Isometrics: Is There Such a Thing as a Gaming Auteur?

Auteurs: the great powerful entities of the cinematic world, and a theory about how the authorship of a work goes beyond the written word. But does this idea of great artists uniting a team under a singular vision gel with the technical nature of video games? David Rose investigates...

Welcome to Isometrics, the long-dormant look at the literary world of computer and video games. Currently we're in a fairly interesting world of gaming, with lots of interesting news, but right now I want to talk about the Auteur theory. So while there's plenty to talk about with regards to commercial ethics, Steam Refunds, major releases being so buggy on launch they were recalled from entire platforms and the next wave of great Kickstarter games, for now we are going to discuss something that closely approximates literary criticism.

The Auteur Theory, commonly attributed to François Truffaut and the writers of the French periodical Cahiers du Cinéma (Literally translating to “Notebooks on Cinema”), primarily concerns itself with the notion of creation or authorship in a film. Unlike a work of fiction or even a scripted theatrical piece, where there is a clear author and often therefore a person (or small group of people) to ascribe particular stylistic, narrative, metaphorical and other literary quirks to, a film is usually a massive undertaking with a team of dozens, sometimes hundreds working to bring a project to fruition. In that sheer sea of humanity, who is the author? And given the multiple forms the language of cinema takes (photography, performance, framing along with the narrative content of the script), what does it mean to be the creator? This is simplifying, but the Auteur in cinema is the driving creative force, which in many cases is a role the director shoulders. A good director, so it is argued by proponents, unifies the creative process, and ultimately creates a film which has the particular fingerprint of that director.

Segue into the world of film aside, what does this have to do with video games that have evolved from the FMV watchathons of the 1990s? Well video games, much like films fall into that difficult critical territory of being designed by a large swathes of very creative people, and so can any one person really claim to be the captain of a creative vessel, steering the concept through his vision? Besides, given that the main artistic disciplines are so diverse and multi-stranded (A single author must ensure that gameplay, art assets, narrative, music and enough technical capabilities to put them all together work to create a unified whole).

Now before we go any further, I'm not necessarily talking about one man projects, or even projects with teams you can count on one hand, since the author of a one man project is pretty self-evident. The main interrogative thread is that, given the spate of incredibly successful kickstarters by famous video game developers, what the meaning is, if any, of a by-line in a video game. Is it simple marketing, or is there something to be said for the ability of a single artist who can bring these assets together? The best place to start is probably the most obvious.

Hideo Kojima is a name that either you are familiar with, or you haven't played enough games. The ace game designer at Konami and a man who revolutionised gaming in countless ways through game of the year after game of the year after game of the century. He's probably one of the easiest examples of gaming auteur to show in many ways, in part because his style owes at least a little to fellow auteur Quentin Tarrentino. His works are unashamedly postmodern: built on medium bending, genre manipulation and using that fragile nature of the game's reality as a powerful tool. There is a distinct style to his work, and that is what makes a game instantly recognisable as his, despite massive differences in game engines, technical sophistication, gameplay genre, setting, mood, atmosphere and even intent. Pretty much every game he's been involved him has some kind of fingerprint, from the metafictional construct of PT, through the bizarre and highly innovative solutions redolent in games like Snatcher to the delightfully literal solution to the insular nature of gaming found in Boktai.

Kojima is a very obvious case, and were the accusation that he desires to make films more than games actually to come to pass, he would probably be considered an auteur in that as well. But gaming doesn't quite play as simple a game as that, and a designer/director/project lead can show his/her influence in other ways. Roberta Williams' uncompromising attitude manifests very clearly not merely in the brutal and often sadistic levels of death her poor players suffer when playing any given King's Quest, but through a diverse legacy of adventure games that pushed the genre to new heights commercially, creatively and technologically.

On a similar note, Shigeru Miyamoto's fervered belief in “kyokan” (literally “feel-one” but generally refers to empathetic research based around emotional connections) is the emotional heart that Nintendo built its empire around and shows in an astoundingly diverse body of work and his influence will likely live forever in developers he has influenced.

The ever-controversial Peter Molyneux certainly counts as well, with his particular focus being the interaction between the player and the world in which they interact, which manifests in his god games (Populous, Black and White, Godus), his devil games (Dungeon Keeper), is paid particular focus in the Fable series with somewhat mixed results, and even his odd management sims like Theme Hospital. His incredible habit of overpromising on his games sheds even further light into this particular theme.

Finally, there is Kenji Eno, the force behind WARP software, and as interesting as he was when I covered all his US-released games. His distinct desire to not play by the standard rules and conventions of video games and his theories about the future of virtual media led to concepts like the virtual actor, games trying to be films to the point that they have a film-like length, games with invisible monsters and basically every single bizarre thing about D2 that wasn't a direct homage to Hideo Kojima.

So a gaming auteur (what's even the word? A Gáuteur?) can come from many different disciplines and bring a style in different ways. The key to each of these examples, as well as the other (Yu Suzuki, Suda51, Swery65) gaming auteurs out there is that they bring a style, a distinct vision and their own quirks that for better and worse identify them as the driving force behind a particular game. I could probably write a somewhat hefty book if I tried to cover every single gáuteur out there, but here's a small taster of how the Auteur theory applies to gaming, something we will cover in greater detail once I start showcasing the more literary examples mentioned here, along with a bunch of other crazy theories.

This doesn't mean of course that the rest of the team don't matter. Far from it, team management ultimately is the most important weapon in any auteur's arsenal, and it is even more important in gaming with the incredible amount of dependent artistic and technological parts to games. To answer the question more directly if the fact I'm trying to come up with pretentious words doesn't provide enough clarity: Yes, there absolutely is such a thing as a gaming auteur, and the fact that these authorial developers are influential, important and design incredible games in most if not every genre is a rather large smoking gun in any argument that games are a thriving art form.

All the people who bought Metal Gear Solid can't be wrong...

Hello there. Many thanks for reading Isometrics. It's been months since I've had the time and the opportunity to really get back into writing articles about something I love so much in an academic manner. The plan is to do an article a week at first, being put up on a Wednesday, though that may increase if I have time, and I may do some special articles concerning particular issues. The plan is not to cover as many current events and instead focus on gaming's place in wider literary debates. Hope you enjoy, and if you have questions, thoughts or names of Auteurs I missed (I didn't even name ten, and didn't even mention Geoff Crammond or Will Wright), feel free to drop me a line on Twitter @HuggyDave, in a comment below or on Facebook (look up David Rose – Writer).

The Isometrics Worst Games of the Year: The Top Eight Worst Games of The Year

So after a long contentious year, there stands a stack of terrible games, some giftedly bad, others a sheer affront to the gaming Zeitgeist. However they got onto this list, they are games that really made a dent in arguments that video games are artistic statements.

Right, I covered the rules in a post last week, but just to clarify everything. I'll do a quick summery:

It has to be a full game released between 1^st December 2013 and 31^st December 2014, that is not a beta or in early access. Episodic games count from the release of the first episode, so long as the intent was to be episodic and not to sell a beta release. Freemium games are exempt except in particularly egregious circumstances. Remakes, ports and expanded rereleases can count either if they are the first version of a game released in English or are expanded to a sufficient degree that they could be considered a sequel.

In the end these are all subjective rankings, and I will show my working as much as possible in the process of writing the list.

Now, with that out of the way here is the bottom eight games of the year!

8: Watch Dogs (Ubisoft: PC/X360/XONE/PS3/PS4)

Speaking of subjectivity, this is a game I suspect might ruffle a few feathers, because on the face of it it's not a terrible game, with mostly functional mechanics and a few occasionally interesting twists on the Ubisoft Open World formula. This is on the list for three relatively minor things that in combination ruin the experience. The first is the simplification of basically every aspect, with the hacking on the go mechanic that is meant to differentiate it from other open world games almost never coming into play except in the most situational of circumstances. This spreads to the graphics, gorgeous in trailers but fairly mediocre and choppy in game. Speaking of mediocre and choppy, the PC port is particularly awful, with low framerates, poor textures and stuttering abounding and serving to ruin the experience further.

It is the most classic, and frustrating case of a game with a great idea that falls flat on the fundementals and simply ends up as a lifeless, dull and largely unlikable game. A crying shame.

7: Duck Dynasty The Game (Activision: PC/ X360/PS3)

Probably on a lot of people's top spot for worst game this year, Activision's take on the beardiest family in america caused a lot of eyebrows to roll. How would a game based on a reality (using the word under advisement of course) TV series pan out? The answer is generically. Outside of the baffling and occasionally unintentionally hilarious storyline (Any cutscene before a stealth section really speaks for itself), the game is a set of rather shallow minigames in a rather shallow open world. It's pretty low on this list in part because it at least works completely, though the fact that it is above a game that was almost completely broken on it's PC release speaks volumes about the quality within. Whatever you think about the Robertsons and the Duck Commander, this game commands you to throw it in the bin.

6: Takedown: Red Sabre (505 Games: PC)

This at first seemed like an excellent idea for a game. Bring back classic tactical shooting in the vein of the sublime Rainbow Six 3, even calling on a former developer of the title for support. Sadly the game was astoundingly bugged and even when it wasn't constantly crashing to desktop or sucking wind on fairly powerful PCs the actual content of the game was ferociously limited, with multiplayer being as unplayable a mess as possible. It is a crying shame that this game failed to live up to expectations and served, along with several other Kickstarter disappointments to really dent confidence in the crowdfund as a medium for distributing games, which is the primary reason why it makes it on this list.

5: Rambo: The Video Game (Teyon: PC/X360/PS3)

Oh dear. This is the first of many games on this list that are both utterly dreadful and utterly deceptive. The Steam page of the game suggests that your hard earned thirty pounds will garner you a crazy yet rather alright looking FPS based on the most manly man in the history of 80s manliness, John Rambo. However upon purchase the game turns out to be an on-rails light gun game. You may have noticed that there aren't any common light guns available for PC. The graphics, while passable in screenshots are terrible in motion, not helped by the fact that each of the stages has exactly one enemy type. Other mechanics such as perks and the rage bar seem tacked on and other than making the obligatory quick time sequences even less necessary don't serve to make the game suck any less. On top of all this, the dialogue is literally ripped from a blu-ray of Rambo, right down to sound artefacts in the background. Lovely.

4: Guise of the Wolf (FUN Creations: PC)

Oh dear. This isn't a game that people likely remember, but the sheer abject terror that is Guise of the Wolf can't be understated. Featuring appalling character design, questionable cel shading effects, an appalling mix of the most boring generic time consuming puzzles and awful combat, and a profound sense of obtuseness surrounding pretty much every other aspect. It is no combination of fun, challenging or rewarding, but an experience to be suffered through incredibly slowly.

3: Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric

Just as we thought Sonic had managed to escape the throes of terrible gaming, sadly Big Red Button productions drags the blue blur back into the fold. The television show and indeed the 3DS game are at least debatable in quality, however the Wii U release Rise of Lyric has a budget game rip-off feel last seen with the reprehensible Ride to Hell: Retribution. Sonic's trademark speed is limited to brief on-rails segments, the beat-em-up mechanics are tedious, as indeed is the different platforming sections for your four playable characters, every single one of which seemingly having a fetish for Boost Rings that moves into concerning by the end of the game. Add to that a co-op mode that slows the game to a crawl, random slowdown anyway and a pause glitch that allows you to jump infinitely off the edge of the world, and you have a recipe for a disaster worthy of comparison to the execrable Sonic 2006.

2: The Slaughtering Grounds (Digital Homicide Studios LLC: PC)

2014 was a year in which Steam opened the floodgates, allowing pretty much anything willing to pay their cut to release a game on Steam. This lead to some abominable atrocities, zillions of straight up ports and rereleases and a flurry of awful unfinished games so huge that Steam altered its curation system to mitigate the damage. Then came the Slaughtering Grounds, a game that brought back the dark old days of shareware, with hideous graphics, a useless interface, controls designed for someone with at least three thumbs and some of the worst FPS gameplay seen on Steam. As far as attempts to co-opt the success of Killing Floor go, this is possibly the most atrocious example, and there is very little fun to be had.

Of course the creators of the game seemed to disagree and created a series of potentially libellous videos mocking critic Jim Sterling, who voiced what can only be described as the truth. Bashing the critics for skewing your work has never ever succeeded in doing anything but making you look bitter, insecure and unable to admit your product has serious flaws.

1: Air Control (Killjoy Games: No Longer Available: PC)

The other major trend of 2014 was the idea of Youtube Fodder: deliberately bad games that would be made fun of by major content creators in a bid to artificially create buzz and sales. Games like Goat Simulator really towed this line, splitting the critics as much as it split sides, while other games like Surgeon Simulator AE and I Am Bread managed to succeed far more as games. At best this allowed silly concepts to be released and generate a lot of interest, but at worst it was an excuse to sell utterly broken unplayable games. Guess which one Air Control is?

Air Control, by the rather appropriately named Killjoy games is just atrociously bad in every important respect. It's difficult to decide where to begin, be it with the assets stolen from other games and other game engine assets, the repeated ripoffs of Flappy Bird, the controls that don't work and even have “Lock Mouse” buttons to further cripple them, the fact that the game has a two part casual mode which means nothing and crashes the game if you try to switch between the modes, the litany of other game bugs, most of which are game breaking, the questionable censorship of criticism by Killjoy themselves, the accusations that critics simply have computer that cannot run the game despite it looking like an 11 year old's first attempt with Pie in the Sky, deleting criticism of the game as well as requests for refunds and the sheer audacity of trying to charge money for a game like this.

Some have argued that this is all a satire of Youtube fodder and Steam's curation policy or lack thereof but none of that stops it from being the worst, most absolutely rancid and toxic game of the year, and better yet because the game is no longer available for sale I'm not enabling this kind of irresponsible behaviour among game developers.

After that lark, come back to the Clinkening tomorrow for a far more positive look on the year, and look out for the Isometrics Awards and New Years Resolution post later this week.

Thanks for Reading!

New content

Hey guys. So much for one update a week at least eh? Well hopefully I can make up for it with a big review I will post in two parts tomorrow on one of the hot topic games at the moment: Tomb Raider. I've a hell of a lot to say (in fact i spent the last two and a half hours writing a journal article's length review on the bloody thing) but I hope you'll enjoy it.

Birchillgate: Or the irony of the Oppressed Oppressing the Oppressed

Screenshot from Dys4ia, an autobiographical game about gender reassignment surgery

I should start with a bit of a set up for this, since it's a bit out there as far as a Clinkening topic (although I’ve touched on gender politics before). I originally wanted to write this for the Clinkening last week, but thanks to my phenomenally stupid time management skills, I was two busy fighting the two headed viper of essay deadlines and sleep deprivation to really be able to do it justice.

And I suspect I'll have to to get away with this one.

My attention was drawn during one of my all-too-frequent breaks from my essays to an article by bastion of tact Julie Birchill and her article “Transsexuals Should Cut it Out” (now removed from Comment is Free, so reference will be to the “We've got some clowns...” archived version of it), in which she throws out every trans slur possible in the name of explaining how a “bunch of dicks in chicks' clothing” have no right to contribute to the feminist agenda, and that apparently their issues aren't important enough to discuss.

I originally was a bit wary of entering a debate where, as not a woman, nor a transsexual outside of maybe Baudrillard's definition (where we all are), but since this is as much a debate on excluding voices as it is on the feminist Zeitgeist, I figured it'd be ironic enough for me to get away with it. So let's be balanced about it, let Birchill get her day in court.

The purpose of the article was as a response to criticism of lauded (and controversial: infamous feminist critic Germaine Greer famously describing her: “hair birds-nested all over the place, f***-me shoes and three inches of fat cleavage”) feminist writer Suzanne Moore, who posted an extract from her latest book Red: The Waterstones Anthology about the power of female anger. For the most part the piece was Marxist-inspired discussion of the seeming reversal in gender equality in the last five years, its causes and the warning to the powers that be that women wouldn't be put down and pulled down anymore by identity politics and tokenism. However, in what she calls a “throwaway line”, she comments on the subject of image and gender politics:

The cliché is that female anger is always turned inwards rather than outwards into despair. We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape – that of a Brazilian transsexual.

The “Brazilian transsexual” line was a moment of pretty phallic stupidity to be quite honest, a point where Moore lost the point of her argument and relied on pretty lurid stereotypes. Unless she was talking in a kind of Baudrillardian sense – that the body has become an “artifice” that is crafted and constructed to the point where it is no longer sexually attractive in a physiological sense but in the sense of its image, it's constructed image – then perhaps I can see where Moore was going with that. But as she later admitted it was a throwaway line meant to spice it up, transsexual commenters, writers and the like were justifiably upset, as were actual Brazilian transsexuals, given Brazil's appalling record on trans crime, despite it's Carnival reputation. Moore's responses weren't entirely convincing, mainly because she didn't offer a true act of contrition for it (she has apologised for it though, that should be pointed out), more asking for perspective on the 'real issues' and the real enemies.

Yeah, denigrating trans issues is TOTALLY going to make them feel united and that they are part of a universal struggle for equality.

So yeah, there was a lot of classic “Feminism is Middle Aged White Women” issues with Moore's article, and that arrogant lack of self-awareness that broke down the Women's Liberation Movement by the early eighties (Women's liberation being the name for the largest fragment of second wave feminism), but on the whole its focus was elsewhere, and the issue the trans community seemed to have with it was as much about flippancy as it was about actual offence.

Birchill on the other hand...

Right, I'd better get this out of the way; I have a lot of bile built up from reading the piece repeatedly so I'd better get it out of the way. The article was pretty close to fucking abuse, and it's fairly fucking ironic that she in the tagline harps on that “it's never a good idea for those who feel oppressed to start bullying others in turn” as she spends the entire article denigrating, belittling and attempting to silence trans people, ending with an outright threat:

“Shims, shemales, whatever you're calling yourselves these days – don't threaten or bully us lowly natural-born women, I warn you. We may not have as many lovely big swinging Phds as you, but we've experienced a lifetime of PMT and sexual harassment and many of us are now staring HRT and the menopause straight in the face – and still not flinching. Trust me, you ain't seen nothing yet. You really won't like us when we're angry.”

Yes Ms Birchill, it really isn't a good idea to bully others because you feel oppressed, is it?

Right, with that out of the way, my vitriol back to safe levels, it's time to try and break down Birchill's argument, such that it is. What is Birchill trying to say, other than “chicks with dicks” need to stop haressing her friend because they have the foolish right to believe that they can be accepted as women, who they mentally have always been but physiology has betrayed? Because, if one line sums up Birchill's argument is, funnily enough, a quote from Moore herself “'People can just fuck off really. Cut their dicks off and be more feminist than me. Good for them.'” There is the notion that there is some kind of competition between M to F transsexuals and born women, as if only one of these groups represents “true” feminism, and more tellingly that there is somehow a conspiracy that men undergo gender reassignment therapy (a series of painful, intrusive, long term procedures) purely, as Birchill eloquently puts it “to have your cock cut off and then plead special privileges as women”. Actually, she summed it up much better here in a piece simply entitled 'Gender Bending':

Transsexualism is, basically, just another, more drastic twist on the male menopause, which in turn is just another excuse for men to do as they please.

You really do become the thing you hate don't you? Also, I'm glad thirteen years of thought has led you to the same tired conclusion Ms Birchill.

So, to summate, she's a hateful writer who apparently twists an agenda initially based on the fight for equality to turn it against people she considers “no true Sco- I mean Women!” and in doing so undermines her cause, the cause for feminism (by proving a lot of crtics of feminism absolutely right) and damaged the credibility of The Observer, the newspaper this hateful polemic initially appeared in. This has sent ripples throughthe intelligentsia, most of which siding against Birchill if not for her toxic views than at least for the way she said it and has led to the removal of the article (for breaking large swathes of the code of conduct, namely the bit about using language offensive to various groups) and really in the end proving her own immaturity while doing so.

I'd say that Julie Birchill should cut it out, but I don't think the choice is in her hands now that the PCC is involved...

It's a pretty incendiary debate, so comments are welcome, but try to keep them civil. 

Stay safe and always hug it out, no matter who you are

Huggy Dave

The Top 10 Most Baffling UK Number One Singles in History Part 1/2

The UK pop charts tend to, especially in recent years follow a particular formula. And with a little bit of thought, it's easy to see why: The single buying public, more so than the Album Charts has a very specific demographic that skews younger and younger with each generation; with younger demographics come very specific ways to sell music and types of music to sell. Hence you tend to see most things follow the trend (which at the moment comprises of boy bands, teenybopper pop singers and endless club songs, interspersed with some retro-soul) and most things outside of it not even getting a look in outside of their niché.

However, with well over 1200 number one singles since the charts unified in the late 1960s, there's been more than a few songs that make you scratch your head and wonder “how the hell did they become a hit?” and thus is the topic of today's list. Ten of the most baffling songs ever. There are a few caveats since this list is about being unexpected rather than just being bad, or obscure, though both of those things come into play. No, this is about songs that seemingly come out of nowhere and make you wonder how the hell people could buy them in the hundreds of thousands, so Charity singles are out and bad but conventional songs also are unless there's something especially unique about their rise. So with that, count down with me won't you?

10: Mambo No. 5 – Bob The Builder (2001)

What?

Oh, where to start, this one is very very easy. The second of two number one hits for the cartoon star (and his voice actor, Neil 'Man Behaving Badly' Morissey) sees the builder covering Lou Bega's number one hit, an anthem for polygamy where Lou Bega sings joyously about sleeping with pretty much every woman in the northern hemisphere. Of course the lyrics are somewhat altered to be less about boinking everyone and more about fixing every problem about the house. Although, put like that it kind of poisons the childhood of pretty much anyone just younger than me...

Most Ridiculous Part

The fact that someone from CBBC (the children's wing of the British Broadcasting Corporation who own Bob the Builder) looked at Mambo No. 5 and went “That's a perfect song to do a tie-in with Bob the Builder! You know how kids are all about pimping!”

Why did it happen?

The worst bit is that it worked! The BBC had already scored a number one already with the Bob the Builder theme song early in 2001. It helps that Morissey, while hardly the best singer ever, has an interesting voice and can hold a note, which made Mambo No. 5 and especially Can We Fix It actually tolerable compared to the CBBC's other number ones, the Teletubbies theme and especially Mr Blobby, both songs that aren't listenable even if you're young enough to watch the shows. It's a cash in and quite an embarrassing one, but one that makes a small bit of sense.

Mull of Kintyre – Paul McCartney (1977)

What?

I don't know either, the list will contain some terrible inexplicably popular songs, things from nichés that never broke free from that restraint or some long forgotten tie-in, but this one makes no sense. Paul McCartney has a spot of land called the Mull Of Kintyre, so he sang about it in an utterly dismal acoustic ballad so banal and insufferable it made one long for the days of the fucking Frog Chorus. And it scored the Christmas Number One spot, an accolade that is hotly competed for year on year and leads to some of the most creative (and occasionally worst) songs of any given year.

And yet the Christmas number one was this utterly irrelevant, pointless, dull as dishwater acoustic ballad about how Paul McCartney owns a big bit of beautiful land on a Scottish island, which is the 70s equivalent of those endless slog of rap songs and rap verses proclaiming the amazing wealth you have. That's the issue with it; strip the romanticist imagery and you have not only an incredibly dull acoustic ballad, but an implicitly egotistical one.

Most Ridiculous Part?

That the biggest hit of the band who did Live and Let Die was this, although this is far from the last time this is the case in the pop charts, and not even the last on this list.

Why?

I can only assume purely based on McCartney's sheer hit-making power. Paul McCartney had a ton of hits after the Beatles, first with Wings and later as a solo artist, and most of them were if not outright terrible at least a little unimaginative, lacking the zest and energy that former bandmate John Lennon provided, or indeed the musicianship and vulnerability of George Harrison. And it is indeed each members' hits post-Beatles that shows the balance between the members, that sheer synergy that made them one of the greatest bands of all time...as well as the clear weaknesses in each member's solo work. Ah well, at least the Frog Chorus never got to number one.

8: Axel F – The Crazy Frog

What?

Oh god, this one. This horrible, putrid, unlistenable piece of pop music smegma that polluted the airwaves and conversations of civilised society for a large chunk of 2005. Trying to explain this one to the blissfully ignorant is like explaining the odd popularity of slavery. Right, it started as a Swedish student trying to copy the sound of a two-stroke engine out of the comically awful Russian car, the Trabant. Six years later, another Swedish student created a 3d animation of the creature known as The Annoying Thing, using the sound to show off his ability to lip sync and animate in time with a sound file. It was popular on his site and spread out to Napster and other file sharing sites of the time and thus it was at this time that the burgeoning mobile phone ringtone company Jamstar! (at the time known as Jamba!, RingToneKing and a zillion other terrible names) bought the rights and started to blanket advertise the damn thing more than anything alive. More people saw this than saw the Coronation, the Jubilee or any sporting final, if only because it was absolutely impossible to escape. This original clip eventually permutated into a big merchandise grab to cash in on the surprise flash in the pan hit which eventually led to an hugely successful album in 2005, Crazy Hits.

The lead off single of Crazy Hits, a cover of the main theme from Beverly Hills Cop was a monumental smash hit, even with Frog's annoying gimmick polluting the incredibly infectious beat getting to number one practically everywhere in the world and staying there in the UK for a month, only finally being ousted by the tag team of Tupac and Elton John.

Most Ridiculous Part:

As much as I want to say the very fact the Crazy Frog exists as a pop culture artefact is one, but I suppose the fact that the mobile phone-bait music video was turned into not one, but two video games makes me want to flee this planet as fast as physics will allow me.

Why?

It's really hard to consider how the Crazy Frog phenomenon suddenly flashed into existence and just as quickly went away. As much as I want to put it down to horrible people being horrible and liking terrible things then finally seeing sense, there must be more to it than that. Crazy Frog was the symbol of a change that would very quickly sweep the pop world: The use of ringtones, the internet and new media as a firm marketing tool, as well as cross marketing in a very efficient way (well other than the blanket marketing of the initial ringtone) that kept the grey bastard constantly in the public's conscious, which snowballed and meant once it was there it would not go away.

As much as we wanted it to.

7: Ain't No Doubt – Jimmy Nail (1993)

What?

If the Crazy Frog is entirely plausible from a sheer cynical marketing perspective, the huge and sustained success of Jimmy Nail is the complete opposite. Typically the number one position goes to either something very talented, very catchy or it fits a contemporary trend. Jimmy Nail was never any of those things, and in fact there's a good chance you won't have heard of him, since his last big role was in 2002, reprising a role he hadn't done at that point for 14 years. Basically, he was the Geordie lout from Auf Wiedersehn Pet, and yet from that he had a pretty respectable television career in the 90s, his biggest hit being the heartwarming comedy Crocodile Shoes.

And it is with Crocodile Shoes that his television and music careers both converge and peak simultaneously, the simple premise of a factory worker who wants to live the dream of being a country music singer included a tie-in album which went to number two at the tail end of 1994 and the title track becoming another of Nail's many many chart hits. However, while Crocodile Shoes makes perfect sense as a tie-in product, his previous album, Growing Up in Public was the big hit, and its first single, Ain't No Doubt inexplicably went to number one, the reason I call it inexplicable becomes readily appatrent once you hear it.

From a production standpoint the song is pretty much dead centre in terms of its sound. It has a brass band, an admittedly awesome bass riff that powers the song and muted synth chords creating a somewhat slow atmospheric verse which comes to life in the chorus. Nail is also accompanied by Sylvia Mason-James, who does very well with the three repeating lines she gets. Those are the two good parts of the song, and really it goes downhill the second Nail starts evoking the rhythmic styling of William Shatner. The lyrics are about a breakup and the mistrust that comes from that, done in a simplistic way and really simply demanding honestly; the act of lying to save feelings after a breakup being a contradiction in terms, leading to the eventual resignnation of Nail's narrator as a liar himself, lying himself to both protect himself and to try and hurt his former lover. The problem is Nail's performance, acting like he's narrating the monologue in a bad Geordie Film Noir, which could have worked in framing the lady as a femme fatale and extending the metaphor. The problem is that it becomes abundantly clear that Nail is not singing the verses due to the limitations in his voice or the unwillingness of the hacks who wrote the song to create a vocal melody, and so it stands to expose his weaknesses in both lyricism and singing, weaknesses that got him an Ivor Novello award nomination for excellent songwriting.

It should be noted that “Bad Geordie Film Noir” seems to be the theme of the music video, although the influences seem to be less “The Blue Dahlia” and more “Bugsy Malone”, as the verse and chorus move between the grim London streets in an intimidating cold grey, the overexposed, almost deified light in the Pre-Chorus and the glitzy full on musical colours of the chorus, relating a tale of the muted emotions of the protagonist being tested by the forced platitudes of his former love, eventually tipping over and forcing the protagonist to rhetorically ask "Why does she pretend?!" and burst out into the emotive, colourful chorus.

Yeah, that's about as much Jimmy fucking Nail analysis as you can wring out of me.

Most Ridiculous Part?

The Pre-Chorus by a mile, where Mason-James is interrupted by Nail's sardonic asides of “she's lying!” which is nothing short of genius. If I'm ever in a nasty horrible break up (um, again), I know who's sage advice I'm going to follow to deal with it!

Why?

Nail was a fairly respected actor, with most of his better roles, such as in Spender and Crocodile Shoes being characters he created, and received five BAFTA nominations and a Golden Globe Nomination that he created. Perhaps his exposure and reputation with the BBC, a company known for being better than most when it came to cross-promotion, as well as his reputation for writing (though not really music) kept him in the public picture, and thus people bought his music as a show of support for his television persona, like they did later with Crocodile Shoes.

Or maybe people are just suckers for bad break up songs, who knows?

6: Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter – Iron Maiden (1990)

What?

Oh hell yes, one of the gods of metal, Iron Maiden were so awesome they managed a number one hit in the early nineties, where metal had been shooed away into nothingness in the wake of the first wave of popular hip hop (or hip-pop as certain particularly humourless oafs will claim). Most metal that was still stocked was the increasingly out of control yet ever duller Hair Metal variety, and it would be a couple of years before its reaction would get big enough to confront it's decadent stablemate. Amid this chaotic landscape, and the utterly pathetic religious claptrap Saviour's Day making it to the Christmas top spot , Iron Maiden managed to score the number one single on the eve of 1991.

To a fan of heavy metal this is standard, and actually for Iron Maiden unfortunately redundant stuff, off their weakest album, No Prayer For the Dying, although a different cut was used as the theme song for the slasher flop Nightmare On Elm Street Part V: The Dream Child. Arguably a tiny bit more accessible in terms of sound than something like To Tame a Land admittedly, but really it's standard Maiden, and really it's difficult to hate an Iron Maiden song if you're a fan of that kind of music. And if you're not, then these words are going to slap you in 3...2...

Most Ridiculous Moment

The BBC banned the song and its music video, if you can believe it, in late 1990 when it started climbing up the charts on Christmas eve. I assume it's because of the rather sexualised lyrics, or maybe that they thought in the wake of the devil worshipping child abuse scare of the early 1990s (believe it or not, that was a real genuine moral panic), that people would literally bring their daughter to the slaughter. Either way, it was a bit sensationalist and I suspect the BBC were pushed into it.

Why?

While I want to say simply “Because it's awesome your plebian cretins!” I genuinely am baffled by this one more than most of the ones on this list. Rock and heavy metal really stopped being more than a fluke hit about a decade before this, but even with the hits in the genre that came before and after this, there was usually a reason for their success. They were in the soundtrack a hit film, some kind of major media event involved them, they got a rub from a popular star of the time or more morbidly one of the members dies. Nightmare Part 5 was an utter flop, so I doubt that Freddy had anything to do with its success. It's not much simpler than most Maiden fare so it wasn't a dramatic change in style like how Metallica and Megadeth got big hits. The song got banned from the BBC, but how much that drove sales I have no idea; while it got the Sex Pistols their only number one hit, but that song was trying to get banned because being taboo was the entire point of the Sex Pistols (not punk mind, before I get complaints from punk bands, just The Sex Pistols themselves). Personally, this isn't entirely out of nowhere, given their massive success outside of the pop fold, perhaps a crossover hit was inevitable. Also, Iron Maiden are awesome, that is all.

Insane Clown Posse Releasing a Song about a relatively recent Murder-Suicide. Exploitative or not? An impromptu review.

Hello there fans of the Clinkening. I know I've been absent for a while due to graduation, applying for loans and jobs and really stuff that doesn't matter to anyone who reads this blog (as in the empty space) and I have been working on material for the site, which should come up in a day or so (I'll start a 3 a week update schedule though the things I do will for the most part be two short things and a long thing each week, or something that equates to that.)

But enough about that, what could rouse me from my thousand year Avalonian slumber? Why, it's the controversy surrounding the Insane Clown Posse and their brand new video entitled Chris Benoit. If you exactly how offensive calling a song that is, welcome Pro Wrestling fans, there is nothing for you here. But ICP, their connection to pro wrestling and the harrowing events surrounding Chris Benoit's last days are all irrevocably connected in this piece, so first I'm going to have to show anyone who doesn't know why this is offensive the ropes (pardon the horrible horrible pun).

Chris Benoit was a professional wrestler, but really what he did in the ring (which was a lot) is in the minds of most who know of him irrelevant compared to what he did in the last few days of it. In 2007, Chris Benoit was found strangled to death in his home where his wife and son also lay dead. Extensive reports suggest that Chris Benoit murdered his wife and child before killing himself and that bit of the story is regarded as impossible to refute. The problem was why he did it, the leading theories either being steroid abuse (though unlikely given forensic evidence) or the sheer abuse on his body (and particularly his brain) basically destroying his ability to reason.

Really, the reason for his actions is largely irrelevant as the fact that it's a deeply controversial and relatively recent tragedy concerning professional wrestling, and has for the most part relegated the once-prominent sport to the sidelines of modern pop culture. The Benoit case tends to be something to rather avoid, as most discussions about him tend to lead into loud abusive cul-de-sacs with each side accusing each other of being murderer's cheerleaders or not open-minded enough or something. The petty feuds of wrestling fans really hide the issues of this and really stops the event from being seriously explored, not helped by the somewhat partisan attitude of the people who have written about it. Thus, as utterly odd and moronic as it sounds, perhaps a song could use the song as a metaphor to explore the deeper issues surrounding Benoit and the tragedy of his family. And even more oddly, perhaps people who are neutral regarding pro wrestling and the incident may be the ones to do it! People like the Insane Clown Posse!

I think that last paragraph may have cost me my credibility, my sanity and my dignity in one well aimed swoop.

However, what is absolutely the case is ICP and the Juggalos have a very interesting relationship with professional wrestling, particularly the emergence of the backyard wrestling and extreme wrestling scenes within it. You know, the bits people mock of kids wearing slipknot t-shirts hitting each other with florescent light tubes while forty illiterates catcall and wail? ICP own a promotion called Juggalo Championship Wrestling but before that they had a big connection to wrestling, having stints in the three main promotions of the era; ECW (the guerilla pro wrestling association), WCW (owned by AOL Time Warner which at the time was the biggest corporate entity in the USA) as well as WWF/E, also known as the only one left at the time of writing. And I don't just mean they went and plugged their crap; they actually wrestled as well. Not very well but they did! So if anyone had the right to create a song based on such a distinctly wrestling-centred tragedy, it would be the Insane Clown Posse surely.

I was going to say, maybe it should be someone with talent, tact, subtlety and not a front for evangelical Christianity, but that'd be unfair (and in the latter case not entirely confirmed). Most of what I've personally heard about ICP is from second hand sources and the very scant number of songs I've heard (Yes, including the meme-tastic ode to stupidity Miracles), so I'm willing to give them a try. If only a relatively neutral artist can get away with a song about Benoit, maybe only someone who's not a predisposed hater or Juggalo should be the one to review it.

It starts off in typical ICP fashion, with a discordant pseudo-carnival backbeat, like Hunter S Thompson going to the circus. It tends to work quite well and actually creates a slightly unsettling atmosphere for some of the songs, though its abuse like in the celebratory Miracles means that occasionally it lapses into sarcasm, parody or a simple lack of imagination, quickly launching into our hook, with a male and female voice duelling “A Catastrophic Demise” and “Unmeasurable regrets” (oddly also parsered as “I'll measure up all regrets” which makes distinctly less sense) chants. This kind of works although you can tell just how badly they have to mangle the words to get them to fit the meter.

The first verse by Violent J (and yes, I had to look up which is which) is actually not too bad, relatively simple flow but it works, and the lyrics discuss a deranged damaged mind going over the edge in a way that won't blow anyone's mind but at the same time gets the idea across without cliché or really stupid metaphors, although “pull your tongue out with pliers dispatch” (oddly parsered in the lyrics I read as “player dispatch” which doesn't even sound right) is a bit of an odd metaphor to use, an odd time to use hashtag rap when the rest of the song seems to avoid a lot of what makes modern rap music so unlistenable. And then we get to our chorus, which again sounds okay, a crescendo to the talk of nearly being at your limit, all the anger, outrage and negative emotions burst out of you and you go insane, or as the song puts it, you're “heading for the worst”. While not, bad, you have the issue of the backup vocalist “I'm Chris Benoit!” after every single line, which I assume is to connect the subject of the title to the chorus, which is your thesis statement about the themes of the song. The song appears to be claiming that Chris Benoit was slowly being driven insane by everything around him and that he suddenly snapped and killed his family. I'll spare you the insane nitpickings about how that's impossible and just say that based on the police reports done it is indeed impossible.

Shaggy 2 Dope's verse doesn't really do much different, essentially being another series of synonyms for being pushed over the edge to the point where you lose control. Now, generally when you have more than one rapper in a rap group (like Run DMC, Public Enemy, NWA etc) it's because you have several rappers who each have their own flow and verbal ability, which spices up a song which could start flagging by the third verse otherwise. My issue with the ICP is that they don't seem to do this. Other than the paint and the fact one's thinner than the other, they're hard to tell apart, probably not helped by the very slow beats that they create. Also, while “Eject my controller” is quite a clever line, it doesn't rhyme with “over” no matter how hard you try.

At this point, the biggest mention of Benoit (the title of the song after all) is just Shaggy and the backup singers saying it. Until of course after the second chorus where they include one of Benoit's wrestling promos in the middle. Benoit's main characterisation in pro wresling was that he was a bringer of pain, the crippler that could make you feel so much pain you'd surrender and hope for mercy. In other words, the promo they used was just like any other wrestling promo so I'm not entirely certain why it was used. I can only assume because of the connection between the pain he caused in the ring and the pain he caused out of it, which suggests that the duo read Ring Of Hell in lieu of doing research.

The song is really not bad. It's pedestrian, with a rather weak flow, lyrics that aren't offensive but are in effect a series of synonyms for “I've gone insane” and a beat that while initially rather good doesn't ever go anywhere or do anything of interest (though not to the same banal degrees as Soulja Boy). However, by naming itself after a murderer, it forces itself to be a thesis statement on the man, and other than some very transparent references to his name, the use of one of his promos and the music video being set in a makeshift ring, the concept is largely wasted in favour of a song about insanity I'm almost certain they've released about a dozen times by this point. And so an attempt to understand real tragedy through art is once again wasted. 'Tis a shame.

Huggy Dave will return...

Normal service will be resumed shortly, but while you wait...

On Nick Clegg and how the term “dickless” now has an Avatar

Hello there, it seems the more things change, the more they stay the same. This rings particularly true in that weird disturbing, infinitely despicable world of politics, which appears to have replaced cockfighting as the national sport of the aristocratic elite. I can picture the lobby group offices as being in strange warehouses, illegal gambling dens in the Cotswolds betting on just which policy will screw the working class over the most. And then maybe a bet for which single politician is the most hated person in the country.

I suspect Nick Clegg would be close to the top of the list.

Before I get to the point where I claim that Nick Clegg is to politics what “We Built this City” by Starship was to music, I think a little bit of history needs to be put in order, both of Mr Clegg and myself.

I myself come from a working class family in the northwest of England, pretty steadfast labour voters for the most part, me and my brother sharing someone lefter wing views than the most but still for the most part supported that Labour, while under it's Nu-Labour guise that meant it had to be Tory and capitalist baiting, at least seemed to give a shit about the people of which it has been voted to govern. Then scandal after scandal and disaster after disaster rocked Labour and it's unfortunate dour leader, Gordon Brown, who seemed to have little going for him up against Tony Blair replicant David Cameron. Cameron's early pitches for the Tory party, telling them “Don't go blue, go green!” and making every single simpering pathetic possible attempt to prove his hipster liberal principles. I mean, kids you gotta vote for someone who listens to The Killers and Radiohead! But this boneheaded attempt to appeal to a set of voters who have ingrained memories of their parent's struggles with Mrs Thatcher didn't just consist of Desert Island Discs and impossibly bad slogans, oh no! His policies consisted of just two for the first 3 years he spent as leader of the conservative party; Hug a Hoody and ride a bicycle into work (Limo escort behind optional).

It's the wonderful irony that gets me.

Anyway, the British public seemed to be forced to make a choice between an increasingly compromised Gordon Brown, who was blamed for every single misfortune befalling the country, some being very much his fault (“Oh, the economy is sinking, I blame the previous chance- oh wait, that was me...”) while others, like the floods and the expenses scandal (which in fairness affected all two and a half major parties at the time) really were stuff he didn't really have a hope in hell of doing anything about; or David Cameron, a genetically formulated politician who often seemed more reptilian than man and has to be taught what human feelings, emotions and values are.

I'd personally sack the incompetent dolt hired to teach him those things.

This was the way of the world until late 2009, when a new saviour swept the lands in the eerily similar shape of fresh faced Nick Clegg, a kind of new liberal democrat, trying to sweep away the vaguely old dour aged image of the party, and this was for me a little bit of an alarm bell. You see, I'm a fan of that old Lib Dem view of politics, and was a huge fan of Charles Kennedy in particular, a great political mind ruined by his own very public weakness. He was succeeded by Menezes Campbell, touchingly nicknamed “Ming Campbell” by journalists whose jokes were somehow older than Ming himself, who seemed to consider the building of the Pyramids to be a recent memory. After he left to fight Flash Gordon, Nick Clegg stepped up to the podium, and brought with him a mix of that wonderful Lib Dem idealism and values as well as a pragmatic gift of gab that was enough to make a lot of people seriously consider him as having the potential to actually win an election, helped a lot by a lot of very crowd pleasing decisions, such as vows to improve the NHS, a promise to not increase the tuition fees, which he famously (well, infamously now) posed with while on the campaign trail, and a general view that he was a new face that understood and connected with the people as opposed to the dinosaur and the reptile. Things were so hot for Nick that in live debates the main way that the other two parties scored points was to say “I agree with Nick”

Still leaves a sore spot for a lot of you doesn't it?

So many people fell for this hook, line and sinker, almost including me. That by the way isn't some kind of “I told you so” on the majority of the British population; I don't think too many people really saw what he did coming, but I do fear that I must have had an omen in that polling booth, my pen hovering ominously over the Liberal Democrats box, before I quickly took it away and voted for the Green Party. An omen that, some how, in some way he wasn't quite on the level. Regardless of my actual vote for the most part I believed in the hype, mostly because I wanted to believe. I wanted for Nick Clegg to swoop in and save Britain from itself, and I thought the curious ending to the 2010 general election (where no party got enough of an overall majority to actually win) which led to the first coalition government in the history of Great Britain. Alright, so it was with the Tories, but we all thought it would eliminate the nutters on both sides; the Tory racist/sexist/homophobic bigwigs wouldn't get a word in edgeways, and Lib Dem policy would be refined to be less idealistic but more possible, and so the potential for change was there.

We all probably know what happened in the next year and a half. Everything got so much worse so quickly. The Tories very quickly shed their skin of humanity in scenes reminiscent of the show V, while Nick Clegg very blatently, very clearly and very pathetically whimpered and backpedaled and simpered and cowardly broke his promises on education, in a similar way to how Cameron betrayed his promises about the NHS. The heroic, brave Lib Dem Nick Clegg became Cameron's poodle, a little pet that's carried around sometimes as an odd curiosity to rich Tory aristocrats, and basically pulled the Lib Dem party down with it. For a year and a half the so called “ConDem” coalition was really the Conservatives dominating while all the Lib Dems could do was lie back and think of England. All that hug a hoodie nonsense went out the window in the summer, as Cameron essentially called the underclass a cancer on society, a philosophy which has been echoed in his constant attempts to rid the country of mythical “Benefit scroungers” who must be stopped by ruining everyone else's lives.

All the while Clegg has done nothing.

After a year of this, there are louder and louder rumblings of rebellion in the Liberal Democrat ranks, and honestly who can blame them? The people at top, mostly Clegg himself but some of the upper Lib Dem brass, is dragging the party through the mud and basically ensure that there is no possible way the Lib Dems will ever get into power again.

All because Clegg was willing to sacrifice everything, especially his balls to get even the slightest whiff of power.

Even if he had to become a dickless yesman to do it.

Lazy Day?

Hello there, sorry this update is going to be very rushed and not particularly interesting, since I've not really got that much to talk about. The news is abuzz with Georgie Porgie cutting the tax rate and the NHS slicing bill coming to the wire, along with the fierce manhunt for the iPhone destroying menace that is Russell Brand, but I decided to take a little break from being a bastard in order to relax and take stock.

On the grand scale of things, past a bit of emotional crap I've muddled through, consistently going between poor and literally penniless, hating everything to do with politics, advertising and the general hyper-conservative nature of society, and wanting to rip the throat out of pretty much every sexist prick in the south of North America, life's not all that bad.

I've got a roof over my head, the emotional crap has got to the point where I'm not exactly depressed at any specific thing anymore, I've enough food to eat most days, people seem to inexplicibly like me for whatever reason, and the ludicrous lawmakers in the States are a massive rampaging raging ocean apart from my world.

So yeah, lazy relaxed day. Sorry guys, I'm not mad at anything in particular. As a way of making amends, have a picture of a sleepy cat in a hammock:

Stay Safe and hug it out guys.

Huggy Dave

The Metafrustration: Blogging about not thinking of anything to blog about

Hello there. When I started writing the blog again, I committed myself to a schedule to wit I would write a blog post every other day, and make sure I had a good split between discussing contemporary news, writing reviews on music and views on writing and philosophy and stuff. I guess this counts as stuff but I do apologise for the complete lack of anything resembling fascinating discourse or argument in the next thousand words or so.

In life, things tend to appear in cycles. As we move between boom and bust in the financial front, most things around us tend to move in similar cycles. We move from slickly produced committee-created music in favour of wonderfully earnest “real” “alternative” music. We stop stuffing our minds with popcorn films and watch more frugal artistic fare. Clothing styles change with the tide. To a degree these are financial based: Who would fund overpriced crap in a recession for instance? And as for music, why do people want to hear about people bragging about being so mind bogglingly rich it causes most people to transcend sanity. In the past it's how art and life interlinked: Art fit the needs and attitudes of the people and to a degree vice versa...

The new millennium may have changed that a little bit.

Maybe this is just me looking back, but with the evolution of the internet going far beyond anyone's expectations and its simple far-reaching nature meaning that uprising and protest and world change is increasingly returning to the hands of the people. People in large numbers can incite change, for good or bad. But what has been lost in the midst of riots and uprisings and despots being upturned is the other massive revolution of the internet brought by its sheer scale and vastness; the fact that there is room for all voices to be heard on it in some form. Hell, the very fact you're reading these words proves it, and the media has fought like Canute telling the tide to go back is the fragmentation of the audience. In the past, music tastes being cyclical made sense; you heard music in record shops and on the radio, and so when audiences got bored and turned off, something else would take its place to begin the other step of the cycle. People picked up their guitars, then put them down when they got sick of the earnestness. I use music as an example primarily because the difference between the two cycles is so readily apparent; on one end you have digitised slickly produced music with relatively simple messages appealing to an audience that likes the way the hegemony is treating them, and when people get sick of that, the underground rises; the music of the people gets its time in the spotlight to shine. With the internet, everyone has the chance of getting the best of all worlds; commercialised music thrives but at the same time the individual taste of a lot of underground subcultures gets their chance to be catered for, and it's hard for a usually very single minded set of old industries to get their head around, over 20 years after the internet started to thrive in earnest, they still don't.

What does this have to do with anything, let alone the frustration of creating a blog post?

My point is the internet is everything and nothing in the world and in terms of media and communication has an appeal for all niches. If you want to write tiny messages about your day, you have Twitter and Facebook to suit you. I've heard various stories over the years in typically graceful moderate language of how the internet is ruining language, industry, music, film, literature and pretty much anything else. The arguments typically being given from old industries and folks who are not entirely well versed on the Internet’s great power for communication, and would rather see the locking down and ruination of it than allow the world to change around them. Either the internet will change society to fit, or as many enterprising individuals and small groups have realised, ways to make money on the internet will be found and really the only thing at risk from the internet as it is are the huge monoliths who crow about it.

It's such a shame they seem to be the lawmakers now...

The Death Throes of Game: Or Why Monopolies are the ruination of an industry in the long run

Hello there, sorry for the haphazardness of this one. My original idea turned out to be a bit trickier to write about than I had expected, so I've spent the weekend looking for something to write about that might have enough interest and worth to the internet to really consider discussing. It's a relatively slow news day and I've not got any relevant topics to really discuss.

Then of course I read the news about how Game Group Ltd's has had 95% of its stock value completely wiped out, primarily because of how damaging the fact it will not be stocking some of the biggest selling games of this year, including Mass Effect III, Street Fighter X Tekken and Mario Party 9. Because of the largely confidential nature of business and finance, I will try to avoid going the straightforward route and calling Game allergic to money. Because some facts need to be made clear before we lunge at Game with the sporks and runcible spoons.

First of all, their argument is that negotiations with EA have soured due to “unreasonable credit negotiations” which in layman's terms means EA was trying to flog them wholesale for a price they'd never be able to profit on. I've heard in the ballpark of £40 or £45 for Mass Effect III but I'm not entirely sure whether that means for the vanilla version or for the limited N7 Edition. In any case, it would have led to Game ending up in an even tighter pinch than they already were last year, already being tightly pincered in between online suppliers (who can sell them cheaper due to not having to pay for shops etc) and supermarkers (who have such massive profit margins they can get away with selling them for chicken feed as loss leaders to get people into the shops) so they declined, pissing off EA who refused to supply any of EA's March releases (which included Max Payne 3 and Mass Effect III), so that wiped 20% off their stock value; this was followed by Nintendo refusing to stock Mario Party 9 for similar reasons and later Capcom joined the group.

Now, for non-gamers, this is like a music store pissing off Warner, EMI and Sony music in one go, or a book shop pissing off Penguin, Routledge and Scholastic. It's not inherently fatal, but your profitability is going to suffer invariably, not just in terms of losing a vast swathe of very lucrative sales; even if the companies were going to force the games to be loss leaders, the amount of merchandise, strategy guides and whatever else would help to balance the gap. In fact, Game has worked hard to modify their business model in favour of enhancing the profitability of a single purchase (also known as the Bobby Kotick business model after he had the gall to boast that he'd turned a single $40 purchase into a $200 one) and so while still feeling the pinch, the company might still get through with various rethinks. Instead, it made the choice to annoy one of its main suppliers and is paying through the nose for it: their stocks have nosedived, the company's a pariah to the gaming community (who never liked the way it treated them as idiots to begin with) and without the latest stock of games chances are they'll easily lose the casual market they tried so desperately to court. More importantly it'll shatter the myth that just because you have a monopoly you're here to stay.

The Game we know and loathe formed from the purchase by Electronics Boutique (the name licensed from the American company EB Games) buying out its competitor at the time (the Game that wasn't actually that bad if you got to know it). This led to a monolithic Game store that pretty much had two or three stores in every town you could think of. The purchase of various overseas game retailers also helped balloon the relatively small fish's ego and led to a business model that essentially consisted of buying out any potential competitors, leaving only the small independents left. With the purchase of Gamestation before it could really get going, it looked like nothing could stop Game from buying out any other potential national competitors. With a bigger company came bigger hubris, and it seemed for a long time that nothing could go wrong with the company. Until of course a lot of competitors snuck around it, and Game with it's antiquated business model and predatory tactics, couldn't adapt when the tide turns.

The real tragedy of course (along with the poor employees losing their jobs) is the loss of the dedicated games shop you could walk in and have a discussion about games with. Online stores won't quite have that and I somehow doubt you'd be able to talk games with too many of the staff at Tesco unless you know them out of hours. Hopefully the lessons learned from this and the countless other casualties of old guard corporations; a company can go from perfectly healthy to on the brink of collapse on the basis on one critically bad decision.

Stay safe and hug it out!

Huggy Dave

The Undaunted front of Online Activism, or One does not Simply Overthrow Dictators with Retweets.

Hello there loyal reader (I think there is one). I've been struggling over the last couple of days to think of a particularly striking topic to discuss; there were a few interesting things happening in student politics but by the time most people read it the LUSU elections will be a rather distant memory in the minds of people who found their friend's names first, people who had stupid slogans second and RON third. There's a few things I intend to review, including some albums for RocSoc (for some reason they saw the first three and wanted me to write more).

Sometimes, things get too big to ignore though...

At the start of this month, a documentary video on Youtube entitled “Kony 2012” went viral in a big way, and chances are anyone who's viewing this probably already knows about it. For those who don't, I will do my utmost to condense 25 years of the most tumultuous period in Uganda's recent history and try to hopefully demonstrate a point.

Joseph Kony is the leader of a violently evangelical Christian guerilla group (to use the politically neutral term) called the Lord's Resistance Army, who allegedly come from Kony being told by God to spread the Ten Commandments (Kony's own interpretation of them) through Africa. He forces children into slavery either as soldiers or as sex slaves. The accounts about their activities towards their own people or the people of Central Africa don't get much better, involving tales of torture, rape, mutilation, assorted butchery among many other things. It's stuff that I personally don't want to get into and has been repeated by various sources. Essentially he's a bloodthirsty tyrannical African warlord; one of many combatants in one of the most unstable parts of the world, in Uganda, in South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Invisible Children are a charity whose primary aim is to stop Kony, and have made a multitude of films attempting to showcase the atrocities Kony (usually pictured attempting to impersonate Carl “Apollo Creed” Weathers in Predator) has done, Kony 2012, being the most recent of these videos. The video is very much propaganda in nature, as you sort of expect, and is 30 minutes long, a long time for anything to go viral, which makes me suspect most people who spread the campaign haven't watched it. The video's aim and purpose is noble enough; stop Kony. It's intended method for this is to take advantage of the nature of social media and it's ability to allow free thought and expression to be spread across the world, which forms the backbone of rebelling against opression. All well and rosy, although it's idea of social media as an unstoppable force for good and wonderment in the world is something that is open to debate. The video's tone is very similar to 80s fundraising campaigns such as Hands across America or Live Aid, where it seemed that greed was so good the only way to get people to do anything was to fellate their ego, which smacks to me of White Man's Burden.

The basic idea of Kony 2012 is that people will spread it around to everyone they know and buy wristbands and posters from the Invisible Children folks, so that on April 20^th, everyone will 'Cover the Night' and make sure that the collective voice is heard so that the people who can do something about it will do. The charity seems to be at least implicitly encouraging militaristic action targeting America in particular as a country that should be doing something about it. Currently Obama has sent about 100 tactical specialists (essentially soldiers there to help the Ugandan army out in terms of strategy) to Uganda to help, for the record, but Invisible Children is suggesting some kind of joint-operation between at least Uganda and the United States. The fact that the primary focus is on the United States to instigate change in the region again reminds me uncomfortably of White Man's Burden and undermines efforts by the Ugandan forces to arrest Kony. Speaking of Uganda, there is no mentioning of Uganda's somewhat spotty human rights record, nor of the instability of the region, which could get more than a little worse if people just blunder in. Invisible Children for the record responded, mainly by saying that they simplified the entire thing to make it “easy to understand.” All fine and dandy, except that by simplifying the debate, you've completely changed it. Those complications are the backbone, along without wanting to look like neocolonialists. There is simplification and there is changing facts to suit an argument. The latter has no place in rational discourse, and really is the problem with using social media in campaigns: It becomes an increasingly nonsensical game of Chinese Whispers which eventually gets split down two very extreme camps; extreme supporters who call the others child murdering bastards, and the other side who claim that anyone who supports the campaign are vaguely racist sheep.

All this makes me look like a cynical asshole I'm sure, but raising awareness is far from a bad thing, that aspect of the campaign I don't mind at all. Getting and encouraging people to think of the world beyond their front door is always encouraging. I don't know, if you want to raise awareness, be sure that you're not blindfolding them to the full truth at the same time.

Stay safe, and hug it out (Hey, if everyone did that we wouldn't have this problem to begin with )

HuggyDave

When Life gives you lemons, blog about them

Hey there, all you zero readers. It's been a while since I've posted, and a lot has happened in my strange little life, which sadly put my blog on the back burner, limited to the reviews I've done for RocSoc, which I thought after no longer being on the exec I probably wouldn't be doing again. Well, I've had surprisingly good feedback (by that I mean one of the exec asked me to do some more), so I will attempt to make that a regular thing . The idea is that I will post something every other day , and once a week post something more substantial like a review, or some kind of extended blog post. We shall see, for the most part I'll be playing things relatively fast and loose until people start messaging angry things demanding content, so there we are.

Stay safe, and always hug it out,

HuggyDave