Tag Archives: me

On boredom

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This is a post from my old blog, circa early 2006. It was probably its most successful in terms of readers (a modest claim, to be honest) and how pleased I was with it, and it also generated some angry responses, accusing me of petty, bourgeois narrow mindedness. That wasn’t my intention at all, of course – I just kinda thought that there was a a new generation of people that had forgotten, or had never experienced, true boredom in a world  increasingly tuned to providing continuous partial attention. Self-indulgent it may be, but here it is again – now with footnotes!

We took our son to our book club yesterday evening. We all met at a bar restaurant place under the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank, and we spent a glorious three hours talking about Rodinsky’s Room and uproariously deciding what book to read next1.

And all the time, little eight month old Jack2 was there, playing with bits of paper, being bounced about, smiling at people and (eventually) sleeping in his pushchair, but, naturally, marginalised from the main activity. And I got to thinking about how bored I used to get as a child, how I remember the hours of being dragged to places by my parents, made to wait as they had mystifyingly entertaining conversations with friends, or watched stuff on telly or went round National Trust properties3. In fact, an abiding memory of being a kid with my parents is of boredom4.

And I realised that I can’t really remember the last time I was truly bored. Whenever people tell me that they’re bored, I often find myself telling them that I love being bored. I’m wrong, of course. I mean that I love being aimless – fiddling about with whatever’s at hand. I don’t really know what it is to be bored any more. There’s so much to do – play a videogame, watch one of our backed up Lovefilm DVDs, read a one of my many backed up books, flick through one of my many backed up Edges5, read my backed up Bloglines feeds, write a review for Pixelsurgeon6, write a post, like now, for Rotational…

And these are just the things I like doing. Then there’s cleaning the flat7, sorting through all that paperwork that I keep putting into great, horrifying untidy piles, wash some clothes, get some bloody milk we can’t keep spooning baby milk powder into coffee8.

And before all that there’s looking after the boy.

Even on long journeys I don’t get bored – there’s DS and reading and watching Sin City on PSP and listening to music…9 Bored just doesn’t come into it any more.

I guess that’s good, but I’m not sure. Could I cope without being endlessly stimulated by something or other? What if the electricity runs out?

  1. It was Flowers For Algernon – lovely stuff, too. The book club days remain treasured memories. ↩
  2. Now four and about to start at school. Jeepers. ↩
  3. Here’s the rub: making our final descent into middle age, last year we became members. ↩
  4. Though the kids often get frustrated that things don’t always revolve around them, they haven’t yet experienced the drawn-out horror of a long afternoon with nothing to do. Aside from the evergreen delights of Lego and felt-tip pens, now there’s the modern impositions of all-day Cbeebies and YouTube. ↩
  5. Oh, the irony. ↩
  6. Now up on blocks, it was a good illustrator/web design community. ↩
  7. Now a house and with one extra kid, so even more cleaning. ↩
  8. Yup. Still do that. ↩
  9. I love going on trains because they impose on you time you can’t do anything other than the things you have with you. With the advent of iPhone (or iPod Touch, in my case), though, continual distraction invades even the sanctity of First Great Western. ↩

Architecture and videogames panel

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For those interested, we made an mp3 of the panel discussion I chaired last week at Develop about the relationship between videogames and architecture available on Edge’s website. You can pick it up here – sound quality and the fact I only remembered to switch on my dictaphone a minute or so into my intro aside, I’m pretty pleased with the way it went.

By the way, you can find a couple of write-ups of the session at Gamasutra and Pixel-Lab.

Games = extreme architecture

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I’m doing a panel session at Develop on Wednesday about the relationship between architecture and videogames with Viktor Antonov, the art director behind Half-Life 2 and (the unfortunately on-hold) The Crossing, Rob Watkins, an architect-trained artist on Fable 2, and Rory Olcayto, features editor from The Architect’s Journal and an artist at developer Inner Workings in the late 90s.

Following are my introductory thoughts on the theme to get my head properly working on it all.

A lot is said about videogames’ closeness to film. But I’d like to suggest that another art form is much closer to videogames than that: architecture.

Just as games do, architecture influences behaviour and emotion, provides for certain needs and can be used to tell stories. It’s non-linear, too – unlike film. An architect I know once told me that he saw videogames as an extreme form of architecture, and I think he was right.

Look at the Natural History Museum, for instance. It’s a superbly practical place to show off huge skeletons and glass cases filled with stuffed animals to thousands of people a day. But it also subtly steers its visitors through its spaces, is suitably grand for a national museum and is a physical representation of Darwinian principles – with terracotta tiling that’s banded to look like stratified rock and featuring carved animals crawling up its columns.

Now think about a multiplayer map in Team Fortress 2 or Halo 3. Their forms are engineered to be fun killing grounds, designed for specific game types and to facilitate players to flow through their spaces in general patterns. Their decoration, meanwhile, is designed to extend their host games’ fictions or, in TF2’s case, tell their own.

And think about Super Mario 64, whose world is the game. Or Grand Theft Auto, in which a game is placed on top of an entire, credible city. Or Red Faction: Guerrilla, whose buildings have to have structural integrity because of the game’s physics system.

Think also about the way both videogames and architecture are germinated with a grand idea and a sprinkle of available technology before the practicalities take over – of working window seals and regulatory balustrade heights, graphics optimisation techniques and platform certification.

It’s time to stop thinking so much about the cosmetic similarities between games and film and look to architecture instead. [Insert panellists going into more depth with incredible insight and sparkling examples here.]

More themes:

  • The effect of the grim futures depicted in games on the imaginations.
  • Players becoming architects through The Sims and Far Cry 2’s map editor.
  • How to create dread though spatial design.
  • Architects’ jealousy of Halo 3’s heatmaps.
  • How architects can teach game designers how to design a fun game in an open world.

Hello world! (again)

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It’s time to stretch my writing legs a bit more, and therefore time to reinstate Rotational, a blog I managed to break irrevocably with overenthusiastic database fiddling a year or two ago.

What to expect: personal reflections on

  • videogames
  • spatial and visual design
  • technology and society
  • meeja odds and sods
  • stupid ephemera (should it not come under the above)

And a rather sporadic nature.