From Cyberspace to Composite: Two Fantasies of Hacking

Once upon a time, in the early years of the internet, nobody knew you were a dog.

In those days, nobody knew that I wasn’t really a 21-year-old graphic designer from Britain either. Every night, in the witching hour, I would sneak down to my father’s study, furtively unlock the door, and spend all night flirting on IRC with well-built Australian women. Tom Brindle had left the key in the lock once after losing a particularly savage drinking contest to our mother, and I cycled the three miles into town to get a copy cut. From then on, it didn’t matter who ‘sat’ on my ‘lap’ or what weird shit I wanked to, because it happened in a place as placeless and secret as Narnia.

Watching the trailer for Ubisoft’s forthcoming Watch Dogs reminded me of those nights because I feel sure they couldn’t have come from the same planet. Ubi’s game belongs to the world of Foursquare, Girls Around Me, and geotagged Twitter posts, where I can sit on a train and watch my best friend’s kid nephew’s tween Twitter spats. But I didn’t get social networking until I was 18 and didn’t ‘get’ it for another year after that. My adventures took place in the world of another hacking game: Introversion’s 2001 classic Uplink. Existing more than a decade apart, these games represent two very different fantasies of what role technology plays in our lives.

Conference Report: GameCamp

At a lecture given to the RSA, Everything Bad Is Good For You author Steven Johnson asked: “Where do good ideas come from?” In five minutes he outlined a theory that the most fertile environment for ideas is one where they can meet, bounce off each other and joyfully breed – where half-formed hunches can combine through conversation to emerge as beautiful butterflies. That’s why the coffee houses were the intellectual centre of 18^th century London - and it's also why GameCamp is a good idea.

Reality is Beastly: when videogames meet thirteenth century heresy

In a parallel universe, I start this article by declaring how sodding tired I am of games about the 13^th-century Catharite heresy and its persecution by the Catholic Church. Sadly, in this world, there is only L’Abbaye Des Morts. Dealing with a dark and obscure annex of European history, creator Locomalito opts for the dark and obscure conventions of classic insta-death platformers like Manic Miner. But because of how it uses these conventions, it is – delightfully – not just a game about the Cathars, but a Catharite game.

We have a Tumblr, apparently

Not content with stinking up this blog, my malodorous brother Jimmy Brindle has established a Brindle Family tumblr on which she is reposting our articles alongside pwetty pictures, along with a bunch of original content and her general 'thoughts' (ha!) on videogames. You can 'follow' her there, and 'reblog' her, and 'ask' her, and do all kinds of social media things, if that's to your taste. Hopefully this will keep her busy at a safe distance, and if you are coming here from Tumblr...welcome! Please ignore everything I just said about your social network, I'm sure it's lovely.

I Will Eat You And Everything You Love: Metal Gear Solid 3

In 2007, the Brindle family fortune was divided equally between each brother, there being no will to determine otherwise. Last month, however, one of us – I’m not saying who – claimed to have uncovered just such a document in one of Tom Brindle’s old filing cabinets. After the initial brouhaha, expert analysis and cryptographic elbow grease eventually confirmed that the document was merely an invoice to a long-dead developer for selling them the concept of ‘escort missions’. Anyway, that’s why there haven’t been any posts for a while. We’re back now, I guess. What else are we going to do?

I wanted to respond specifically to Bunbury’s post about Metal Gear Solid. There,  he argues that the game benefits the more it resembles Pac-Man, and claims that stealth games – and games generally – are better when their rules and mechanics are explicit, clear,  known. That may be so, but to me, it’s Metal Gear Solid 3 that most resembles Pac-Man – because it’s all about eating.

Sneaking on the D-Pad: Why Metal Gear Solid benefits from being like Pac-Man

1998. That’s fourteen years ago now - more if you’re a citizen of the future. I remember fondly the time I spent as a youngster; enjoying 90s action films when I was too young to realise they were genuinely crap, watching children’s cartoons when I was too young to realise they were genuinely brilliant and wondering why my penis felt all tingly and nice when I hugged a pillow between my legs and thought of Kate Winslet. They were simpler times, really – videogames being no exception.

The Family Grows

As is becoming clear, other members of the Brindle family are now returning to the fold. Jimmy, who appears to be under the delusion that she is welcome here, has already introduced herself sufficiently, and made it quite clear what kind of contribution she intends to make. It is against my better judgement that I allow her to remain, but what can you do? She’s blood.

Lest I give her the oxygen of tribute, let me instead introduce my other brother Bunbury Brindle, lately conveyed from the bohemia of San Francisco to that of Brighton. He will serve as our house artist, as well as writing articles, and it’s my sincere hope that this blog will allow him to make something of himself and renounce his formerly profligate and idle ways. Dear Bunbury – I am sorry for what happened to you. It’s okay. Nobody wants to hurt you here.

Yet.

Watch out tomorrow and in the following weeks for more from them.

ART IS A FLACCID PENIS: the Death of the Brindle Blog

When my brother John asked me if I would write an article for his video games blog (“asked” being used here as an uncommon but technically correct synonym as listed in Webster's New World Thesaurus for “viciously and cold-heartedly blackmailed with certain ill-gotten photographs”), I was all too happy to oblige him. When I in turn sought permission to write an article about whether games are art or not, he said “don't take the fucking piss jimmy you know the rules argybargy wot wot pip pip” and some other British things that I'm pretty sure mean “yes, please do.”

No one can accuse little Jimmy Brindle of misjudging an audience, and I know nothing moistens your cuntflaps like a self-legitimizing exploration of the question Are games art? Some may argue that we’ve settled this debate already, the lot of us coming away with our heels dug into our preferred answers. But while it’s generally agreed that games have the capacity to be legitimate art, the theoretical concerns underpinning that debate - what legitimacy looks like for games, who confers it, and what relation it has to other artforms - did not die but instead reassembled themselves in a new popular resurgence of ludology vs narratology (i.e. ‘ontologically suspect formalism vs something else apparently about emotions,’ a debate about aesthetic quality now stumbling across the blogosphere in the sheepskin of a methodological debate academia settled five years ago).

Moral Psychopaths: Blizzard's community policy is a sense-free zone

Once upon a time, on a little World of Warcraft server where I used to play, there was a guild called <LAZERYATTACKPEWPEW>. And that would have been the end of the story – but this was a Roleplaying server, where special rules demanded that guild names accord with the game’s atmosphere of cod-medieval fantasy. One day, the guild’s leader got a letter from a community moderator. which said the guild’s name had been reported for violating the roleplay naming policy and changed accordingly. With a wave of his magic wand, the moderator had given the guild a new name, far more in keeping with the ethos of roleplay: <Sword attack klangklang>.

This was the story that came to mind last week when Fox Van Allen reported on Joystiq that Blizzard’s swear filter had until recently censored 'homosexual' and 'transsexual' but let through 'fag' and 'faggot'. The connection struck me not because the whimsical flouting of policy and the predictable wailing and gnashing of roleplayer teeth that ensued are any way comparable either to the scandal of the swear filter or the hubbub surrounding it, but because it demonstrates how frequently Blizzard are either unwilling or unable to understand the purpose of their own rules. Come with me, traveller, on a journey into the crazy world of Warcraft.