Birdbook Launch Tonight!

So we're finally there. The official launch of Birdbook 1: Towns, Parks, Gardens & Woodland is tonight at the Phoenix Artists Club on Charing Cross Road, from 7.30pm. We have a raft of poets reading, free pin badges to give away, some early proofs to display, a slideshow of the artwork to project, and the full range of books to sell. Lots of the artists are coming too, so looking forward to chatting with all the various contributors who came through for us on this truly collaborative project.

In other words, we've printed out a dummy Fuselit: Contraption and found that - yes! - the rivets and ribbon go well together. Slowly we inch our way towards rolling out the new, triple-format Fuselit for all to see...

Birdbook Poets Win Major Award

Nice headline-style heading for you there. Our newest and mightiest anthology, Birdbook: Towns, Parks, Gardens & Woodland, is already full of award-winning poets, but just to demonstrate that we aren't just picking up our leads after the trophies have been handed out, three more poets from the book - Tom Chivers, Holly Hopkins and Niall Campbell - have this week won much-coveted Eric Gregory awards. The Gregories, given annually by the Society of Authors, are awarded to the best five (give or take) British poets under 30.

Naturally, the search is under way to find poets for our upcoming projects who will win the award next year. Let's see if we can beat our record and get five out of five.

Errant gaming summary part 1 - the basic model

It's been a while since I've posted anything about what I've been working on - so I thought an overview might be in order to bring things bang up to date.

The methodology I was following through the spring was something I've called 'errant gaming'. It's a way of exploring the relationship between jokes and what I'm very crudely calling anomie. By anomie I just mean zones of indeterminacy, areas outside of social norms or formal rules. And by jokes, well, the rough formulation I'm working with is nonsense that makes sense, or mistakes that work. So something crazy which seems to have coherence, or taking it less linguistically, it could be when you kick a broken computer and it starts working.

The above diagram divides these interactions into two 'zones'. The first is jokes as agents of subversion, of detournement. But what I want to focus on is joking as a means of dealing with indeterminacy. If you think about it, once the rules break down, nothing you do is going to be right so you need some other strategy, and joking represents one of them.

Errant gaming tries to generate these zones of anomie in game contexts, in such a way they can be resolved by the players using different means. A errant game therefore needs two properties – it needs a hole, it needs indeterminacy, but it also needs a way of being shifted or changed to run, there have to be forces outside the game you can bring in.

So my first conception of an errant game the a card game I called 'Anomie', which I described some months a go. It's a card game whose dominant feature is that playing the joker that lets you do anything. So you could burn the cards, eat the deck, whatever. And in one game where I tested it, this card really became the point of the game – no one could follow what was happening, but everyone wanted a chance to do something silly.

My second experiment was quite different. It's called 'automata chess' - it's played like normal chess, but each time you take a piece you set it a rule – almost pseudo-computationally – which governs its movements. They're the pieces with the blue thimbles on them.

And here are the rules at this point.

The main thing to note with the game was the sheer level of mental exhaustion caused by having to constantly invent rules – and how this caused us to start cross referencing rules in order to retain sanity.

Now, at this particular moment of the game we had a bit of a weird situation – I'm in check, but automata 1 will block my check at the end of the move. So do I have to move out of check? We had no way of resolving this, and in the end had to resort to a randomised system – guessing what colour counter was in her hand.

Those two, and other minor tests, constitute what I call the basic model for Errant Gaming. And I then moved to working on the temporal model – which is an attempt to introduce this indeterminacy into game time. Why the shift to time? Well, I'll explain later...

Do a young poet a favour ...

... and tell them about the Foyle Young Poets Awards!

An amazing opportunity and exciting kick-off point for young writers, this free competition recognises talented poets between the ages of 11 and 17. On top of the prestige, the prizes can be found here.

I wish I'd known about the FYP awards when I was a slip of a thing. Now I shall live vicariously through all the fresh-faced poets out there - write, ye scurvy dogs!

Deadline is 31 July 2011 - spread the word!

Poetry 2011 - Initial thoughts

These are just some of the poetry books Kirsty and I have bought so far this year, and there's a whole load more coming over the hill. Donut released a bristlingly good clutch of them early in the year, while Salt and Bloodaxe are deploying first, second and sixth books by many high quality young(er) and old(er) poets over the spring and summer. This isn't some kind of feverish shit-at-the-wall mentality either - some of these books contain work written, honed, performed and published in journals over the span of a decade or more. Some of them are also simply beautiful objects, with months of work going into the presentation.

Some of these books I'll hopefully be reviewing in full in the coming months over at Irregular Features. My initial feelings about them, having read only a few in detail, are largely positive. Much of the poetry is dark, dense and slightly loopy, mining the idiosyncrasies of our shared culture deeply - these are books to make your brain drunk.

I am concerned, however, about how difficult it sometimes seems to find a poet's 'character' beneath the initial impression that they're very good at what they do. This is partly a problem with blurbs, which I just don't feel work hard enough to distinguish themselves from one another, and which are often the entry point for the reader. When I dip into so many books in quick succession from the same cultural hotbed, I tend to want to envision the authors as members of a superhero team. What are their individual powers and what does it mean for the team dynamic? That's partly because superheroes are so easy to explain to people. We've just come from the new X-Men movie, and I could tell you, say, that Banshee is the one with the supersonic scream, Beast is a genius scientist with apelike strength and catlike agility, Mystique can assume other forms etc. You'll get the gist, and maybe already know which one interests you the most. In an era of unprecedented choice, when people, you might think, would almost rather have decisions made for them then expend the effort of weighing up a plethora of possibilities, the problem of too many talented poets is one that manifests itself in continued low readership. People crave the 'good old days' of poetry because there were only half a dozen they had to have any opinion on. That is the be all and end all of 'greatness' - climbing to the forefront of the public conscience.

I certainly don't wish for a return to elitism and thoroughly disingenuous measures of quality. I'm glad there are so many skilled poets, and so many opportunities for them to be published. But overall, and as hard-working as the staff at our best presses are, I would like to see more done to solve the problem of surface uniformity. It's being addressed by some, certainly, but the issue needs more brains round the table. We talk of the 'pigeon-holing' done by the media and its ill effects, and worry about that obsession with the angle or the story, but in terms of snagging attention and create a viral outbreak of interest, it's an important weapon that the poetry culture could - maybe - seek to utilise more often.

Book and Game: For the Unitiated

[Book and Game is a new feature for Cut Out & Keep. We select a book and a game that are somehow thematically linked with the aim of cross-pollinating their audiences. Bookworms, try the game; Gamers, give the book a whirl!]

Rather than these two being thematically linked, however, I'm simply going to recommend the poetry book and game I think are most likely to convert the deeply hesitant and challenge their preconceptions of the respective mediums.

BOOK: The Solex Brothers (Redux), Luke Kennard (Salt Publishing, 2007)

None of the poems in The Solex Brothers have line breaks. They are all multi-parter short stories taking place in strange, constantly shifting miniature universes. In almost every paragraph, Kennard attempts to subvert one expectation or another. In the title poem, the narrator is cajoled into murdering the Solex Brothers by the local townsfolk (who may be lying). The poison fails to work but instead turns the Solex Brothers into babbling poets. A year later, the narrator is still in contact with them, offering them advice:

"What are you supposed to do when someone doesn't like you?"

"Kill them," I said.

The line went dead.

Why is it poetry, then, and not prose? Because the lines, rather than simply providing a narrative function, can't help but make you aware of their texture and strangeness. Whereas prose is typically used as a means of conveying images and information into your head, poetry wants you to notice its language, the medium of delivery, the same way good food needs to be tasted as much as it needs to be swallowed.

GAME: Portal 2, Valve, 2011

You'll have seen me posting on this before, and if you're even vaguely aware of what's being talked about in the gaming scene, you'll have heard the hype. You might even have seen Charlie Brooker writer about it in The Guardian.

Portal 2 is a game in which you never shoot anyone, nor batttle in outrageous outfits, nor chat to bosomy, half-nude girls. Its levels are huge, three-dimensional puzzles that you solve by creating portals and messing with physics. It's also a comic sci-fi parable whose main antagonist is a scientific evangelist for whom the purpose of life (particularly human life) is to test. Your only quest: escape. Escape the endless testing any way you can. Like numerous Kurt Vonnegut stories, the moral behind Portal 2 is that even the most worthy cause eventually becomes absurd, authoritarian dogma when married to ego and obsession. So it goes that we're left to run a treadmill inside a vast and meaningless machine. And when humans make ideological mistakes, they don't do it by halves.

Did I mention that playing the co-op mode with a friend is some of the purest fun available to those with a networked computer (and a friend)? It encourages teamwork, collaboration and a playful approach to problem-solving. It makes you want to high-five each other - and then goes ahead and lets you do it into the bargain:

Oh, sorry. That's a hug. You can do that too.

Birdbook Launch! Plus Lifelines!

Tomorrow night, Kirsty and I are joining a multifarious array of performers for a Japan fundraiser event. It's at the Rugby Tavern near Holborn from 7.30 and since it's a charity event, there's an entry fee of £7. We'll also bring our latest books and pamphlets and put a decent fraction of everything we sell towards the appeal.

As I have a particular interest in the intermingling of Japanese and western cultures, I'll be reading poems entirely around that subject, including translations/versions of poems by contemporary Japanese poets. I'll also be bringing some illustrative props to aid in the education element, including some genuine x-rated doujinshi.

Here's more details from the event organiser:

At 7.30pm tomorrow night a group of performers and poets will be gathering at The Rugby Tavern, 19 Great James Street, London, WC1N 3ES. This gathering, which goes by the name of Lifelines, will showcase a fabulous concoction of poetry, spoken, word, music and comedy.

Your lineup for the evening includes the founders of Sidekick Books and crafters of the written word, Jon Stone and Kirsty Irving. Richard Evans is the author of two beautiful collections of poetry, The Zoo Keeper and Orbiting. Nick Hunt is a journalist and fiction writer whose work has been published by The Guardian, The Economist and the BBC. Chris Rusbridge is an electro folk musician and Major Horatio Hebblethwaite is a decorated Knight Commander in The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

I will be introducing this eclectic lineup and giving each performer 15 minutes to dazzle, delight and tickle you (no hands allowed!).

You will be asked for £7 (£5 concessions) on the door and this money will be donated to Oxfam's Japan appeal to help reconstruction efforts after the devastating earthquake and tsunami of March 2011. Here is a picture, map and more details of the venue http://www.shepherdneame.co.uk/pub/wc1/rugby-tavern.aspx

As Churchill once said, on the fearful eve of the battle of Normandy, "See some of you there."

Also on the horizon is the official launch of Birdbook: Towns, Parks, Gardens & Woodland, the mightiest, most sumptuous book yet from Sidekick Books. It will be on Thursday 23rd of June from 7.30pm at the Phoenix Arts Club, just off Charing Cross Road. Full details on Facebook here. We're still putting the readers in place but there will certainly be projections to accompany them, and some of the artists involved will be bringing their original artwork for us to put on display. Stay tuned for further details and in the mean time, scribble the date in your diaries!

Book and Game: Ludicrous and Lonely

[Book and Game is a new feature for Cut Out & Keep. We select a book and a game that are somehow thematically linked in the hope of cross-pollinating the two mediums. Bookworms, try the game; Gamers, give the book a whirl!]

BOOK: The Minotaur Takes A Cigarette Break (Steven Sherrill)

 


In this heartbreaker, the Minotaur of legend is now working in a busy American steak-house kitchen, almost mute with insecurity. His co-workers never seem to notice that he is a bull-headed man, so nobody understands why he feels so awkward and out of place. Physically immense but hamstrung with self-consciousness, he is an aching depiction of loneliness trapped in a labyrinth of normality, where every possible friendship is like a spark in a cave.

The dreams of the Minotaur are almost pathetically modest and achievable, yet prey to malicious sabotage. As he does not have a human face, he is a blank canvas, standing for anybody who is trapped in a job that hurts them, surrounded by cruelty and, despite their physical strength, afraid to fight for what they really want. He has existed for centuries and even he is unsure why.


GAME: Octodad




You're an octopus. You're also the father of an all-American family. As in Minotaur, there are no answers as to how you got into this situation. The developers set the scene thus:

"His existence is a constant struggle, as he must master mundane tasks with his unwieldy boneless tentacles while simultaneously keeping his cephalopodian nature a secret from his human family."

Suspicion meters, children's assault courses, a homicidal and perceptive sushi chef and nigh-on impossible everyday chores conflict with your goal of creating a dummy 'you' to escape your family and return to where you belong. One of the most tragic scenes is Octodad's attempt to help his wife by cleaning out the fridge. Controlling one tentacle at a time, you fling everything onto the floor. Bafflingly, this pleases your wife. For anyone who's ever felt out of their depth, weighed down by the expectations on their role, or simply that even those closest to them never really knew them.

When 'No' means 'Yes'

Here's a comment from beneath this Guardian article, one of a feast of internet arenas where the proposal that 'rape is rape' is currently being aggressively debated, following controversial comments from MP Ken Clarke and MEP Roger Helmer, who have both suggested that there are gradations of seriousness in rape cases:

"Men get it fine. They just don't switch their brains off when they hear the word 'rape'. How come majority opinion on CIF can be quite detached when discussing murder, or burglary regarding it as a complex issue and even asserting that the perpetrator may be a victim of society, that the vengeful statements of victims is misplaced, that the indignation of public opinion is merely the frothing of ignorance fanned by the malice of the right wing press.

"But when it comes to discussing rape ..."

This point is made again and again, with varying degrees of rage and dismay, and is often linked to the much-put-about stereotype of feminists as shrill man-haters. In some ways, I'm not unsympathetic. It doesn't matter how much you talk down the prospect of being falsely accused of rape - the very idea is terrifying, and men are bound to attach some importance to it. Articles like this one, posted by an anonymous police blogger (now taken down - but the comments remain), seem to support the contention that the majority of rape allegations that don't make it to court turn out to be false. Why, then, it is asked, do rape campaigners persist in quoting the low conviction statistic without taking this into account?

To be fair, these are points that deserves an answer. So here is the answer.

First of all, the simple reason why it's instilled in multiple generations of feminists to make their points loudly, repeatedly and without much subtlety is because it makes the rest of us pay attention. They learn very quickly, one can intuit, that arguments made quietly, with built-in wiggle room, lead to them being at best ignored and at worst shouted down. Unfortunately, the tendency of those who consider themselves embattled with feminists is not to seek out and talk to those who are making their points quietly, intelligently and after lengthy consideration, but to react solely (and with predictable indignance) to those that reel off slogans and statistics. These feminists are often acting as digital demonstrators - criticising them for not behaving as if it's a panel show debate is like asking protestors to paint more caveats on their placards.

Secondly, any comparison to a violent crime or theft is somewhat misplaced because both can be, in certain situations, acts of self-defence or social justice. Robin Hood and Indiana Jones are heroic figures who rob and kill respectively. There is no equivalent in rape. A rape can never be anything other than an act of aggressive domination. The rapist may be a pitiable figure, set against the rest of society, but there is no sense in which we can say that society has raped them in the way we might say that society, through its harsh inequality, visits violence and theft upon those who are destitute. It is never an answer in kind.

What's more, when we discuss murder and theft in our more 'detached' way, we focus in on the criminal figure and their circumstances. The victim, more often than not, is just the victim. Only when debating rape does there seem to be an almost prurient interest in what the victim was doing at the time and how much 'responsibility' should be attributed to her.

Thirdly, and most important, when does 'No' mean 'Yes'? When men say it. As a nation, we seem to be quite happy to take part in Sun polls where more than 90% of us think rapists should be jailed for life, or hanged, and we're happy to hang around on messageboards declaring that we can't even understand the mindset of a rapist, and: "Of course rape is wrong! Of course it's terrible!" That shit is easy.

But we don't seem to really mean it. Otherwise, how on earth does a politician go into an interview without first sorting out in his head whether he means 'date rape' or 'statutory rape', or without noticing that an 18 year old having sex with a 15 year old isn't actually classified as rape at all? One can only imagine it didn't strike him as something he needed to be particularly precise about. How can another politician (a far more odious one, I might add) think it proper to come up with this sort of ludicrous example of a less 'serious' rape:

"Imagine that a woman voluntarily goes to her boyfriend’s apartment, voluntarily goes into the bedroom, voluntarily undresses and gets into bed, perhaps anticipating sex, or naïvely expecting merely a cuddle.  But at the last minute she gets cold feet and says “Stop!”.  The young man, in the heat of the moment, is unable to restrain himself and carries on."

There's no room for equivocacy on this: if you believe there is really such a thing as a young man 'unable to restrain himself' in such a situation, you don't take rape seriously. Yet this myth of the red-blooded male who has no control over his body seems to be widely accepted - and tacitly encouraged - by mainstream culture. Its very existence is an encouragement to rapists, who think they have an excuse that at least 50% of the population can somewhat get behind. And even if they knew full well they could stop, who could prove it?

The level of delusion here beggars belief. Is a man's sex drive so overpowering that they wouldn't stop if a fire broke out? Or if their parents walked into the room? Hardly. Which suggests that for some people - including, apparently, tory politicians - women's objections rate slightly lower than personal embarrassment in the scale of things to act on.

The idea that, in any other serious situation, a person's action or lack of action can be partially excused by their horniness is one that normally wouldn't even be raised (our child starved to death because we never came out of the bedroom? Ambulance late because on-call driver was engaged in foreplay?) The concept simply has no place in a morally intelligent society.

At the same time, we have this deep-seated hypocrisy regarding clothing and casual sex. When I searched Twitter for 'slutwalk' recently, the first tweet that came up was some wag suggesting that there was a contradiction in women not wanting to be objectified, whilst at the same time 'dressing like an object'. What 'object' is she dressing like exactly? Here we have the whole unpleasant mentality laid bare: the woman's body is the object. If she doesn't disguise her body adequately, she is flaunting it. The concept that a woman might want to dress in a particular way for her own personal satisfaction in her appearance, and not for the purposes of harvesting stares, genuinely seems to baffle some men - the same who seem to most easily believe that a man's reaction to a state of partial nudity is one he can't be expected to control (presumably, the effort it takes him not to crack one off there and then, in public, is stupendous).

When this sorry attitude is mixed in with the inexplicable tendency to want to implicate the victim in their own rape, we get ridiculous comparisons along the lines of: it's like leaving your keys in the ignition. Not only is the woman's body treated as a posession in this comparison, but her degree of nudity is a kind of moronic carelessness, because rapists are more likely to target them! This, despite the fact that the circumstances of most rapes (look up any account) don't appear to include the rapist making choices based on degrees of nudity. Moreover, if we must make the car key comparison, since most rapes are carried out by people the victim knows, it's more like taking your keys with you to a friend's party and leaving them in your jacket pocket, hanging up by the door. Then your friend's friends find them and steal your car. Oh well - you should have known better! And you do realise that they won't be punished because you can't 'prove' that you didn't leave the keys there with the express intention that they should help themselves?

So can you blame a woman for not trusting men when, collectively, we seem to be looking her in the eye and saying, "Rape is abhorrent", while making a secret signal over her shoulder to the rapist: "Don't worry - just make sure it isn't 'proper' rape. Just make sure you can pin some of the blame on her, and we'll all get ourselves in a lather worrying about how complex the issue is"?

Or, even better, when we seem to be saying: "Mate, just don't get caught." Objecting to the spinning of the rape statistics is missing the point. Rapists get away with it. Not in the same way murderers or thieves get away with it (because no one knows whodunnit) but because somehow, with all our great minds and modern gadgetry, we can't puzzle out a way to make conviction of the real perpetrators more certain. The worrying statistic isn't necessarily the allegations that are dropped; it's the number of rapes that aren't even reported. And we don't even know what that number is.

New Irregular Features, Interview, Birdbook stockists!

We're excited to announce that, with help from Chrissy Williams, Kate Parkinson and Chris Larkin, Birdbook I: Towns, Parks and Gardens is now stocked in Foyles Royal Festival Hall (see Ms Amy Key's lovely photo above) and the London Review Bookshop, with more shops pending.

Well, it's only taken us till May to get Irregular Features' 2011 edition up and running! Here it is in all its glory at http://drfulminare.com/features.html. What have you got to look forward to?

• an article by Andrea T Judge on the 'Poetics of the Movie Trailer'
• an interview with Sabotage Reviews boss Claire Trévien
• reviews of poetry collections by Wayne Holloway-Smith, Ruth Larbey, Andrew Pidoux and Ross Sutherland

With lots more to come!

In other news, me and Jon were interviewed recently by the lovely Caroline Crew for Flotsam! She quizzed us about Sidekick, Fuselit and the dynamics of two poets in a relationship, among many other topics.

100 Word Review: Lamb and Tyger by Jude Cowan

On this album, Jude Cowan’s vocals take a holiday from tiptoeing (and sometimes star-jumping) over ukelele and bestiality and apply themselves instead to revamping the poetry of William Blake, using a Hammond organ, a salting of Child Ballads and a hearty dose of Nick Cave. Less joyfully bawdy, more music hall meets ghostly choir, the arrangements are subtle and ludic, never overshadowing the original work Cowan so clearly enjoys. Out of time and place, Lamb & Tyger’s bitesize ditties (the longest is under four minutes) are like scattered pearls. Strange and soothing, and a great way to get into Blake’s work.


*****


For more Jude, head to www.myspace.com/judecowan

What To Do - K's pamphlet is loose!

Happenstance Press have very kindly released my first solo pamphlet, What To Do, in their trademark gorgeous design - cream cover with a menacing Ittan-momen, courtesy of artist Gillian Beaton, and delicious dark green end-papers.

Aside from killer scarves, expect Cat Stevens, a psychiatric institution populated by mythical figures and the odd lonely fetishist, among the other misfits roaming the pages.

Priced at £4 plus postage, here's what the blurb says:

This pamphlet is full of characters in trouble. The energy that drives the poems won’t settle for resolution, only the sense that however bizarre the action or injury, it has you by the throat and isn’t letting go. This is, as they say, something else.

Visit Happenstance's shop to see a sneak preview of one of the poems!

...and another May update

While John and Kirsty are slaving over a hot printing press, I shall be out and about reacquainting myself with London's stages and microphones. Specifically:

Friday 6th - Bingo Master's Breakout, London's premier bingo poetry karaoke night. This time, it's not just your bog-standard bingo poetry karaoke: this month it's Eurovision bingo poetry karaoke, and I shall be representing Greece. Now, I know what you're thinking: how will I be providing a unique slant on Eurovision bingo poetry karaoke? I'll be combining it with a Feltographic commentary: that is how.

Sunday 8th - Open Mic at the Hideaway, guest-hosting in Fran Isherwood's shoes. We welcome musicians, comedians, storytellers, poets, burlesqueteers and casual drinkers with nothing better to do in the Tufnell Park area on a Sunday evening.

Tuesday 10th - The Camden School of Enlightenment will have some storytelling, fetish lecturing, improv comedy and an interview with dead poet Stevie Smith, amongst other Jedi mindf---s. As usual, I shall be discharging my duties as Headmaster of Ceremonies.

Wednesday 18th - Touch Me I'm Sick, co-hosting again, with the most lovable Joe Campbell of R'n'B News fame. Three featured poets (TBA), and floorspot poemswapping (bring two poems: one to read yourself, and another to go in the champagne cooler for somebody else to read).

May Update!

  

Well, Birdbook is finally out, as this handsome Dutch golem will attest to. Now we only need to do the work of an entire marketing department! Support so far from the poetry community has been fantastic, but we aim to distribute this book further afield as well. It's a learning experience so don't kick us too hard if we mess up!

In the next week, we should have the first Irregular Features of 2011 up. These include reviews, an interview and a new article by Andrea Tallarita with a typically interesting premise.

Apart from that, we're getting on with Fuselit: Contraption. I should have an 'Under Development' bar at the side, just so I don't need to keep assuring people we're 'getting on' with stuff. We are. We're just not quite Aperture Science. Or Valve, for that matter.

Kirsty is due to release her debut pamphlet, What To Do, this month, through Happenstance. It has lots of really good poems in. Kirsty and I generally avoid saying too much about each other's work because you obviously can't trust us to be impartial, but for the record, I've always thought she's a more naturally gifted poet than me with a stronger individual style. Her subject matter is also of note - rather than ranging over whole glossaries of material in the contemporary way, she tends to stick more closely to treatments of outsiders and individuals in desperate and sad-comic situations, often related to sexual repression, but generally avoids the 'worthy' or 'Phil Collins' perspective. I honestly think the main reason she hasn't been published more widely before now is because most of what she writes is too dark to be celebratory and too witty to be moralistic or melancholic. That, and her work is usually quite syntactically complex without being avante.

Other things dragging their heels over the distant horizon:

• e-book editions of our micro-anthologies
• online editions of past Fuselits (probably 1. Demo and 12. Fox)
• the first Sidekick Books 'team-up' pamphlet
• Coin Opera 2 and our first charity anthology

So stick with us! We may be slow but we get there in the end!

Portal 2 and Computer Games as Art

Although I've had a deeper-than-average affection for computer games for many years now, my commitment to poetry still runs deeper. How can I tell? Well, apart from the fact that I gave up designing Duke Nukem 3D levels and Klik n' Play games and started writing poems, there's the debates within each medium's respective communities. I feel compelled to get stuck into the wranglings regarding prize culture, mainstream/non-mainstream poetry, publishing, audience expansion etc. You can see how worked up I get about those things right here on this blog. I feel that stuff is important.

The kind of arguments that crop up around gaming, however, more often than not just leave me baffled and disillusioned, images of petulant, whiny geeks swimming around in my head. Take Portal 2, which, as far as I'm concerned, is the latest surefooted step towards making interactive storytelling the artform of the future, as well as (along with its predecessor) a significant stride away from games as a primarily male-orientated, borderline mysogynistic medium. I'll be fair and say that most of the thick-as-pigshit responses to Joe McNeilly's feminist reading of the original Portal (sample: "And since when the fucking hell have guns been phallus-like?") are far from representative of the gaming community. In fact, I would say that the eagerness, both on a popular and critical level, to embrace both games comes not only from an appreciation of their technical qualities but also from a genuine hunger to move in a socially inclusive direction. Gaming, just like poetry, is at war with a debillitating image of itself. Just as poets are loser musos fortifying university literary departments, gamers are overweight single men trapped in dark boudoirs. Normal people in both groups face the double antagonism of lazy stereotyping from outsiders and mutated forms of macho posturing in their own camp (for poets, it comes in a variety of forms; for gamers, it's usually Mr "Game is too short and easy - I finished it in forty minutes while replaying Half-Life 2 with my other hand".)

Nevertheless, I find myself asking: what do Portal 2 players think they're achieving by complaining that they have to pay extra if they want to unlock virtual comedy hats for the robots? Or by whining that the PC version might have been developed as a port of the console versions? In their droves, by the way - so much so that gaming blog RockPaperShotgun felt compelled to post a careful refutation of the various petty accusations that have been levelled against the game. I've tried, with little success, to understand exactly what the problem is with selling people downloadable extras on top of the original game. Supposedly, it's 'immoral', it's evidence of the developers not working hard enough for their money, it's time they could have spent making the main product more watertight and so on. Really, though, I think it comes down to this: many gamers are rampant completists and their dealer keeps raising the price of their addiction. They don't want to pay $5 for a silly hat but feel bizarrely compelled to.

There is an argument that modern games, which have replaced high score tables with percentage complete bars, lists of achievements to tick off and unlockable extras, encourage a completist attitude. But really they're just giving old schoolers a nicotine patch to help them cope with the transition from games as contests of skill, with empirical or quantitative measures of success, to a medium-cum-artform that seeks to satisfy and enrich emotionally and intellectually, non-quantifiably. Particularly in a country like Britain, where the arts are increasingly asked to come up with figures to prove their cultural value, it's a real positive that mainstream games which sell in their millions are being pushed in this direction.

In Portal 2, none of the suite of pleasures I took from playing through were as a result of my own proficiency and game-playing competence. In fact, one of the reasons I rarely got annoyed with the game is that it's built with the idea of constant learning and progression in mind, rather than forcing you to repeat the same tasks again and again until your fingers learn the right twitch patterns. I enjoyed cracking the puzzles because the results involved devious manipulations of space and physics, as well as defeating lethal turret guns with nothing more harmful than holes in the ground and blue paint. The game tests you intellectually without demanding you develop yet another non-transferable expertise, and rewards a furrowed brow with the kind of entertainment that delights the grown-up child in any of us. It teaches you to think laterally, and to meet force and apparent gross unfairness (as well as misuse of power) with cunning thought and resourcefulness.

I also enjoyed that rarity in interative narration - a story with plenty of twists and turns that never feels like it's trying to tell you to be serious and stop mucking about. Whereas in a game like Halo 3, the most fun I had was at the developers' expense - by bludgeoning soldiers who were supposed to be on my side and watching them consistently react as if it was an unfortunate accident - Portal 2 marries up the player's aims with the protagonist's so successfully that you genuinely want to do what's expected of you: solve the puzzles, upset the gun turrets and break out of the facility. There are parts where I would have wanted to drive a harder bargain with either of the neurotic AIs that partner up with you, but they were never less than useful to have along.

The story is also extremely witty. I'd go so far as to say it borders on Vonnegutian. Portal 2's dialogue and visual black comedy shows up nearly every other future sci-fi dystopia game I've played as the humourless, intellectually arid bag of cliches it really is. It's the kind of game you want to play with other people just so you can share the most beautifully scripted (and voiced) moments.

Talking of playing with other people, I haven't had the chance to start the co-op mode yet, which lets you and a friend solve test chambers together. If games can continue in this direction, it will draw a line under the stereotype of the antisocial bedroom dweller forever. It's not hard (although rather painful) to imagine this sort of technology being used to train employees in basic trust and collaboration skills.

The computer games as art debate is well rehearsed; as sympathetic as I am to the medium, most of the arguments in favour of its acceptance as an artform could be applied to, well, football or gardening, ie. it's immensely inspiring and gratifying to see an intricate thing done spectacularly well. That's all very well, but we still need the kind of high art that provides the fuel for break-out thinking and grass-roots solutions to social problems that politics avoids addressing. Based on the general behaviour of gamers that I've come across, we're not there yet, but there's certainly hope. And that's of interest to poets to because computer games might be our last, best hope of maintaining an awareness of and connection to art within the disenfranchised, systematically betrayed and aggressively consumerfied generations currently growing up.