Ben There, Dan That: Special Edition

Dan Marshall and Ben Ward are the two guys who, together, make up Size Five Games, and they’ve recently released the special editions of their award-winning games: Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentleman, Please, both on their website and on Steam.

This marks the first time that I’ve done a voice-over for something that I’m able to point people at and encourage them to buy so that’s, perhaps unsurprisingly, exactly what I’m doing. The new bundle includes both classics as well as a couple of extras including a video detailing extracts from the heroes’ diaries called Peru Explained. This video features the voices of Michael Fox (who also does this) and myself doing the voices of Dan and Ben respectively. If enough people buy the Special Edition, then they think they’ll almost certainly make a third game in the series: one that will be fully voiced. I can not begin to describe to you how much I would love to voice an entire game so please help me make this happen. As far as I’m aware, the minimum price for this bundle is around £3 but if you want to support these guys further, you have the option of paying more for it on their website. As far as I’m aware, the games are also pretty fantastic.

Thank you and god speed.

Finance Explained: Risk Neutral Behaviour

Hey! I’ve actually done a second video for that thing I said I would do more videos for! How about that!?

I only had one suggestion for the next video from my good friend Kaspar Chan so that’s the one I’ve done. As the title says, it’s about risk neutral behaviour which, although it doesn’t come up regularly in discussions on finance, is still very important in regard to pricing stocks and risky assets.

Please watch and let me know what you think. As always I’m looking forward to what you guys will ask me to talk about next.

All the best!

Watching Eddie Izzard in French

I don’t often do things on a whim but I like to make them count when I do. Three weeks ago, someone mentioned on Twitter that Eddie Izzard was extending his run of the show “Stripped” in Paris and, being a huge fan of his, I thought ‘why the hell not?’. The difference of course being that the gig was in French.

As of next month, I’ll have been living in Lausanne for 3 years. I originally came for one and a half but as my friend Rob said when I got here “you’ll never leave”, and I guess so far he’s been spot on with that one. As a result, I consider my French to be at a reasonable level even though it’s still way behind where it should be given the amount of time I’ve spent here. I blame that on the prevalence of English at the university I work at and my own laziness. So you can see now that it wasn’t just a whim to go to Paris to see Eddie, but to see it in French too.

I would never go and see a native French speaker do comedy in French. I’ve seen comedy on TV here and if they’re not making funny noises and pulling stupid faces then I’m totally lost. At the same time, Eddie often performs sections of his English performances in French (I say ‘often’, it’s certainly more often than most comedians). The reason I think he can get away with this is that a lot of his comedy stems from a place of overt physicality. Yes, a fair amount of his comedy is in the words he uses, but when he does, it’s more about taking words out of context rather than pure wordplay. In fact, I feel that when Eddie does wordplay, it usually falls flat on its face but you can tell he’s not surprised by that and usually turns it around immediately. He does exactly the same thing in French.

So you may expect going to Paris to see comedy in French for someone like me would be a super-whim rather than just a regular whim but really, seeing your favourite performer perform in a language that is not his first is a very rare opportunity and as pointed out in describing his style of comedy, maybe it wasn’t as big a whim as it first appeared (it was still pretty big).

The performance itself was very similar to the performances I’d seen him do on DVD (this is the first time I’d ever seen him live). It’s clear that the show was a direct translation of the English version, and for the most part that wasn’t an issue, but when he starting talking about the Wikipedia entry for “confiture”, it was impossible not to think that it would have been much funnier if it were the entry for “jam”. I also learnt the French for “badger” after the gig (“blaireau”). There was a very prominent badger Eddie talked about (and that’s not a euphemism) that I had to guess was some other kind of animal. When it was explained to me, I’m amazed I didn’t work it out sooner.

The show itself was very, very funny and Eddie excelled. As a fan, I could work out themes that are the hallmarks of Eddie’s act alongside some new stuff including undercover raptors and new material about where we were in Paris and how Clichy (the boulevard on which theatre is located) is an anagram of Sex. No really, that all got explained. There was also a visit from a French chef who was hilarious. So much so that Eddie had to try doubly hard to convince us that he wasn’t part of the act. I still don’t believe him.

All in all the show was much shorter than usual, less than an hour, but driving to Paris to see it was one hell of an adventure. Three cheers to Rob for agreeing to come with me and drive us there and to French Tom for putting us up for the weekend. We had a great time in Paris and now I really want to go and see Eddie perform in English. It may have been fun to try and follow the whole thing in French but I only really got about 70% of the whole thing. I really should try and practise my French more and so going to live gigs will probably have to wait. The thing that surprised me most, however, was how often I expected the French bit to be just a short section in a much larger English show. I guess that’s just what your brain expects after seeing his English shows often enough.

Finance Explained: Derivatives

I’ve wanted to do a series of videos for a while now explaining various financial terms that people have started using in everyday conversation without properly understanding what those terms really mean or stand for.

I’ve started with derivatives but what I cover next will be up to you. I would love to have some feedback on this video and please feel free to suggest other financial terms you would like me to talk about in this series.

Thanks and enjoy, Chris.

The American Competitive Spirit vs. The Rapture

Well I can’t deny that we had a lot of fun this weekend. I’ve decided to assume that the rapture did actually happen and that either 1) everyone who was supposed to ascend has now been replaced by perfect facsimiles as God’s way of playing a practical joke on the rest of us or 2) the only person on Earth righteous enough to enter Heaven was a cattle farmer in central Poland.

But let’s be serious now. I like Christianity as a fundamental belief system – it has several rough edges but the central tenets are decent and, although I identify as a humanist, I do follow the best ones as closely as I can because I think many of them can improve one’s life. What annoys me greatly is how such a brazen competitive spirit, a relatively new phenomenon in human history in terms of the driving cultural ideology that features prominently in the USA, has infected the creed so severely that vast swathes of Christians in America now identify themselves as being on the “team” of Christianity. And because people on that “team” are known for following all those wonderful central tenets, and they are on that “team”, they assume that they must be following those central tenets too, even though any sideways glance at almost any area of American public opinion will demonstrate that this is, on the whole, false. Not that that’s all their fault – a lot of the blame can be laid at the feet of right-wing media outlets in America although there’s no point me going into that now, least of all because there are better people to discuss the influence of media in society than I.

This post focuses on the wilful misreading of Biblical passages and how the apparent widespread acceptance of these, particularly under this “team” assumption I’ve already mentioned, warps what it means to be a Christian in the United States out of all recognition from the religion itself. I personally find this very important because I feel this warping eventually affects things like America’s climate change and foreign policies and therefore has a massive impact on the world as a whole. It was inspired by two things: the ‘We Can Know‘ website, which was the primary source of promotion for the May 21 date; and this story about how people who believed them ended their relationships with friends and family under the sole reasoning that the world was ending on the New York Times website. Without the latter, my counter-argument to the former would be frivolous and self-indulgent.

Almost anyone who grew up in the church, myself included, remembers being told over and over that Christ’s coming will be like a thief in the night. In other words, no one can know when His coming will occur. One place we read about this is in 1 Thessalonians 5:2-6 so let’s examine this passage verse-by-verse, beginning with verses 2 and 3:
2
“For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night.”
3
“For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.”
Teachers have always used these verses as proof that people will be caught off-guard by Christ’s coming. It is true that these verses are teaching that, but verses 4 and 5 instruct us that there is more to the story:
4
“But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief.”
Here we discover that there are some people who will not be caught off-guard by Christ’s second coming. We have all been taught time and time again that Christ’s coming will be like a thief in the night, but here we have a clear statement (at least, it’s clear to us now) that it will not come as thief for the children of the light.

No, and do you know why? Ignoring the nauseatingly saccharine “children of the light” allusion, think about it. If you’re a righteous human being who will ascend to Heaven upon the second coming, then by default you’re prepared. Knowing the exact date of it is completely unnecessary – this isn’t some competition of which you’re the only people to have become aware. This is about living your life in a manner that forgoes the need to know exactly what date you’ll need to be “prepared” for, whatever that may actually entail.

We will see that those who are “sleeping” are not those out in the world who want nothing to do with God, but they are those in the Christian community who continue to hold the belief that we can’t know when the end will occur.

Or, more concisely, that we don’t need to know.

We are being taught here that we can know enough about the timing of the end that it will not come unexpectedly if we are watching. How do we watch? Do we go stand on a hilltop and look at the sky? No, of course not. We aren’t going to find any information in the sky about when to expect Christ’s return so that it does not come as a thief in the night. We watch by studying God’s Word very carefully.

This demonstrates a complete lack of comprehension of the analogous nature of the Bible and taking such a literal impression of them shows slowness of mind that it begs the question: how have these people found the brainpower to stand up and speak out loud for more than 30 seconds at a time? This kind of cognitive heavy-handedness is by no means a strictly American thing but, let’s be honest, they don’t half shout the loudest.

It disappoints me that there are people out there who feel it’s more important to be a Christian than to actually live like one. People who have the idea in their heads that to be on that “team” trumps the need to have goodwill and be civil to others around you can’t be more misguided and some of the quotes and stories from the article I linked to above are truly sad. The idea that many of them actual celebrate the end of the world (see the quote on the woman’s T-Shirt in the NYT article) is depressing, not just on a psychological level, but also in terms of how utterly selfish that proposition is when you really think about it. My hope is that one day these people will learn from this chapter in their lives, stop worrying about semantics and start living like they’re not operating on a different plane to the rest of us. Although chance would be a fine thing.

Ready for the Big Chill

On Saturday I received my first piece of marketing as a blogger – for some reason this made me oddly excited and it’s a very strange experience. I looked in my mailbox to find a funky-looking black envelope with a stamp from the US nestled in the top-right. Stamped across the envelope seal were the words “Nobody Knows It Yet” and inside was a single piece of card that’s the same length as two iPhones (photos below).

The design of the card is modelled on a block of ice and on one side, in very stark lettering, is the phrase:

“NOBODY KNOWS IT YET BUT IT HAS ALREADY STARTED.”

On the other side is the silhouette of a person apparently trapped in the ice, the phrase “READY FOR THE BIG CHILL” and the web address: facebook.com/ReadyforTheBigChill.

If you go to their Facebook page, the idea behind it is quite interesting. Essentially, what can we do to prepare for a new ice age? Now, my first reaction was “huh?”. In a world which we’re repeatedly told is warming up, would it not make more sense to prepare for quite the opposite? However, as the website points out, there are several plausible scenarios in which a new ice age could occur (that’s plausible of course, not probable) including the “explosion of a super-volcano or the impact of a large asteroid” and just because we prepare for one possible future doesn’t mean we can’t prepare for its polar opposite (no pun intended).

As made clear by the stamp on the envelope, this is an American initiative, but the repercussions for the UK are perhaps more pressing than those for the US. As I mentioned earlier, climate change due to a warming world is a much more obvious thing to be thinking about and preparing for it seems much more urgent.

Except one possible outcome of a warming world is the shutting down of the North Atlantic Gulf Stream, which would end up giving the UK and the Nordic countries a similar climate to that of Siberia, which is notoriously chilly just in case you weren’t aware.

So maybe this isn’t as bad an idea as my initial reaction first suggested. The website is moving apace and there are loads of posts giving ideas for how we could survive such an event. Why not head over and give it a look?

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

The Leaning Tower of Pisa has 296 steps to reach the top. This blog was viewed about 1,000 times in 2010. If those were steps, it would have climbed the Leaning Tower of Pisa 3 times

In 2010, there were 14 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 35 posts. There were 2 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 40kb.

The busiest day of the year was July 4th with 89 views. The most popular post that day was Davies vs. Moffat.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, tardisnewsroom.blogspot.com, twitter.com, community.livejournal.com, and Google Reader.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for farewell messages, chris hemmens, farewell message, russell t davies vs steven moffat, and steven moffat vs russell t davies.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Davies vs. Moffat July 2010
1 comment and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

2

How to argue with people who don’t do facts October 2010
8 comments

3

Update #1: Phone Messages July 2009

4

About May 2009

5

Bankers’ bonuses and addiction November 2010
4 comments

Letter in EDGE

To round off my week of posts about games, I’m posting a letter I had published in EDGE magazine issue E220 about two months ago. It’s in response to Steven Poole’s column in E214. Enjoy.

My letter:

“I was very disappointed with Steven Poole’s column in Edge 214 about people seemingly deciding that in order for a medium to count as “mature” it must be able elicit tears from you. From the start I immediately wanted to stop and correct him, especially when he asks “Why is crying thought superior to, or more authentic than, laughing, or feeling terrified, or joyously triumphant, etc ?” The point is that all of those latter emotions are already abundant and widely experienced in games. No one’s asking for those because we already have loads. It’s not that games that make you cry are more mature, it’s that they’re practically non-existent in our medium.

Here’s an analogy. Imagine I want a cheese sandwich and I go to the supermarket and get bread, margarine, cucumber and tomatoes. I go to the checkout and say “I’m making a cheese sandwich.” The cashier says “Well you’ll probably want some cheese, then.” I could respond by saying I have all the ingredients I need to make a basic sandwich, but she’d be well within her rights to say: “Yes, but if you want a cheese sandwich, you’ll need to put some cheese in it.” If I took Steven’s column as a rule, I would probably ask her why she thinks cheese is so much a more important constituent of a cheese sandwich than, say, bread or margarine. I imagine at this point she’d either explain to me that she saw I already had all the other ingredients and didn’t feel she needed to mention them, call security or go and fetch the damn cheese herself.

I agree that some developers may blindly be taking the crying theme a little too seriously, but to criticise people for holding one emotion above all others when in fact they were merely pointing out a missing ingredient from the “maturity” formula was, in my opinion, misguided.”

Response:

“The problem with Steven Poole, of course, is that he’s never had to make a cheese sandwich in his life. (It’s all butlers and maids at his gated hacienda.) So perhaps we should cut him some slack.”

One-handed Gaming

To complete my trio of posts about games I’m going to talk about something I was meant to post in February when I broke my wrist learning how to snowboard. In case you were wondering, snowboarding is very hard and you should probably learn to ski first. This is certainly what I plan to do after I get over my newly acquired fear of being up very high mountains.

As a result I was forced to consider what it would be like to have to play games one-handed and so here is my report of being a disabled gamer. My first go at one-handed gaming was on the DS and, specifically, Professor Layton. There’s only one word for this – success. With my cast on and being completely unable to move my wrist, being able to hold the stylus like a pen was ideal and, in the case that you can literally only use one hand, laying the DS on a flat surface means you can still play games on it. I don’t believe the same can be said of the PSP although the PSP does fall into the same gaming category as the 360, which was my next attempt.

It turns out that, even with my cast on, it was just about possible to play games using a standard controller on the Xbox 360 – but it wasn’t very comfortable. Having said that, I did eventually get used to it and it hardly affected my ability to play well at all (I presume this goes similarly for the PSP). Contrary to the DS, however, having literally only one hand wouldn’t work on standard controllers, but you probably could’ve guessed that already. As for peripheral games like Rock Band and DJ Hero, they really were impossible with a cast on so that was the first major failure.

Now we get to why this subject is in fact very, very interesting:- Sony’s Move, and Microsoft’s Kinect. There have been a lot of comparisons between these competitors concerning how well they copy the Wii perform as non-standard games controllers and it’s obvious from the point of view of having a broken wrist that the Kinect must win in this comparison. In fact, assuming you still have an arm and assuming it has a range of decent games available for it, it’s a better gaming platform than the DS.

Here is the point of this piece:

If you’ve got this far, I really hope that at some point you’ve thought “Why in God’s name do we care how someone with a broken wrist plays games? It’s so specific and not at all appropriate.” or something similar and I hope that because you’ve then hopefully also realised that this post isn’t really about trying to play games one-handed. This post is about trying to put yourself in another person’s position and trying, as a designer, to make it so that your product is as accessible as possible. This even goes as far as being left-handed, which, despite describing roughly 10% of the world’s population, is often completely forgotten about (much to Apple’s recent embarrassment).

Not being able to play games because of a physical issue is one of the medium’s major disadvantages but the amount of coverage this side of gaming gets is very slim. When I was at university, I had the honour of covering the Science Museum’s Game On exhibition in 2006, during which I got to try a game designed for blind people called Chillingham. It was difficult for me to get into it but the potential was certainly there. A quick search also reveals that many people have tried to create games specifically for disabled people but it certainly feels like the funding just simply isn’t there.

On Wednesday I wrote about how storytelling in games compares to film and literature but what I didn’t mention then was the barrier to entry that games have that these other two media do not. In fact, the same two most common things that might stop you watching a film – blindness and deafness – also stop you from playing a game (at least films generally come with subtitles). At least, this is the perception. An article in the Guardian from Naomi Alderman talks about “videoless games” and is a really interesting insight into the things games are capable of. After all, I began Wednesday’s piece complaining that games were trying too hard to be like films; well, how many films do you know that work without video?

Storytelling in Games: The Role of Environment

I’m not the only one in the world to think that too many games from the latest generation(s) have tried far too hard to try and emulate films. The temptation is obvious:- games do appear to have a great deal in common with film but that’s where the similarity ends. There’s a blogpost or presentation by Adrian Hon I recall where he comments on the fervour around GTA IV when it was released and how certain writers described the story as being better than The Godfather‘s – when in reality, if viewed with any kind of scrutiny, this was patently not the case.

I brought this up at one of the Guardian Blog’s Breakfasts at GameCity last month by saying the reason I thought games like Rockstar‘s GTA IV and the recent Red Dead Redemption felt like they had stories that were more engaging than some big-name films, were because their environments were so complete and, rather than have a single story thread that the player must laboriously follow, they provided the opportunity to tell hundreds of stories through their environments – such as with the vast number of radio stations that players could choose from while driving in GTA IV, which provided comment and news from in-game characters.

It occurs to me that a strength that videogames have over film and literature is their ability to create environments that players can explore at their own convenience and that have the ability to tell hundreds or even thousands of stories auxiliary to the central plot. At was at this point that I was countered by Adam Saltsman who interrupted me to say that the film Stalker by Andrey Tarkovsky did a perfect job of using environments to tell stories. My point, however, was that, although it’s not impossible for films or books to do it, it was an advantage that games had because the character is under the control of the player rather than under the control of the author. On the flip-side and for the opposite reason, pure narrative is an advantage that films and books have over games. Having said that, however, it’s still not impossible for games to be competent and tell their stories purely with a narrative rather than with the environment.

The best example I can think of this is the recently released Enslaved: Odyssey to the West from Ninja Theory, which, although I’m currently only halfway through the main story, is really engaging despite not using the environment at all for storytelling. It helps that it’s fun to play too. In this particular case it helps that the script has been co-written by Alex Garland who was responsible for the novel The Beach and for the screenplays of Sunshine and 28 Days Later (here is an interview that Alex gave to Edge magazine about writing and videogames). Having a professional author and screenwriter on the writing credits is very rare, and of course this may change in future, but I really hope that this trend does not become the norm.

Why, you may ask, do I wish that this does not become the norm? Because, as I pointed out before, games have an advantage that films and books do not have: the environment. As such, perhaps screenwriters are not the most apt writers of future videogames. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather have a professionally written narrative in a sea of bland stories that don’t engage from any angle, but I personally feel that the best stories in games will have very little in common with the best stories from film and literature. And in my opinion, that’s how it should be.