Dennis Hollingsworth

one health point

(Noodling along at normal browsing speed, I slip down the rabbitt hole of Kotaku.)

Here's an interesting conversation about writing and computer games and wrtiing about computer games... all of which reminds me of the coils of the gyre all floppy and chopped up (Dennis' lingo decoded -meaning that there are these wierd feedback loops of new and old in strange positions):

In the early seventies Tom Wolfe edited a collection of writings from the previous few years entitled ?The New Journalism?, which provided exactly that. This journalism was intensely personal, throwing away the rules of standard journalistic discourse like the pretence of objectivity and an embracing of the ?I?. We're talking about people like Capote, Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson. While Games journalism ? having nabbed a lot of its tricks from the people who nabbed a lot of tricks from the New Journalism people ? uses a sizeable chunk of those already, it hasn't really thought about how the core of that philosophy really applies to videogames.

In the last year or so we've started. In a nod to Wolfe, I'm going to call it the New Games Journalism, just because it needs a name if this essay's going to be decipherable to the human mind.

Embarrassingly for myself and my professional peers, the first real signs of this form didn't appear in the pages of game magazines, but on the net. Early-period State was painfully close to a new paradigm for games writing, but was hamstrung and eventually foiled by its elitism, its faux-intellectualism and insecurity. They're all forgivable faults, since the writers were the gaming equivalent of zine-kids, trying to find a voice which didn't sound too shrill. But still: depressing.

...so I click on the provocative link in the article:

You see what this has become? It's not just a trivial game to be played in an idle moment, this is a genuine battle of good versus evil. It has nothing to do with Star Wars or Jedi Knights or any of the fluff that surrounds the game's mechanics. I played by the 'rules' and he didn't, that makes me the 'good' guy and him the 'baddie', but this is real, in the sense that there's no telling who's going to win out here. There's no script or plot to determine the eventual triumph of the good guy (that's me, five health), there's no 'natural order' of a fictional universe or any question of an apocryphal ultimate 'balance'. There's just me and him, light and dark, in a genuine contest between the two.

And there it is. I don't even know what it was. Some chance slash or poke in all of the rolling and jumping around and his lifeless avatar, with all his racist stabs and underhand duplicity, goes tumbling to the floor vanquished by the guy who even in the face of all of that, played by the ?rules'. Only one health point remains but I win.

I'm a fucking hero. A real one.

A beep and a server message: Wanker has disconnected.

I can only dream of the howls of anguish so far away.

My next opponent spawns. And bows. A chat icon appears.

"Awesome" he types.

All of which reminds me of... me (but in a small way of course). I like the self awareness, the wrestle with change that Modernity brings, and the inclusion of the marital in the arts of it all.