I can’t come back from this; I’m a monster.
I can feel the anger inside me,
but I am…still, somewhere inside me, more than that…
…better than that.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY PLAYED TO THE END OF FARCRY 3.

So I just finished playing Farcry 3.  After quickly peeking over the shoulder of my flatmate a couple weeks ago and being awed by the beauty of the world he was playing in and wanted a piece of it myself.

The game is…incredible.  To say that it is immersive would be an understatement.  With open-world RPGs I always stick to two main rules:

1. No Stat Farming : I’ve found in past games that I’ve kept an eye on my stats to ensure that I’m doing things in the most skill/experience-point efficient way.  The enjoyment gained from having a powerful character does not exceed the enjoyment gained from an immersive game.
   
2. No Fast-Travelling : Unless the game actively requires you to (ie. repeatedly sends to to other sides of the map that would take > 20mins to get to via in-game transport).  Without the loading-screen of fast-travel you stay inside the game for longer and aren’t confronted with the fact that you’re playing a game.
   
   
3. BONUS POINT: Don’t die.  Facing any sort of loading screen just pulls you out from the immersion.

So I followed these rules for Farcry, and it’s been a Bank Holiday weekend (what, with Easter and all), so for the last 4 days I’ve been playing it straight…and I mean straight.  It’s pretty much all I’ve done for the last 4 days, so that definitely helped with the immersion.

The problem is, this is a violent game; on behalf of your character (Jason Brody) you are killing people.  Albeit ‘bad’ people but you are still first-person taking folks down through whatever means you can, and you’re enjoying it.  On the surface this isn’t such a great thing to be so absolutely immersed in.

This is where a well-written storyline and script come in.  Your violence, in this game, destroys everything around you; alienates you from your girlfriend, your friends, and puts you into a position where you step over lines of humanity that are met with ‘what am I becoming?’.

The answer is provided in the last lines of the game (see top).

After living in the jungle for the last 4 days, you absolutely understand when the words ‘I can’t come back from this’ are said; when the game fades out and ends you are left sad that only the real-world beckons.  There’s no-one to save, no wilderness to explore and real-life feels so superficial.  I can imagine this is how soldiers fees, but on a grander scale, after they return from war.

But you are still left with the words ‘I’m better than this’ as you sit there listening to the final outro music.  The effect is profound.

After the credits you can continue playing on the island, but I didn’t want to.  Jason Brody has had his revelation and now needed to come back from this, to recover.  It would have all been for nothing if I just go back into the jungle and start shooting things again.

This is the profound effect of a well-written game.  I’ve now got to go and think about how this has changed my outlook and perspective on things.

‘…better than that.’

All countries are rubbish. I’m not patriotic. Everybody should just live in a city and we should build up instead of across. This is because the outskirts of cities are depressing. So are the suburbs. So are satellite towns and rural villages. The countryside should be international no man’s land so that people have wilderness to wander.

On a bus atm, going through the SE towards Brighton. Everywhere is rubbish. Brighton has the sea and is close to London, so that’s ok. That said, find me a city by the sea and I’d probably fall in love with it.

Anyhow - if any of you live in Brighton drop me a message and we’ll have risky I-only-know-you-online-this-is-so-weird drinks! They’re the best kinda drinks! Oddly I’ve had a fair few in my life…

As always, as I’ve ever known - things are once again EXCEEDINGLY tight.  One of my clients from waaaay back still hasn’t paid up, so I’m now £60 away from the edge of my overdraft.  I’ve got at least £525 coming in before the end of the month (plus the £200 the client owes) and I need a total of £800+ to move to Brighton and start this course.

It’s gonna be tiiiiight.

My diet for the past few weeks has consisted of an orange, a kiwi, a plum, a doughnut and a bread roll each day.  Works out at £1.80 per day.  Not the best I’ve done, but still pretty good.

Holy crap it’s gonna be tight.
I’m getting butterflies. 

threedaysofrain:

1. If God exists, is he an author? Is coincidence a kind of foreshadowing? Does the universe have a Dramatis Personae at the start, like a translation of a Tolstoy novel? And are we all equal, or does someone get to play Anna Karenina?
2. Does God hate me less for the fact that I wish I could believe in him?
3. If hipsters are postmodern, how is it that hating hipsters is also postmodern? Is being postmodern about postmodernism postmodern? What about post-postmodernism? What even is that?
4. Is introducing young women (young PEOPLE) to feminism via the body acceptance movement not just another way of reducing women to a sum of their parts?
5. Does the misogyny and racism of Lars Von Trier mean I should boycott his films? What about Roman Polanski? Should extremely talented artists be allowed to continue their craft as a public service and find their abhorrent crimes go unpunished? Can genius be argued to in any way elevate a criminal above the law?
6. To expect the people who love you to continue to do so, should you try not to change? Or should you try to change yourself in a dancing, partnered way, as they do, like a tango?
7. Are all dead people the same? Why do I find it moving and emotional, visiting the remains of idols and family members and other people I respect? Is my urge to behave “respectfully” in graveyards a way of honouring the dead or a way of placating the living?
8. Is loving a skewed perception of someone real love? Does building someone up in your mind mean that you only love a figment? How is it even possible to love objectively?
9.  If I am lonely, but there is no one around to whom I can express this loneliness, am I a tree in a forest? Am I lonely?
10. And really, honestly (and I don’t mean this in an angsty way, and I’m not just asking because it seems like the best way to end this sort of a list), what is the point?

(Answers on the back of a postcard, please.)

This human being, folks.  This.

In an attempt to stop myself from spending too much time wasting time on the internet and procrastinating, I’ve given myself a sort of rota for each day - including time for everything that I want to do, and should do…and my working day is only 6hrs long (with a 30min break)!

For those who are interested:

Read More

So, I’ve always been a gamer; a PC gamer at that, and to top it all of I’m a bit of a gaming snob.  That doesn’t mean that I only like vintage games or whatever else you think it means- it just means that I don’t like it when key game elements are rushed, or if key gameplay elements are removed in order for the company to make more money (a la Sims).

So when I game, I do keep finding myself gravitating towards games back before EA became the developer-guzzling gameplay-destroying monopolising bastards that they are now.  I’m utterly obsessed with Sid Meier’s : Alpha Centauri again now, and I always play to the endgame.  I play the highest difficulty setting each time, but because I know the game so well, I find myself winning so easily that I find myself terraforming the entire world and role-playing a TBS game!

But then again, I really dug the idea of Terraforming in Spore as well (another game which was awesome before EA got it’s paws on it), so I think in about a year from now, once I’ve started to learn some real code.  I’m going to start working on a game with a focus on terraforming. 

I don’t know more than that, but I do know I’ll probably be using parts of the program I wrote a while back which simulates a tree growing from a seed; a tree that is unique each time because the branches grow in the direction of the sun, and the speed of growth changes with the rainfall and the soil…and the tree drops its own seeds etc.  Okay, so I wrote a forest simulator, not a tree simulator.  But I’ll be using it.

Exciting times!

Our generation is a strange one.  When I say ‘our’, I am talking about the current generation, say…aged 18 - 30ish.  We’ve seen computing power come from text-based adventure gameing to being able to manage and run an entire city.  We’ve seen the internet come from AOL chatrooms to an entity which is now almost flawlessly integrated within our day-to-day lives; with advertising and the media keeping up with that degree of permeation.

We have grown up to become masters of PR.  We control our digital images and our real-life actions through a screen of wider-perception; would this affect how people see me?  Interest in Me Ltd has fallen recently, I should organise a promotion campaign on Twitter.  I should leave comments on all my friend’s walls so that they don’t forget me.

I have worked with charities and organisations calling for change, for people power, but still unable to think outside of the rules of Public Relations.  Protests are no longer expressions of outrage; they are turned into ‘fun days out’ so as not to ‘tarnish’ the image of the organisation with any real emotion.  Everything has become symbolism without the follow-through.

Despite the fact that I’m sure we all have wildly varying political opinions- I’m sure that we can all agree that our personal political power has waned during the course of each our lives.  We are now only allowed to protest in designated areas.   Only if we stick to a pre-arranged route.  Otherwise we are declared a ‘riot’ or a ‘terrorist theat’ - and that’s only in the UK, which has oodles more in the way of civil & political freedoms than the states!

But I’m not writing this post about politics.  I’m writing this post more as a response to our worries and thoughts.  We have grown up with the most powerful PR tools in the world at our fingertips, and we have grown up learning how to use them effectively.  We have grown up as masters of information and of perception of information; but now we need to use those tools as a human asset and not as a corporate one.

We are not companies & corporations that need publicity and advertising in order to thrive.  

We are human beings who need hugs, kisses, excited talks about nothings, awkward moments, loud moments, quiet moments, deep meaningful talks when everyone’s gone to bed at parties, sunshine, heartbreaks, romance, smiles, poetry, music, affirmation and love. 

So chill out!  Stop worrying about what people think of you so much. Stop Facebook-stalking your friends and just give them a call instead.  First, we regain our humanity, then we take this digital age into some seriously awesome territory.

This is not Facebook.  If you add me, that does not make me want to add you; in fact, it makes me want to block you- annoyed that you’re trying to cash in on Tumblr because it’s obviously a rad & creative place.

Learn some manners- don’t call us, we’ll call you.

Yes, I’m looking at you ‘The Jude’.

Maybe it’s because I’m not a coffee buff (yet), but coffee just smells infinitely better than it tastes, and the ground beans smell better before they’ve had water poured through them.  It’s odd.  I can open a packet of coffee and the smell instantly hits me in the same way that nostalgia would; less an assault on the senses than on my memory; which is odd, seeing as nobody anywhere I’ve lived has really been THAT into coffee for it to play a major part in my life.

Either way, I started drinking the stuff for real about 2 months ago- trying to see what the attraction is.  I don’t fully ‘get’ it yet, and I don’t get a coffee buzz, but I know that a year from now I’ll have associations with the taste of coffee and late night web design in a rural welsh cottage listening to cat power…

…which doesn’t sound all that bad when I say it like that.

I’m good at dealing with what’s thrown at me. In fact- as long as I have time, I can do pretty much anything. It’s when there’s a deadline; an inescapable deadline looming overhead that I start to struggle.

It’s why I don’t set alarms in the morning- if I wake up naturally and when I’m ready then I get stuff done at my own pace…if I set an alarm then I wake up hating the day the moment it begun. With alarms, you go to bed thinking ‘right, I have 6 hours left before my alarm goes off- I’d better get to sleep quickly!’ (and you never do)

So it’s sinking in and hitting me hard the fact that I’ve got a week to get this all together and find all this money so that I can have a home next week…and the whirlwind happens. I’ve only ever had this once before; the feeling that all your insides are spinning in your body and you’ve got to keep control of it or you’re just going to burst.

This has got to be where the phrase ‘keeping it together’ comes from- cos that what it feels like. A struggle between you and your body- where it wants to disassemble and you would much rather stay in one piece.