Bordeaux is an excellent town. Mia is there, my mother’s god-daughter, Jeremy’s first child. You need to be paying attention at the moment if you’re mad enough to try and make sense of my extended family. We can’t do it so you definitely can’t. “How do you feel about having another nephew or niece on the way?” , Rupert asks Mia. Rupert is as much of a gobshite as me, but he has learned from a book that asking open questions is the correct way of connecterising with the other humanpeoples. “I haven’t got any nephews or nieces.” “What about Ramsey?” “Ramsey is my son, Rupert. I’m his mother.” “oh. oh yes.”
We three awkward boys on a road trip have continued to develop our interpersonal dynamic. I had my first squabble with Rupert today and he with me. But the end result will be a deeper connection. I think it’ll turn out to be worth the time we spent, but I have it so hard wired into me by dad that “family is important”. There’s something powerful about the fact we don’t get to choose.
I got pissed off with Rupert for unevolved and simplistic views about computer games, of all things. Someone made him aware of the fact that in open world games you can do anything you like. His example was that someone his son observed who was eight was allowed to play a Grand Theft Auto game by stupid parents. Sasha used to sneak into my room to play exactly that game at exactly that age, and he’s a hedge fund analyst now. But that’s as maybe.
The son of Rupert doing the observation is in the arts. In game, If you pull up in certain bad areas and honk your horn, a scantily clad man or woman might get in the car. You can then drive into an alley and the car will start rocking while the voice actor makes some generic noises expressing false pleasure. Then some of your money goes away and the person leaves the car. It’s an open world game so there’s nothing stopping you from running the person over although it’ll likely lead to a police chase. If you run them over your money can be picked up again. His take: “An eight year old bought a prostitute, and then ran her over while my son watched.” Sure he should have been prevented from accessing the game. But don’t try to convert that into some idea that games are bad. That’s the definition of ignorance.
Computer games cover so much ground now. It is unbelievable how deep they go, how much thought and time has been spent. Sometimes asking deep questions, sometimes just doing ridiculous rubbish.
There’s a computer game where you drive through a straight road in the desert for hours in real time and nothing happens. There are so many games doing so many things. The whole point of loads of games is to shoot people in the head. I don’t like those games. But GTA is art. It is trying to see what it can make possible. An old mate put on Hamlet in game. When people are gaming, the fact that some games let your character do transgressive things is joyful. But the game doesn’t encourage you to do that. It wouldn’t be authentic if it didn’t allow it. But it doesn’t encourage it. This is why there are hardly ever NPC children in these games, or if there are they are weirdly immortal like the ones in Skyrim running around after dragon attacks like nothing has happened. Sandbox, yes. But never underestimate the ability of people who don’t know what the hell they are talking about to get indignant about things out of context.
I forgot though, that Rupert is ALMOST SEVENTY. He’s 67. He comes across much younger.
I couldn’t really explain the joy of an open world game to Lou, even. Barely to Tristan. But Max knows them. I was gaming with him for recreation when they first came into being, and now they are, to me, a huge storytelling medium. We need a course for beginners to understand. Some early games that changed the landscape and are still playable and understandable for non gamers…? Journey springs to mind of course. But there are many. Rather than getting pissed off perhaps we could try to educate. I will never forget my first time through Journey, largely because of a stranger who joined me. We could only communicate through jumping and odd sounds. The game is no longer than an hour and a half to play and we had a lifetime within that. A simple game, but games are art now. As with all art, it can be simplified by idiots. “Look at that naked body by Chagall. What a pervert.” We simplify what we don’t understand to fit our existing agenda. I was disappointed with Rupert and more disappointed with his artistic son who is younger than me and looking at this incredible medium of games through a cracked lens.
I’m playing Mass Effect for the first time, slowly, at the moment – just the first three – and it is a fiercely dense moral maze of a game where your actions have consequence but you can act pretty freely. I made a decision that caused me to shoot a childhood friend in the head in a public place. I’m sure there’ll be repercussions down the line. But the guy that my character (John) shot was from my character’s youthful murderous earth gang. They were blackmailing the adult John because he attained intergalactic public office. At the time, being John, I needed to show a ruthless streak to a particular alien nation in order to assure them that mankind were not a weak species. Their representative witnessed the blackmail and they are a tricky race, higher up in the federation by far than humanity, valuing ruthlessness. The character I’m playing was in a gang on earth that hated aliens, but through his military prowess he has got to be an ambassador in a wild west space type situation. I’m role playing, and he is mostly a paragon of virtue, but I’m playing a game. For my John Shepard, I felt it was correct to fatally shoot this old “friend” in the bar. The alien approved. “I’m surprised. Perhaps mankind isn’t so indecisive as we feared.” I still don’t like the decision but I made it. It’ll come back to bite me for sure. Likely in Mass Effect 3, which was over a decade later on release, and it’s deep enough that it remembers everything you did for the first two games and there’s loads of stuff you’ll never see depending on what you did.
Games now are so much deeper and more complicated than it would have been possible to appreciate in the nineties really, if you are pushing seventy or if you write for The Daily Mail etc you can’t be expected to get them.
The open worlds are losing their edge though, for the exact reason that Rupert is scared of GTA: Show a player being a psychopath in isolation, and Cecilia Montague-Janus tells the weekly column how “GAMES MAKES US WANT TO SHOOT FRIENDS” Still. A gorgeous sunny day in France. I got a scallop and went to a pilgrim mass.
AlBarclay 