "All for Love" came on the screen. I've always been the type of person who loves music so when I hear a song I enjoy, I have to write it down so that I can listen to it when I would get home. These days we have apps that allow us to listen to songs and tell us what they are called. But back then when music wasn't as readily available and I was a child who didn't really have enough money to buy things at the ready, this act was more of a scavenger hunt than anything else. Would I be able to find this guy's album when I got home? What if it wasn't at Target? What would I do then?

Fortunately, Brock captured a strong, if not temporary, following and his album was on store shelves. "All for Love" is a fine song, mostly due to it being a cover from another band. As already addressed, the lyrics feel very odd coming from someone so young. He addresses the girl he is singing to as "sugar" which just makes me skin curl. It is creepy that the music industry breeds young boys to sing about these things so early. This was easily my favorite song from the album. My strongest memories of the song, besides first hearing it at the Hard Rock Cafe, are listening to it and the entire album at my friends house. We had a fun tradition of bringing her boombox outside and dancing around the front lawn. I remember her birthday party and us tween girls dancing through the summer air, our bare feet wet from the moist grass. I'm sure the neighbors had fun watching us act like total maniacs.

Revisiting these songs was fun, but I know there are more I want to talk about in the future! Stay tuned! What are some songs you listened to as a kid that make you feel super nostalgic today? Let me know in the comments!

#Stevie Brock #NSYNC #Britney Spears #Avril Lavigne #Hilary Duff

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ludonarrativediss · 5 years ago

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When We Stop Playing Games

I've been thinking a lot recently about when we stop playing games. Not like stop playing all games forever ("When I'm dead!" exclaims the gamer, skin glistening with the early morning's Mountain Dew), but instead when we put down a game to go onto another game. Or maybe when we put down a game for good.

As a child, this never happened to me. I got one, maybe two new games a year, which meant my backlog hadn't been conceived yet. I always went back and played the games I owned, even the ones I had beaten, because those were the games I had. Most of my game playing back then came from game rentals, which by their very nature had built-in times when I would stop playing them. In my case, when my parents were driving to town the next day and it had to be returned.

In the aughts, which I spent mostly in my twenties, the nature of games changed and so did the way I consumed them. There were a lot more games, and those games were a lot more about their stories. Games for me became contained experiences. I played the games to their conclusion, I saw the ending, and then I moved onto a new game. Games had unlocks and new game plus modes and higher difficulties, but there were too many games to even consider any of that, we had to keep moving forward. That said, even in the early 2000s, you could see the glimmer of games as a service. For me, these were games that my roommates and I could become obsessed with, play asynchronously, and then discuss together. I think a lot of people my age had these experiences in college with Halo or GTA, but my roommates and I were weirdos, so my dorm was obsessed with Animal Crossing on the Gamecube and Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball on the Xbox. These were games without endings, games we could play for an hour a day and feel like we were forever making progress cleaning up our animal towns or dressing up our volleyball ladies.

Then at some point we were all online and we could play with each other even if we hadn't chosen to live in the same liberal arts dorm room. More importantly, all of our games could get updates all the time. Soon, that meant most of the games I was buying weren't finished, and therefore could never be finished by me. Games As A Service: the most boring way to describe the game we all wished for as a kid, the game that never ends, the game you might not even have to buy, but the game you definitely don't have to get your parents to drive you to the video store for. Hey wait Past Me, put down that monkey paw, I've got a bad feeling about thi—

We wished for something new and we got something old. I've been playing Fortnite and Destiny and Overwatch for years now. The stories never end. The gameplay is always evolving. I'm playing it just like I played games as a kid, everyday popping in the same copy of Super Mario Bros 3 (after blowing on it), but in this strange future Super Mario Bros 3 has a Lunar New Year Goomba this week, and they're slowly rolling out lore this season that's really building on the Bullet Bill raid they released in November, and ugh they nerfed the tanooki suit again.

Hey it's great, playing these Games As A Service that I personally click with, where I follow the updates and complete the challenges and obsess over the lore—it's great—but hey guys when do we stop? They've hired psychologists and sociologists and economists to help build these levers and adjust these dials to make sure we keep spending money and never stop playing. And those story games I loved in the aughts? They're still coming out. I've got a stack of weird cool interesting games that I've never managed to get to, burning a hole in my hard drive. I know I need to play Undertale and Kentucky Route Zero and Telling Lies, but those are standalone experiences that aren't going anywhere, and so I need to turn on the new event in Fortnite while it's still there, I need to put some time into my Diablo III character this season—I need to play the same games I've been playing for the last five years.

When I talk to friends who don't play games, they don't get it. See, they get to watch a two hour movie and get a nice, satisfying, full experience. In comparison, I've got these games I've played for literally hundreds of hours, over the course of years, and some nights I've had some of the most incredible, immersive experiences of my life. These are the nights when the gameplay told a story, where the random human players on my team delivered a narrative through their actions, and we discovered the new season's lore together. Other nights I just fucked around and lost a lot of matches, but my numbers did go up and I did feel a false sense of accomplishment. So what do I do, do I keep playing?

Personally, I'm trying really hard to push through the new game anxiety and expand the titles and genres I'm spending my time with. I'm trying not to get caught up in limited time events in my ongoing games, and only playing them when I genuinely want to play them. It's a balancing act between not thinking too much and just playing what I feel like playing, while also pushing against the brain tricks my favorite games are using against me, and learning when to sample something new. Xbox Gamepass has been really good for that, because I can try something new with no expectation that I need to put in a certain number of hours because I spent actual money on it and it's sitting in my backlog, and that sense of "this is free, whatever" (even if it's not actually free) really cuts down on that initial new game anxiety.

Look, man, I don't have the answers. I don't have an answer. But I've been thinking about it a lot recently, I've been thinking about when we stop playing games, so that we can play new games. The stuff I've been playing, the stuff I already know how to play—those are the safe games. That's the nice warm bed to curl back into on these cold winter months. It's the familiarity that brings me back, and it's that familiarity that makes the little changes every week or every season really feel so important. Real new stuff, though, brand new games where I have to learn how to play again from scratch, that's what's hard. That's what's intimidating. But if I don't jump into those new games, then I won't find my new favorite. I'll miss out on the real ongoing narrative, which is the journey our industry is taking as it shakes off the Doritos dust of its adolescence. That's the lore I don't want to miss out on.

#video games #videogames #games as a service #anxiety

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chinmaster · 5 years ago

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So. You might have guessed that I like a bunch of different tabletop RPGs. You might have put together that I like using systems that are designed to tell a certain kind of story to tell that certain kind of story rather than trying to jam a kind of narrative that a system doesn’t support into it just because you happen to like it. Dungeons and Dragons is the most frequent perpetrator of this kind of behavior and it’s gotten to the point where it’s easy to just rag on 5E generally rather than just the stuff that gets on my nerves. So I think it’s important to step back and take a look at the sorts of things D&D (5E in particular) tends to do well and why people are so obsessed with it.

The first reason is probably the easiest to parse, at least to me. Dungeons and Dragons has a lot of cultural recognition. It’s the game most people think of when they hear ‘tabletop role playing game’. It’s arguably the oldest one around, and definitely the one that’s made the most money over the course of its lifetime. This kind of recognition and fame can be self-perpetuating; if the only game a person is likely to have heard of is Dungeons and Dragons, or it’s the game they’ve heard the most about, then if they play an RPG then that’s the one they’re probably going to gravitate towards. It’s also a game that hits a lot of similar beats to some other pretty big cultural properties. Lord of the Rings is the biggest, but it also has a connection to more recent properties like Stranger Things and an increased number of celebrities that reveal how they enjoy it.

Another big part of the appeal, I think, is how similar Dungeons and Dragons is to an open world video game (likely because many of these games take some cues from D&D). Those types of video games are extremely popular (Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto, etc.) and the ease with which Dungeons and Dragons can tell similar stories isn’t hard to see with its focus on combat and exploration of somewhat limited environments (dungeons, towns, continents). Dungeons and Dragons is especially attractive to the sort of person who enjoys those kinds of video games but wishes that they had more of an option to choose what they find important in the world and to tell stories more focused on their particular taste. It opens up the idea that a character could feasibly solve a problem in a way outside the limits of a game engine and the imagination of the game designers. Now, a lot of the way gamemastering works in Dungeons and Dragons can go against a lot of this idea (railroading can be a big problem in games that require a lot of system mastery from the GM) but the fact is that the possibility of extreme character freedom is still there.

In a similar vein, Dungeons and Dragons is appealing from the perspective of its progression and advancement systems being easy to understand. Kill X number of goblins, gain power. This is the perspective that the game itself uses- combat is the only sure way to gain experience points and gain power/skill. There is also mention of handing out experience for noncombat encounters, but this is framed as based entirely on whether the GM decides to do so and it’s also up to them how much to give out, whereas combat is very clear about exactly how much experience the encounter is worth. This gives a very clear way for players to gain power, skill, and knowledge. The system of character progression is also easy to understand in a way similar to video games. You get a handy chart that tells you exactly what your character will learn/how they will grow at any given level. Certainly you’ll get some choices at some of those times, but overall your progression is more or less mapped out by level 2 or 3.

Another mark in D&D’s favor is its focus on long term play. Many other RPGs out there just aren’t meant to be played for the years it can take for a D&D campaign to reach its conclusion. I would hazard a guess that most D&D games never actually reach such a conclusion anyway, but that’s not entirely the point. The point is that the possibility is a draw. It’s fun to imagine a years-spanning epic fantasy where you get to control one of the main characters. This kind of long term play also has the side effect of pushing other games out of the way. Why learn a different system that will only last you 20 sessions at most when this one gets you years of entertainment? Having a game that lasts years also naturally pushes aside other games just from a time investment perspective. A person only has so many hours in a day. Under normal circumstances they aren’t going to have time to play in multiple, several-hour long games. So if they’re playing in one that lasts for years, that’s going to be the game they play without giving any time to other systems or styles. It’s also just a good excuse to socialize with those that have similar interests, and if it’s something that lasts for a long time then so much the better. It can be hard to find time to get together with friends between work and appointments and chores and having something concrete like a game to focus on can help.

D&D also has essentially mechanically enforced teamwork. While there can be traitors in a band of adventurers, it’s not really something that’s frequently beneficial. Given that it is so focused on combat as well as the way those combats are set up, it is frequently not only beneficial but necessary for the players to work together in order to defeat their foes. The classes are set up to complement each other in combat situations. Players are encouraged to think about how their characters can work together during the game. Similarly, secret-keeping and betrayal can be somewhat awkward as the system is not set up to handle it, leaving it entirely up to the creativity and design sense of the GM. If the kind of game a person is looking for is just a fun romp with friends, then having a game that fully encourages cooperative play is going to have a natural advantage over one that is more interested in telling a story about complex relationships.

So. That’s it. Those are the reasons I came up with over my lunch hour that I think comprise the reasons Dungeons and Dragons is such a behemoth in the tabletop RPG hobby. As usual, none of this is the result of any real research on my part- it’s just my observations and extrapolations. There’s no real point or change I’m looking for either- I’ve just spent so much time thinking and reading all these other games it made me want to go back to D&D and think about why it might have the kind of audience it does. It’s also partially that I want to understand its popularity when thinking about my own design, but mostly just idle thoughts.

#ttrpg art #thoughts #dungeons and dragons #D&D

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kyndaris · 5 years ago

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"Not My Video Game...”

I’ll be honest: I never thought that the discussion of difficulty vs accessibility would have blown up as much as it did when Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice launched earlier this year. Knowing that the game would feature punishing gamplay with little reward (at least in my eyes), it was not a title that I cared to sink my hard-earned money into. Frustration and the thought of dying over and over and over again failed to appeal to me. Games, from a personal perspective, had always been about the narrative, enjoying the power fantasy of becoming stronger, knowing what I should be doing in a given world with a dedicated set of rules, or a combination of all three.

The current debate that has been raging on, however, is not new. I remember a couple years ago when the Fire Emblem forums and Reddit pages were aflame with the fact that the game developers at Intelligent Systems decided to implement Phoenix Mode into the more recent entries of the strategy franchise. This move was seen by many fans as a concession to the mass market and casual playerbase. And how dare they do so when in days of yore, Fire Emblem was supposed to be a difficult turn-based strategy game where an ill-advised move would see them lose their favourite characters (which they invested time and experience points) in the blink of an eye. ‘This is not my Fire Emblem,’ many decried. Despite the fact that they could play it on a harder difficulty or select ‘classical’ mode and have their characters disappear if they so choose.

Strange isn’t it that the introduction of accessibility managed to push some ardent fans away. Worse still was the fact that they felt the urge to gatekeep the game so that only ‘true purveyors’ of the game could dip their toes into the genre.

Let us also not forget that just before Cuphead was released, a video circulated online where a video game journalist struggled to complete the beginning levels. Gamers all around the world could not believe their eyes and told him to ‘git gud.’ It sparked off a debate about the skills video game journalists and the validity of their reviews when they could not pull off the simplest of moves.

In saying that, though, there is a valid concern about how developers are trying to cater for the more casual player. Video games have evolved. They’ve become more mainstream. And in order to entice new players there has been a need to simplify game mechanics or provide a thorough tutorial for those that have never picked up a controller or used WASD as anything else but letters on a keyboard.

With Sekiro, on the other hand, many gamers are up in arms by the fact that they cannot select or downgrade the difficulty. Many people have had to put it down because they have found it impossible to get past certain bosses. Others, hoping to use Sekiro as the gateway to other Soulsbourne games have found the price of entry far too high and dislike the fact that it does not easily welcome newcomers. I’ve also watched people who fell in love with Dark Souls and Bloodborne also struggling to acquaint themselves with Sekiro. Luke Westaway, from Outside Xtra, is one such example. In a discussion about the game in a Show of the Weekend, he described that despite beating the game, he was still unable to feel the euphoria that came from it. Was it sheer luck that helped him across the line?

Of course, some gamers thrive on the challenge. The Dark Souls franchise has found a niche in presenting almost insurmountable obstacles for players to overcome. For those persistent players, it grants them a dopamine hit as their reward. To triumph over adversity is one of the reasons some people play games. They like to be presented with a challenge. And once they’ve memorised each of the attack patterns for each boss, admired the fact that their twitch reflexes have improved and deduced a sure-fire way to victory, it’s the best sensation in their world.

There is nothing wrong with that. Games are not a medium where one size fits all.

As someone who has tried to teach someone else how to first use an Xbox controller and then how to play first person shooter soon afterwards, it is clear to me that people do not always intrinsically adapt to a new control scheme. They have particular aptitudes to certain genres. These friends of mine, while quickly understanding the simple mechanics that came with role playing games such as Avalon and Dragon Quest, or the button mashing of Mortal Kombat, found that the concept of using both analogue sticks at the same time was something they could not quite surmount at the time.

I appreciate, too, that gamers with disability should be able to access any and all types of games. Whether that is by minimising the buttons one needs to press to pull off impressive combos or utilising a colourblind mode.

However, not all games fit within a given player’s style of play. Sometimes, the player needs to adapt to the game. The games pumped out by From Software are meant to be hard. You are meant to keep dying over and over again. To make fight with bosses easier, in my opinion, would dilute what made the games so special in the eyes of those that have joined its community.

The debate of accessibility versus difficulty is never going to go away. After reading a couple more articles, online, though, I realised that I’ve also fallen into the trap of conflating the two issues when they are two different things. As developers continue to churn out new titles, the question of how much it should cater to the whims of the growing casual market, looking to test the waters, without dumbing down the entire experience will be an ongoing one. That, however, should not detract by providing simple quality-of-life improvement options such as larger subtitles or the ability to remap certain control schemes.

That said, with streaming so widely available and whole YouTube channels dedicated to the playing of video games, if you can’t git gud as they say, some of that time might be better spent watching someone play though the entirety of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice with a Guitar Hero peripheral. I know I’ll find that more entertaining than watching my onscreen character fall for the thousandth time against a towering Ogre.

#personal blog #video games #difficulty vs accessability

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