rotational

“A man or woman on the street in any year in the 20th century groomed and dressed in the manner of someone from 27 years earlier would look like a time traveler, an actor in costume, a freak.”

Vanity Fair recently published an article by Kurt Anderson about American culture slowing its rate of innovation, pointing out that in many ways there’s far less difference between the fashion style of today and that of 1992 than the difference between, say, 1992 and 1972, or 1972 and 1952.

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Since New Year’s Eve I’ve been quietly wondering whether there’s a really good game you can play at a dinner party with a good variety of friends. You know, both game players and not. Jocks and nerds – the mix.

To end 2011, we took part in a murder mystery dinner party at a friends’ house. It was based on a boxed game called Death By Chocolate. A prominent American chocolate maker called Billy Bonker has been found dead, and for some reason a peculiarly colourful set of characters have gathered for dinner, and one of them did it.

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Sorry for this screed, but it appears I haven’t had my Delicious links properly linked up lately. It’s worth it, I swear, if only for the casu marzu.

• The Suits of James Bond – Well, just that, really. Good fetishism.
• Clive Thompson: Will the word processor destroy our ability to think? – Looking at the impact of cut and paste on writing, and asking the question: has it changed the way we think? I can’t really imagine writing anything fully structured in one pass, but I must have done so when I was at school and early university. It’s strange to realise how alien the concept is now.
• Designing Media: Interviews – Hyper interesting – a series of fantastic four-minute interviews with leading editors, designers and writers about the changing form of media, all to publicise Bill Moggridge’s new Designing Media book. Includes Neil Stevenson on making PopBitch, Chris Anderson on Wired’s relationship with its website, Ira Glass on telling narratives and Mark Zuckerberg on sharing and social connections.
• The Twitter Hulks – From Feminist Hulk to Cross-dressing Hulk, Lit-crit Hulk to Film-crit Hulk.
• Paleo-Future Blog: Dawn of the Wireless Phone – Professor William Edward Ayrton wondered in 1901 what it would mean to have portable, wireless telephones: “Think of what this would mean, of the calling which goes on every day from room to room of a house, and then think of that calling extending from pole to pole, not a noisy babble, but a call audible to him who wants to hear, and absolutely silent to all others. It would be almost like dreamland and ghostland, not the ghostland cultivated by a heated imagination, but a real communication from a distance based on true physical laws.”
• Chris Burden’s Metropolis II – “It includes 1,200 custom-designed cars and 18 lanes; 13 toy trains and tracks; and, dotting the landscape, buildings made of wood block, tiles, Legos and Lincoln Logs. The crew is still at work on the installation. In “Metropolis II,” by his calculation, “every hour 100,000 cars circulate through the city,” Mr. Burden said. “It has an audio quality to it. When you have 1,200 cars circulating it mimics a real freeway. It’s quite intense.”"
• Batman symbols – Must be most, if not all of the Batman symbols. A remarkable range of shapes, but all maintain its distinctive identity.
• NYT: The Attention-Span Myth – “At some point, we stopped calling Tom Sawyer-style distractibility either animal spirits or a discipline problem. We started to call it sick…” What exactly is an attention span? And is it really good to have one? Great piece of assumption busting.
• Nine Eyes of Google Street View – Jon Rafman’s cuts of Street View, showing beauty and ugliness, humour and horror in momentary, sliced, sections of the world. Makes you realise that, though public, streets tend to go often unobserved. And it’s a project that seems rooted in a kind of compulsive madness of panning and zooming. Deckard surely has nothing on Rafman.
• The Atlantic: The 12 Timeless Rules for Making a Good Publication – The Atlantic’s mid-20th century exceedingly elegant and thoughtful editorial guidelines. My favourite: “Always remember that the fastidious element in the Atlantic audience is its permanent and valuable core.”
• Clay Shirky: The Times’ Paywall and Newsletter Economics – Guess what! Shirky doesn’t think it’s been an enormous success. Expanding on that, the venture “suggests that paywalls don’t and can’t rescue current organizational forms”.
• On Set: Empire Strikes Back – Vanity Fair – Pictures from the set of Empire Strikes Back show the wonderful mundanity of making fantasy. Mattresses scattered beneath the platform during the climatic scene between Vader and Skywalker, model makers towering above AT-ATs. Also, check the way they created the yellow scrolling text at the start – they actually filmed it.
• Human landscapes in SW Florida – Patterns amid natural forms in new housing estates in Florida.
• Cheese I’m afraid of #43: casu marzu – Maggot-riddled casu marzu from Sardinia doesn’t sound like my thing. It’s eaten with thousands of maggots still in it, maggots which are not only able to jump six inches but also have mouthhooks which they can use to tear up your insides.

• A short history of Team Fortress 2 updates – Smart Tom Francis looks at how Valve has built on its Team Fortress multiplayer shooter since release in 2007 with a raft of character abilities which have fundamentally changed the way the game plays (two of which Francis came up with himself, more or less).

London design agency Berg has released a video presenting its fascinating proposal, made for magazine publisher Bonnier, for a tablet interface for magazines. Everyone’s doing it these days – Time Inc. released a video showing a prototype for Sports Illustrated, while a video of Conde Nast’s Wired tablet app appeared at Wired promotional event last month. All in preparation for the rumoured appearance of Apple’s 10-inch tablet in January.

It’s all at once fascinating, exciting and scary for paper magazine producers like me.

I think Berg’s design is the smartest of the lot, because it demonstrates the greatest knowledge of magazines’ strengths rather than attempt to simply bring video and connected information into a kind-of magazine layout. Designer Matt Webb knows them deeply, grasping in particular their quality of finality – that you have a finite amount of edited content to enjoy, a property which I think makes magazines more approachable and allows them to feel more complete, paradoxically, and therefore satisfying to consume than the ever-swelling nature of RSS readers and websites.

Sure, in a broad sense, the proposal takes iPhone interaction design and applies it to a larger screen. And it does rather emphasise the bounded nature of the screen – to see a spread you must turn the tablet to landscape and zoom out; to read a column it’s best to turn it to portrait and zoom in. And though swiping left and right quickly allows you to browse adjacent pages, and there’s a neat visual trick which gives a sense of how far through the publication you are, the concept needs work in leading and teasing readers through the pages in order to provide an analogue for your ability to flick though a magazine in order to read it.

I do, however, love the way the tablet senses the reader picking it up, switching from displaying the cover to the inside pages. And, crucially, the the project does point to an ‘e-magazine’ enabled future which absolutely takes the strengths of magazine design and editorial principles and builds on them. It rather emphasises the ‘excited’ bit of the feelings I have for the coming revolution to my trade.

Videogames give players choices. That’s because they’re interactive. Some people say a good game is a series of interesting choices. And games are beginning to give players a lot of choices to choose from.

Over the last few months, in my winding, amateur sort of way, I’ve been playing through Fallout 3. A role-playing videogame set in an alternative, post-apocalyptic future US, imagined as if the 1950s never quite went away, one of its big features is a great number of scenarios designed to allow players to decide how they tackle them. An often discussed, and probably the most interesting, is the Tenpenny Tower quest. For those wishing to avoid spoilers, you’d probably best not read on.

Tenpenny Tower is a luxury hotel left standing alone in the wasteland just outside what remains of Washington DC. Its rich occupants have gated it and posted guards to ensure no one undesirable can get in. And when you arrive, there’s a ghoul, called Roy, outside, demanding to be let in. Irradiated and mutated humans, ghouls are Fallout 3’s underclass, and the inhabitants of Tenpenny Tower definitely don’t want to let him in. In fact, the chief of the guards asks you to kill him.

On travelling to the dingy, underground home that Roy shares with his partner and friend, you realise how militant he is against those in society that have turned him and his kind aside, and he asks you to help him invade Tenpenny Tower with a pack of feral ghouls, mutated humans that have gone homicidally mad. But in your conversation with Roy, you realise that you also have a chance of convincing him that there might be a way of negotiating with Tenpenny Tower’s inhabitants so that he and his gang can move in peacefully.

So there are three possible and far-reaching outcomes: you can choose to kill Roy, you can choose to help him kill the occupants of Tenpenny Tower, or you can try to negotiate a non-violent solution. And, by God, you’ll find yourself wanting to try it all. You can save and reload at any time in Fallout 3, and I often find myself saving at a point where I can make a choice in order to experience each outcome and choose the most beneficial. And, in the case of Tenpenny Towers, the outcomes, particularly the peaceful one, are fascinating. If Roy moves in, you can go away and revisit to find that both sides are getting along well. But if you come back once again, you’ll find all the humans dead and stripped of their clothes and possessions in the basement because of a ‘disagreement’. Though much of Fallout 3 is pretty simple and morally predictable, sometimes it likes to give you a big surprise.

So I’m playing all this with multiple saves, Fallout 3’s carefully engineered storylines and choices fractured and displaced as I zip between them, sampling and testing to find the one I like, and profit from, best. I’m essentially thumbing my nose at an artificial world that’s designed to be naturalistic, with its sunsets and sunrises, its flora and fauna, its crumbing tarmac and crackling swing music, its attempts to provide believable reactions to my pluralistic actions. And I feel slightly cheap for it.

That’s why I respect and love Shiren The Wanderer. Gleefully anachronistic, this game is a Japanese take on the Rogue-like RPG. Don’t worry about what that means – all you need to know is that it’s extremely complex, with a great number of different items and monsters that have a vast array of different effects. To understand how they all work, and how you can survive, takes a long time, and in Shiren The Wanderer, death means your adventure is over. With the game’s world randomly generated each time you play, every attempt you make is different, and filled with serendipity and chance – and you can’t save. You’ll slowly learn tactics and techniques – choices – that will help you survive longer and longer, but you’ll die crushing deaths over and over again.

But as frustrating as each death fleetingly is, it’d be meaningless without its finality. In Shiren The Wanderer you can’t erase your choices. But just the chance to have had a really stupid death (for funnies), a really tense and exciting death (for kicks), or, most importantly, a really instructive death (for experience), can make a death a means in itself.

That’s not really true for Fallout 3. Though its creators have attempted to make sure there’s something of value – and something negative – in every outcome, there’s always a niggling sense that you’re missing something, that you’ve failed in some way, that there’s something better if you do things another way, and you can always rewind through your saves to try and fix things. And as you do so, you’re splintering its story and diluting the clarity of the choices it offers.

My question, then, goes back to that moment I’m standing before Roy as I try to decide whether to kill him, help him kill others or try to make everyone get along. Would it be more interesting and meaningful if whatever I choose is final? Or does Fallout 3 gain something from allowing me freedom to hop around it, spatially and temporally, as if it’s some sort of 4D hypertext?

I’m going to have a good think about that, and write about it in another post very soon.