When I was a child, I received a bumper-sized colouring book every Christmas. I’d immediately set to work with crayons, filling the pages with a chaotic scrawl that each year got closer to staying inside the thick black lines. Eventually, I outgrew this activity and a different type of book began to appear among my presents. When I was perhaps eight or nine years old, I opened my first diary.

Just like the colouring books, the diary demanded that I filled it in, albeit in a different way. First, I’d dutifully enter forthcoming birthdays and family occasions, the the pages in between would wait to be filled with thoughts and missives from my tiny life. Each day brought its own deadline, demanding that something would happen that was exciting enough to write in the diary. But nothing seemed important enough to be recorded, not even on the cheap ruled paper inside my nylon Filofax wannabe.

As a child, recording my own story was a terrifying responsibility. With new platforms for self expression such as blogging and social media, it’s become a casual habit. But are we also recording our stories in ways that we barely notice?

Perhaps reality TV redefined the diary before blogs and social media became a scratch pad for our feelings. Contestants would be left with a cheap camera to record their “video diaries” when the camera crew had packed up for the evening. Elements of the late 1990s trend for video diaries haunts YouTube video blogs to this day. In Big Brother, the Diary Room was a private haven from the rest of the house where, ironically, the diarist’s personal comments would be broadcast to millions of viewers. It was as if the nation was recording the exploits of nano-celebrities via word of mouth and Sky+.

We don’t need a celebrity host to hand us a camcorder or the pressure of a blank page in order to diarise our lives. For instance, tattoos act as indelible mementos, telling stories and marking turning points. Many people with tattoos can tell you the stories behind them. In prisons, they can reflect the wearer’s rap sheet or mourn the passing of loved ones. The idea of someone ending up drunk and tattooed on hitting a milestone in their lives is a cliché, but it happens. Ask comedian and gonzo statistician Dave Gorman, who ended up with a Texas driving license tattooed on his arm after a night of debauchery during his Googlewhack Adventure.

Scars provide a similar map of our lives, acting as a badge of honour or a reminder not to [insert foolish act] ever again. Major events in our lives such as illness or injury leave scars, and sometimes people scar themselves. Their association with pain, fear and shock leave visceral memories.

The world beyond our bodies also tells our stories. It’s human nature to encode our experiences and emotions into the things around us. It may be something physical like a tattoo, but we attach symbolic meaning to far more ethereal forms. The olfactory bulb reacts to smell and forms part of our brain’s limbic system, which controls long-term memory and emotion. Our sense of smell can trigger memories in an instant. Similarly, music becomes anchored to stages in our life and we can manipulate our mood simply by changing the CD. Music’s role in recording stories is perhaps most direct for the musician at the time of creation – Jimi Hendrix described his albums as “nothing but personal diaries”. Although Purple Haze had a specific meaning to Hendrix, it also had a million meanings to a million other people – all based on the listener’s own personal experiences.

One man’s bric-a-brac is another man’s memory (or a memory waiting to happen). Image: Ardfern

The physical objects we collect are perhaps the most powerful representations of events. These range from the literal (like a photograph of a special occasion) to the symbolic (a book we buy because it reminds us of our childhood). If a diary is a series of symbols that we can read to recall a sensation, we can read a shelf full of trinkets in the same way.

In the 21st century, our collections also exist online. The internet gives us many ways to record ideas, emotions, photos, images and conversations. Even when we think of these interactions as only existing in the present, they still have a habit of hanging around. If we want to, we can use our Twitter or Facebook histories step back in time and relive past experiences. Between the updates, posts and photos there are also the private moments and meta-narratives that only we can decode.

As we record our lives-in-progress on the internet, older chronicles are being repurposed for new platforms. Phil Gyford is the mouthpiece of Samuel Pepys in a digital world. For nearly a decade, Gyford  has published entries from the famous diarist exactly 343 years after the day they were written. This time-warping weblog gives an insight into the past with the benefit of real-time delivery. However Pepys’ diaries where never written for public consumption; the private details of the naval administrator’s life, concerns, insecurities and sexual relationships were not published until 1825, 122 years after his death. To read them in a blog format (and more recently on Twitter) seems natural and the content feels surprisingly contemporary, as if Pepys was writing with an internet audience in mind.

Pepys’ legacy was his diary, but what of ours? Don’t be surprised if it’s your social media presence. It’s notoriously hard to leave Facebook and not even death’s a guaranteed escape – two of my friends on the site are sadly deceased. In 2010, one blogger calculated that departed Facebook users total over 5 million by using the worldwide annual crude death rate. Whatever the accuracy of this number, we may be writing our own epitaphs on Facebook right now, and for some of us our last words will be uttered via social media. Our profiles have the potential to become both a shrine and a diary that future generations can pick over. And one day the dead may outnumber the living on social networks.

It seems that almost 25 years after receiving my first diary, I have no problem externalising my thoughts. However, there’s a fundamental difference between my internet activities and keeping a diary. My tweets, Facebook posts and blog entries are aimed at an audience and sanitised, something that a diary doesn’t need to be. As much as they’re a journal of events, diaries are a private place for freedom of expression that will be seen by our eyes only – the most trustworthy of confidants. I have little doubt that faced with a blank diary and asked to record what matters to me the most, I’d still pause. There’s always an indecision about who I’m trying to please when writing about myself. Perhaps Freud’s trinity of id, ego and super-ego all fight for a voice when we’re faced with the prospect of being ourselves. Whoever that is.

So even if we’re recording the events in our lives through diaries, blogs, trails of objects, signs and digital footprints, do we ever really tell the whole story?

This is the second part (part one here) of our look at Ed Key and David Kanaga’s Proteus, currently available to preorder for Windows with OSX and Linux versions to follow…

‘Proteus’ starts with your character literally at sea, looking across a glittering ocean at a distant shoreline; the soundtrack a rolling, chattering musical instrument that’s familiar but difficult to place.

It’s a description that fits Proteus itself; the game’s bold subpoena-ing of designer Ed Key’s own favorite places (a few of which we looked at in part one) bringing a level of verisimilitude to bear on the island’s seasoned environment, while Kanaga’s music provides the closest the game has to a map – guiding and teasing mysteries and wonders from the player’s exploration of this undiscovered country.

The game itself is similarly concatenated. Key and Kanaga’s game doesn’t so much provide an experience as a canvas for experiences. The island doesn’t flood your senses, instead its abstract design aesthetic in particular encourages the player to bring their own memories and feelings to bear on the island. An example of this reader response was my story about the spinney behind my house as a child from part one but Proteus uses a number of techniques – both blocky and beautiful – to populate its island.

EXPLORING THE FUTURE

A pixel is not a particularly pretty thing and early, low resolution videogames asked a lot of our imaginations. This is a dragon from the Atari 2600’s strange and arresting ‘Adventure’ -

And this is a bat from the same system’s tense and frantic ‘Haunted House’–

Baldly laid on a screen, neither appears to be the stuff of nightmares. Players of Adventure and Haunted House had to collude with as much as play the game in order to get the most out of them. Today it’s possible to produce creatures with a thousand tentacles and boggling eyes. But I’d argue that this design -

Dead Space 2.

Is less effective than this design -

Space Invaders.

Because Space Invaders‘ abstract approach – to its game mechanics and music as well as its graphics – understands the value of the player’s imagination.

Taito’s arcade game  was a familiar feature in as many chip shops as dimly lit amusement arcades but this strange box in the corner was the portal to some existential terrors. Taken alone, the sprites – despite one squid-like enemy recalling Lovecraft’s ‘lurker beyond time’ Cthulhu - aren’t exactly scary. But lay them out in their 5 x 11 formation; advance them towards the player in a gradually accelerating march accompanied by an insistent, drone-like soundtrack rising in hysteria and ask the player to defend humanity with the space munitions equivalent of a dripping tap and you have the stuff of nightmares.

I think that’s because the game provides space for the player to bring their own fears and emotion into the game. Dead Space might be a stunningly orchestrated horror but it can’t compete with our imaginations. That’s why the piece of ragged cloth in Jonathan Miller’s adaptation of Oh Whistle and I’ll Come To You is so terrifying.

Whistle and I’ll Come to You.

Proteus’ aesthetic races away with this conceit. The pixellated art style is retro and stylish but those stretches of colour are also canvas-like. They’re designed for us to project our own perceptions and interpretations onto them.

Proteus.

This projected potential is evocatively demonstrated in Proteus’s horizon. Stripped of map and compass, we’re free to soak in our surroundings – and the horizon becomes a central part of the navigational landscape. Ebbing and flowing with the topograpy of the island, I was reminded of Rescue on Fractalus! A game based around the then-revolutionary fractal technology in which the player’s mission – that of picking up downed pilots from an alien world’s craggy landscape – was an excuse to explore this ground-breakingly robust environment. A proto-Proteus.

Undulating and organic, the lines that make up Fractalus have always reminded me of the sleeve for Joy Division’s album Unknown Pleasures. Peter Saville’s iconic design suggests a series of unreachable horizons as much the wave pattern of a dying star it’s based upon.

Joy Division – Unknown Pleasures.

And Proteus offers a light flip side to Unknown Pleasures. Joy Division’s secrets are  frustrating, its fractals treacherous traps to catch at our heels. Proteus’s horizons promise enlightenment. They’re descendants of the blue-skied psychedelic lines in Yu Suzuki’s third person on-rails shooter Space Harrier and a videogame ripost to Joy Division’s ‘failure of the modern man’, where rescuing a civilisation and killing aliens is an experience akin to crowdsurfing at a disco.

Space Harrier.

Fictional Anthropologists in Back to the Future sunglasses point to other links. Proteus’s clouds, which sweep across the games’s island with a smooth majesty, feel like a visitor from Sega’s ‘Super Scalar’ tech. Both place the player in the role of the solitary human being in a strange world, and both leave the why’s and wherefore’s of the story for the player to conjecture through abstraction.

MESOAMERICAN GAME DESIGN

In her book ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities‘, Jane Jacobs looks at how we interact with urban spaces and they interact with us. Her examination of parks is particularly interesting and while Key resists too much comparison – preferring the less tended influences of cryptoforests and the like – Jacob’s description of one of the key characteristics of parks – ‘Intricacy’, as the way the eye perceives the physical space in these areas, is a worthwhile reference. Jacobs highlights events such as the rise of the ground and groupings of trees to create drama and the way that a good park can be difficult to map – all considerations that fit Proteus’s model.

Jane Jacobs. Original photo by Sam Beebe

Key’s role sees the designer trying to strike a balance between a designed environment and one that’s more dynamic. “The general forms of the hills are quite tightly controlled. But the configurations are down to chance, so on one island you might get some picturesque bays and islets arising, on another you might get broad swathes of upland etc.” Key’s influences are more ritualistic than Jacob’s urban planning however. “Rather than looking at landscape design, I did quite a bit of research into the idea of the “ritual landscape” in archaeology,” Key outlines. “If you go to somewhere like Avebury, where there are many coexisting monuments, there’s a generally accepted theory that you should study how all these fit together into the context of the landscape…”

Proteus

One shared feature of both Jacob’s civilisation and Key’s ritualistic landscape is the sun. In Proteus, the sun is a lead character in the games’s storytelling. You chase it through the branches of trees and over the horizon, it provides navigation, a guide and pretty much your only constant companion. Ed – “That’s a nice way of thinking about it and in a similar way I do enjoy following the sun and catching interesting things in silhouette as it rises and sets. I tried to add some built structures that frame the sun, but haven’t got anything I’m happy with yet…”

SOUND

If Proteus has a frame, it’s the reactive soundtrack by David Kanaga that guides and teases the player as he or she wanders around the island and its encounters. Most of the creatures that inhabit Proteus express themselves through sound and the locations too seem each have their own voices. As Kanaga’s synthesised samples soundtracked my shepherding a pixel sharp shard of light towards a gravestone it became clear I was playing a piece of music as much as a game.

“David and I developed a sound system where we dynamically mixed loops together based on player action.” Explains Ed “And after talking to him for a while it became more and more just about music. Just about the sound linking to location and the aesthetic.”

When Ed talks about the ‘score diagrams’ I start to wonder if the game’s audio might be the closest to a script in this meandering, funnell-less game. Proteus scores itself based on player action; adjusting on the fly to your passing through a field of grass or standing on top of a snow-capped hill, amongst other things. “Season and time of day are the other factors, although there are some other subtleties: Once a loop has a non-zero volume it can suppress other loops in the system, according to mixing rules set by David. It’s all driven by a scripting system…”

This sound map is the closest to a guide you’ll have and it’s a beautiful accompaniment to Key and Kanaga’s island. While having a prima guide to the spinney I lived behind when I was five is an attractive prospect (if a little mind-bending), there’s adventure in a game you can’t map.

Key and Kanaga’s greatest success is that in describing Proteus’s principles you wind up reaching as much for real life explorations and discoveries as videogames. I often write about movies and other art forms when talking about games, but I can’t think of another example where my real life experiences have formed the most apt comparisons.

Key and Kanaga’s Proteus is released for Windows this autumn with OSX and Linux versions to follow. Beta and limited edition physical versions are available to preorder on the Proteus website…

This is part one of a two-part look at Ed Key and David Kanaga’s Proteus, based on several builds of the game plus an interview and email correspondence with Key himself. Part two will be released tomorrow.

Sat at the end of a long terraced street, the unremarkable new build home I grew up in as a kid was the gatehouse between a grey suburbia and a put-upon but utterly addictive spinney. The garden backed onto a haphazard cryptoforest – squeezed on either side by a deserted barracks and a new building estate – full of sycamores, nettles, shopping trolleys and endless adventure. I would have lived there if it weren’t for the monsters at night.

I never mapped this jungle, despite the benefits of being able to navigate its smelly, sickly streams or escape the yawning, pit-of-the-stomach horror of me and my friends realising we were utterly lost in its belly as the sun began to set. Why not? I think, despite the terrors, deep down I was aware they were nothing against the value this rich, story-filled space held as a mystery. The phrase ‘here be dragons’ is the most exciting part of any map…

Ed Key and David Kanaga’s Proteus, currently in development for the PC (Mac and Linux versions to follow), locates itself like that childhood home on the razor’s edge between disclosure and mystery. Described as ‘a game of pure exploration and discovery’, Proteus places the player behind the eyes of a lone character on a virgin island with no map, no monsters and an environment that, in the hands of a master, can be played like a violin.

With its stripped down mechanics, it’s an experience as simple, refreshing and exhilarating as running along a beach in no shoes. It’s still a videogame though and Proteus’s aesthetic, storytelling and bright blue skies all bear the imprint of some surprising gaming influences…

A SMALL DISCOVERY

Videogames have long fed upon our compulsion to explore. I still remember being mystified and delighted as a twelve year old by the surprise discovery of the underground monorail in Durrell’s Saboteur! – a landmark that used up precious bytes of my lowly 48k ZX Spectrum’s memory but reinforced the believability of the game’s military industrial complex setting. All I could do with it was ride on the damn thing. I didn’t get any extra points or hidden bonuses. But it felt like I’d found something special.

Proteus is, in one sense, an attempt to sustain that moment of discovery across a whole game. The single player wanders a small island pretty much left to his own devices. It’s a beautifully designed environment complete with shoreline, trees, mud and changing seasons – plus an ecosystem of creatures to discover. There’s no enemies to fight, no levels to complete, and no game to win. And it’s arguably the richest gaming experience I can remember for one simple reason. It asks the player to bring his own systems to the table.

Videogames have affected our vocabulary of interaction. When we play we’re all about how we can ‘use’ the environment to our advantage, whether that’s cover from a hail of bullets, grappling along a parapet, flicking a switch to open a door etc. Proteus has no ‘use’ or ‘action’ button. You can’t even jump. Direction keys and mouselook are all you get and the result is you start to use aesthetic, emotion and ambience to interact with the gameworld.

Proteus’s beats are gentle inclines – tracking down a frog in a marshy copse of grasses, watching the sun set between a pair of trees – but  the island’s language, while softly spoken, is no less engaging.  The success of the ‘smithing’ mechanic in Bethesda’s Skyrim demonstrates audiences’ appetite for smaller interaction.

Proteus ruthlessly removes opportunities to compete, collect or catalogue. As Key outlined when I spoke to him at Nottingham’s Gamecity last year, “The message of the game is to not feel like you’re driven by goals all the time and smell the flowers…” It’s an Urb Ex approach to interaction – ‘Take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints.’ But fill your senses.

“There’s a deliberate lack of agency and creativity in the world, to reflect the qualities of walking in a natural environment,” Explains Key. “There might also be a bit of influence creeping in from Taoism about non-action and not interfering with things. There’s a saying about the ideal activity of the emperor being to simply sit facing south…”

The examples of favourite real life explorations Ed offers when asked reflect this focus (as well as providing some insight into the inspirations for some of the game’s environments). He highlights Nine Standards Rigg’s ‘stones of uncertain purpose’ in the Pennines (below) -

Themselves reminiscent of Proteus’s line of standing stones (below).

And Whinfell Ridge in the Lake District (below).

Both go-to destinations for fell walkers, which Proteus seems to repurpose as story beats.

“NOTHING HAPPENS IF THEY CATCH YOU…”

Much of the pleasure of Proteus comes via engagements and interactions other games often devalue – revolving around ‘soft ambient’ exploration and observation such as spotting a new creature, enjoying the accidental composition of a copse of trees or walking a shoreline.

Nonethless, the reaction of game world elements to your presence also allows the player to engage with Key’s ecosystem. Moving towards frogs makes them hop away, but by carefully positioning myself at the right angle I found I could ‘herd’ the frog to hop towards, and eventually next to, a companion, at which point the two starting merrily burping at one another!

The consistently engaging process of finding and observing the island’s wildlife led me to suggest to Ed my proposal for a DIY I-Spy book for Proteus offering a guide to tick off and catalogue what I found (‘Crabs = 5 points’ – that kind of thing). I wasn’t the first. “Someone suggested a kind of checklist, almost like a bird spotting thing where you tick things off when you see them. It turns out it’s not really needed. I like birdwatching but I don’t like ticking things off in books. It’s fun but it’s kind of a compulsive thing and I don’t really feel there’s a need to feed that…”

It’s not a surprise that me and others have attempted to gameify the experience. That’s what games are, right? You do stuff and score points.  But Proteus is a holiday from compulsion; Key’s response an order to relax. In service of this, there’s no healthbar, no compass and no game map. You start using the sun, landmarks and the game’s exquisite, dynamically generated soundtrack as bearings. The surprising result of this pulling back is an increased engagement with Proteus’s world.

There’s still fences in this virtual paradise though, perhaps as a result of Key and Kanaga’s drive to provide a setting for beginnings. Nothing dies. Proteus has seasons, and they’re beautifully implemented, but you’ll never experience the shock of finding a dead rat by a stream, as I did one sunny summer morning while exploring my spinney. This is possibly the one area where, by distancing itself from videogames, Proteus also removes itself from nature. The battles in Skyrim’s antecedants bring little emotion but death can be a shocking discovery. The magician who falls from the sky to his doom on a picturesque, leaf framed path just outside Seyda Neen in Morrowind, or the discovery of dozens of dead Goblins following a grand battle between rival factions in Oblivion are harsh lessons, but they’re utterly immersive, prompting reflection and an awareness that you’re but one figure in a vast gameworld tapestry. Time and the world moves on. Proteus is an amberised experience – with all the suspended beauty that suggests.

That’s it for part one. In part two, I’ll look at Proteus’s aesthetic, its approach to discovery, Rescue on Fractalus and Joy Division’s album Unknown Pleasures.

Key and Kanaga’s Proteus is available to preorder for Windows now with OSX and Linux versions to follow.

“I think the mind makes its own places…”

From ‘The Signal-Man’ by Charles Dickens

The first thing to consider when approaching August Stars’ fearsome new EP ‘Invisible in the Dusk’ is how to listen to it. Sebastien Wright’s dark ambient project is deeply entwined with, and inspired by, frost-bitten, horror-tinged train journeys through Northern England landscapes. Placing it on the lounge stereo feels wrong somehow, like being in a room with a broken window. But with a little set dressing – a Dickensian gas lamp here, a Jack ‘O’ Lantern there – Wright’s barely-there music, described on his blog as “journeys across the desolate Pennines, train rides through rainswept northern towns and the loneliness… which comes with moving to a new city…” can be teased and tamed to warm itself at the fire. And the Dusk reveals its spectral secrets…

Released towards the end of last year as the penultimate release on Leeds’ Make Mine Music records, August Stars’ eight track ‘longform EP’ follows in the barely-there footsteps of August Stars’ previous release in its reinvention of the Yorkshire landscape as a kind of topographical tuning fork. Wright’s vinylised tension headaches evocatively brings to mind a series of unsettling narratives as they reposition Yorkshire’s rattling landscapes of gritstone escarpments and factories as future noir musical instruments. An Eno-esque take on Byrne’s Playing the Building. But Byrne’s toy is playful and communitised. Like a half-glimpsed ghost in the hallway, ‘Invisible’s encounters are best experienced alone.

Wright name checks as many writers as musicians – including Derek Jarman, Paul Auster and J G Ballard – alongside the likes of Eno and Kraftwork. But I found scriptwriter Nigel Kneale‘s kitchen sink sci-fi an apposite reference. Kneale’s still resonant work repurposes post-war totems as high science – stone walls as recording mechanisms, spaceships buried in tube stations. Kneale had a love-hate relationship with the filmmaker John Carpenter – the latter engaged Kneale’s services for the Halloween sequel Season of the Witch before the project soured and Carpenter later credited his ‘quantum physicists investigate Satan’ horror Prince of Darkness to ‘Martin Quatermass’. ‘Invisible in the Dusk’s fifth track ‘Crooked Spire of St Mary and All Saints’ suggests a disturbing inversion of nature set at the quaking earth of a union between the two genre masters.

The Signalman

I was also reminded of the BBC’s majestic adaptation of Charles Dickens fatalist ghost story ‘The Signal Man’ from 1976. Preempting Carpenter in subject  and tone, the film’s electronic score by composer Stephen Deutsch is used to soundtrack the mundane – a bell, a telegraph pole, a train tunnel – into vessels for fathomless horror in the imaginations of its addled protagonist. A startling antecedent to Wright’s train journeys and a terrifying comparison for the ‘wild harp’ of the Sheffield music makers’ own railtracked soundscapes.

The inspiration for Wright’s album – a train journey across a darkening pennines – lends itself to narrative conjecture but what’s fascinating is the flexibility of this inference. For instance, on first listen the looming ‘Crooked Spire of St Mary and All Saints’ (based on a real Chesterfield Church) feels like the fearful foe of Invisible in the Dusk. But like Samuel Bromley’s poem about the spire, there’s also a beauty to this unknowable giant…

Samuel Bromley

As day turns to night looking out the train window, the outside world is replaced by one’s own reflection. The title ‘Invisible in the Dusk’ seems a reference to the effect of the night on these evocative landscapes, but as the lights flicker on in the carriage it’s ourselves who are illuminated.

Quatermass and the Pit

Part wordless audiobook, part concept album, its hymns to and cowerings from an uninterpretable nature offer rich, peaty slices of sound, the images and narratives they provoke as rich and dense as a thicket. But the main feeling I was left with was that of a connection. Strange and unknowable as these landscapes might be in the half light, they’re nothing without our fear.  It’s our engagement that gives them (and Wright’s music) it’s power. Already half absent at the time of discovery; like Kneale’s jurassic spaceships brought to humming, maddening life by a workman’s drill, Wright’s thought experiments need our presence to sing.

Invisible In The Dusk is available to buy via Bandcamp here. There might be physical copies left via Sebastien’s website Under The Starry Stillness. A free companion digital download featuring extra tracks and alternative cuts is available to download for free here.

Convened to bring together videogame experiences, chat and comparison, First Play Sheffield‘s ‘World 1-1′ transported a dozen enthusiastic advocates to a bare pub function room. Gathered round an Arthurian table arrangement, we each had two minutes to talk about the game of our choice. And the modest setting offered some grand stories.

First up was @Katie_Fenn on Super Metroid. Her look at Nintendo’s space body-horror classic was a new media take on the hero’s journey. Lead Samus Aran’s flickscreen exploration progresses from right to left – an unnerving switch for a genre the audience was used to progressing in the opposite direction (although not such a shock for Manga readers). I loved the suggestion Samus’ inquisitive, fateful wander(lust) towards a subterranean, hellish climax recalled Kane’s journey in sci-fi rodomontade Alien.

Staying in the cold, empty depths of space, @allegary spoke about lonely-as-hell trading sim (and transmedia dark horse) Elite – and his awe at the game’s vast procedurally generated universe. First Play’s Clare highlighted the focus on older games as a characteristic of this first event. Tthere might be something in the likes of Elite’s character that suggests itself as a fitting subject for the support-group allusions of First Play’s round table format.

Braben and Bell’s classic is a frighteningly austere and fatalistic game – my main memory of playing it on a rubber-keyed Spectrum was of dashing my ship repeatedly on the game’s black diamond space stations. Gary brought the awe of this vast universe to the surface with a sparse, rangy testimony which also highlighted the contemporary conversion Ulite as one to investigate.

No less deathly was @EddSax‘s talk on the ASCII-based Rogue-like, Dwarf Fortress. I download, attempt to play and throw my arms up in the air in bewilderment at Dwarf Fortress with the regularity of a clockwork mule. Edd’s talk reminded me of the game’s tenet ‘Losing is fun’ and Bay12′s almost bottomless models for deciding which characters will drown in moats and which become master furniture makers.

The discovery of hidden depths was something of a theme. @jdreimann spoke about World of Goo – a game he made his own T-Shirt for when he realised there was none commercially available – and the slow burn realisation that all was not what it seemed in this green and bouncy world.

Also discussed was the equally cute and interesting Skylanders, which sees players purchase toys with RFID chips that allow them to be uploaded to an online portal where they do battle. This was the only one that made me feel old, and I was never a fan of Spyro, who seemed very much an end-of-days mashup of Scrappy Doo and Poochie, so I was pretty upset to be won over by its resolutely charming ad almost immediately.

My presentation on Suda51′s Killer 7 was a suitably flashy victory of style over substance and something of an anomoly. What First Play Sheffield really highlighted was the character of these games. This had its reflection in a broad demographic of attendees – and our coming together in a hidden space of the Rutland Arms felt like a Bard’s Tale-like bringing together of disparate characters.

The first in a proposed regular monthly event, First Play Sheffield creators Liam, Chad and Katie described this as a usergroup. It’s a suitably technological labelling and the term’s heritage in shared knowledge resonates with the format. But this was also the start of a community.

Succinct and focussed, this was an opportunity for the kind of chat and insight that occasionally floats through one’s mind but rarely winds up anywhere else. Like the stripped out bar and dusty fridges, the walls of the Rutland Arms upstairs room were bare. The chance to fill it with stories, notes, maps and ideas over the next few months is a particularly exciting use of this head space.

First Play Sheffield is on Twitter. Visit their Tumblr here. The next First Play Sheffield will be on 20th March – details here.

It’s almost thirty years since three school friends and I set sail across a pair of lunch breaks at the height of a childhood summer to play a game of AD&D. It’s a distant place now and my memories of our adventure in Gygax and Arneson’s world have blurred with the prefab art classroom we commandeered; a forest of wooden stools and poster-paint Kobalds…

Andrew Kenrick’s new storytelling game Lost Days of Memories & Madness forges the smoke-like characteristics of memories into a more tangible form. ‘Lost Days…’ treats them as marble-like treasures and trinkets to be hoarded, swapped and thieved by his cast of recollection-addicted Elven nobles. I’d like to show you a few from my collection, with the caveat I’m unsure how many of them actually belong to me.…

Overlap: So what was the starting point for developing the game? Andrew Kenrick: It started as a Gamechef game about four or five years ago. I liked the idea of using memories as currency and I’d always wanted to do a trilogy of memory-based games. The other one I’ve got on the go is ‘Six Bullets of Vengeance’ which is a game told in reverse. You start at the end and make your way back to the start so the characters’ recollections aren’t changing but the game plays with the players’ memories themselves. Memories & Madness is more about how mutable memory is…

Lost Days of Memory and Madness is a simultaneously nuanced and grandiose storytelling system that attempts to reconcile the vast scale of stories of Tolkien’s reimagined England with personal testimony and recollection. Me and four companions, plus Andrew himself, played a virtually complete version of the game at Sheffield’s Furnace RPG convention, where the exploration of memory appeared as much a theme as more literal quests, with A Penny for my Thoughts‘ collaborative memory rebuilding framework, the underwater amnesiacs of ‘Ocean’ (on the Savage Worlds system) and the gin-soaked dance with a forgetful city of ‘A State of Mind’ (for the Wordplay system) joining our tale.

Artwork from Lost Days of Memories & Madness

Set in the dog days of a decadent, millennia-spanning Elven society drunk on harvested memories, players take the roles of court nobles (and a King) as their society’s collective psyche begins to collapse in on itself. At the beginning of the game, each of us designed our player character based on a pooled set of memories we’d created (“I remember the drip-drip of water in the cave where I found my brother’s body…” and “I remember the ropes biting my wrists as they tied me to the mast…” were my highlights). The ‘game’ part of Lost Days sees players battle for these recollections in a dice-based, stakes-enabled ‘memory duel’ mechanic. Lose all your memories, your character goes mad, and you’re out the game. It’s a robust, diverting piece of play and Lost Memories revolves around the memory battles in the same way Die Hard revolves around action sequences. They’re thrilling – but just one part of a bigger storytelling picture…

Overlap: I think the way you use dice help provide structure to the story. You use them to decide who wins conflict but they’re bound up with the idea of memories as currency that’s core to the game. AK: Every player has a conflict of some kind in their turn between them and another player. And there’s always a memory – one of the ones you create at the start of the game – at the centre of it. You roll dice based on how powerful the memories are that are involved, so if you’ve just got a couple of memories you may be rolling a handful of dice. If you’ve got a lot more you could be rolling thirty dice or more, as players were in our game…

My character Jelean the Second was a youthful, anti-establishment Elven Lord searching for the truth about his missing (and beloved) brother, Samael. The very first memory Jelean won provided the inciting incident of his story. Jelean prised one of his own brother’s memories from the grasp of the King himself; of being led away from a court by guards as his hand slipped from his younger brother’s…

Having Jelean see this moment from his sibling’s point of view – and seeing himself through his brother’s eyes as he’s led away – was an incredibly rich storytelling moment that got to the heart of the character. But it also provided him with a compelling aim – to discover why the King had claimed his brother’s memories. I used this to inform the character’s action line; after accusing the King of murder, Jelean was arrested, jailed, faked his suicide while in the jailhouse and fled for the dark culverts beneath the castle, before being flushed out by the King blowing up the city sewers, in a demented action that began the toppling of our metropolis’s mile-high crystal castles. All decisions taken by ourselves as players, all components of a collaborative-narrative put together as part of a jointly-authored story and all abiding by the principle ‘character is story’…

Christophe Dang Ngoc Chan, réalisé avec un programme de dessin vectoriel.

Overlap: There’s something pleasurable about having a bunch of spent or lost memories on pieces of paper in a kind of ‘pool’ in the centre of the table. They were like existential Monopoly property cards…

AK: I like the fact you start off with all these memories, which make up your character. As you get more and more desperate to survive or sacrifice them for leverage you start discarding ones that you don’t think are that important. In our game you ended up with just one memory, which was the memory of being the traitor, and the King wound up with the memory of being the king. The memories with the traitor included memories of this figure and memories that were ‘I am the traitor’, which I thought was quite good, especially as we ended up with one player having both!

Overlap: And it’s not necessarily the case that that person is the traitor, it’s just that they have ‘won’ or ‘traded’ that memory…

AK: Absolutely. At the start you assume that the memories you have are your characters. By the end of the game you’ll have taken memories from other characters and lost some to others. Is your mind really yours any more?

Its mix of ‘Porterhouse Blue’ grandiose desiccated farce, ‘House of Cards’ political machination and ‘Dark City’ mnemonic fragmentation (my character eventually lost his mind when he looked in a mirror and didn’t recognise the face staring back at him) suggests Lost Days as nothing less than a concatenation of some of actor Ian Richardson’s roles. The fact that Kenrick’s game recalls nothing so much as an actual person hopefully confirms its success in transforming such a gossamer subject.

Ian Richardson (source: Wikipedia).

“…It’s not ‘post apocalyptic’ so much as society on the brink of collapsing – so ‘Apocalypse Now’ in a sense,” Andrew suggested when we discussed our game afterwards, and Coppola’s film is an apt reference point. Both are overblown, overloaded snapshots of apocalptica, follies full of ‘Last Days of Rome’ hysteria with, at their centre, a decadent king on the verge of replacement by someone or something quite possibly more horrible. Coppola’s statement on the film – “I wanted to create a film experience that would give its audience a sense of the horror, the sensuousness and the moral dilemma of the Vietnam war…” – ignores his film’s sense of legendarium however. Like Lost Worlds of Memories and Madness, this is a land in love with – and folding into – a sense of its own importance, but Kenrick’s story system brings a sense of the moment – a chance to interact with the hair’s breadth of recollections. It’s an experience you’ll never forget.

Lost Days of Memories & Madness is out now on Steampower Publishing.

Described as “…a computer designed to analyse and decompose Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Rambler’s Lullaby II”, on the page, The Machine’s chattering, clattering stream of data at first looks like book music for an organ or the kind of game listing I would have typed into my beloved Spectrum 48k.

It’s neither of these things, but the comparisons are interesting. Written in 1968 by author, filmmaker and Oulipoist Georges Perec, The Machine is in fact a radio play, adapted for live performance by Sheffield-based performance artists Third Angel in Sheffield  just last month.

The play’s story borrows the forms and restrictions of computer programs, but it’s a lot more interactive than its monolithic title suggests. Not so much in the dazzling – and often very funny – back and forth between the computer’s separate processors as they attempt to fathom Goethe’s poem about solitude by (for instance) substituting its nouns for fairy tale motifs, as in the audience’s slow assimilation into its subroutines and  algorithms…

I used to spend hours diligently typing lines of game code into my Sinclair’s Cronenberg-like rubber keyboard and after a while I’d find myself in a eerie, molecular version of what gamers call ‘the zone’. Hypnotised by the rhythmic typing and featureless pages of numbers, I’d almost fall into the code; a ghost in the machine.  The Machine’s tooth-like subroutines, which grind and break down Goethe’s storytelling and imagery into kipple-like abstractions by calculating everything from the poem’s word count to the surface area of forestry in South America, have a similar effect. There comes a point where you’ve heard Goethe’s poem deconstructed so much that you realise you’ve lost its meaning. As Third Angel Associate Artist and The Machine director Christopher Hall described it when we met to discuss the play, “All you hear is words, you don’t hear the poetry.” You’re stranded, like the machine, in a world of zeroes and ones.

Our imaginations eventually kick in, however. Perec’s drama presents itself as a set of subroutines for a computer but we’re as much the subject being fed through the circuits of The Machine’s three processors as Rambler’s Lullaby II. All I have to do is write the words ‘My hand rests on the dry bark of a fallen oak tree…’ and you’re there, unable to stop yourself conjecturing the feel of an imaginary tree’s mossy surface, or the last leaves rustling in the air above you. The Machine is bereft of this type of response, whereas we can’t help ourselves from imaginative conjecturing of story, even in the most arid of landscapes.

A ‘Death Map’ from Half Life 2 Episode 2

Both The Machine and Third Angel’s recent production Homo Ludens - which saw an audience of four players invited to engage with a life size gameboard – suggest a preoccupation with the use of systems to facilitate stories. So is this a Third Angel theme? “There are a lot of Third Angel shows where there’s a series of restrictions, like there is in Georges Perec’s writing,” Hall offers. “A lot of rules that Oulipo - the group that Perec was part of with [Raymond] Queneau and Italo Calvino and Mercel Bénabou – play with and used to play with. There’s a Queneau book called Exercises in Style which is the same story written a hundred different ways.” This put me in mind of Valve Software’s ‘death maps’ for Half Life 2 Episode 2. A visual representation of thousands upon thousands of player experiences in the most recent part of the videogame developer’s acclaimed franchise, they’re experiential data, each marking the ending of a story.

Third Angel use Oilipuian ‘restrictions’ in the devising of stories as well as a tool in the end user experience. But Hall’s example from Third Angel recalls both videogame mapography and boardgames. Where From Here [2001] featured two people in a white room and it was a story about a relationship falling apart,” Says Hall. “The way in which they talked about the rooms that the bits of the relationship were in was interesting though. The rooms were made of white board and the two actors had to draw floor plans, but they had to draw them with their eyes shut. So that was a theatrical version of a Oulipuian restriction or a Perecian restriction..”

Where from Here (2001)

Here too there’s a gaming parallel in the kind of scenarios modern games provide for players. How can I release Yorda from the cage? How can I get ghouls and humans to live in harmony? How can I follow the train, CJ? The way Chris Hall describes it, Oulipu presents a set of game-like restrictions to prompt creative actions. “And creative problem solving,” He suggests. “Which is where sometimes the magic happens. On The Machine, we didn’t know how we were going to light it until we were in the space. I imagined it being very ‘forth wall’, with the performers in a row on a stage. But it wasn’t until we were in the space all together we decided to use radio mics rather than handheld mics and make it into a square. It’s a box.” The result was immersive, bringing the audience ‘into’ the performance as avatar-like characters. Each of us was sat nearer one of the four performers in particular and felt like we were on their team.

The Machine offers a rich Swiss army knife of tools and rules that twist the audience’s blood. So is Perec’s story – and Third Angel’s production in particular – more a process rather than a story? More a game than a play? “It’s not a story,” Hall suggests. “But it does have an emotional arc. Because it ends on silence. And that repeats. I don’t know whether the emotional arc is intentional or not.” I’d suggest it is, but that might be a result of my gameified approach. The Machine is a framework that we operate and that operates on us in turn. In so doing we bring it to life, in the same way that the game worlds of the likes of Grand Theft Auto and The Sims come to life with our engagement with them. The Machine is a story system. We bring the narrative.

The Sims 3 – Town Life Stuff

The apex of this comes with Chris’s description of how The Machine might work with other poems. “One of the things I did think about was substituting Ramblers Lullaby for an iconic English poem like Wordsworth’s ‘I Wanderd Lonely As A Cloud’.” The idea is you’d basically take the program routines, such as ‘recitation in groups of three’, and my favourite, ‘nouns are replaced by nth noun following in University of Chicago Spanish Dictionary’ and apply them to a different poem. Every Fallout 3′er who’s played under the shadow of permadeath; every Skyrim player who’s named their avatar after a Tolkein character, has engaged in this kind of play – and the likes of Something Else’s SuperMes is a consistently engaging experiment in this area – but The Machine’s human element means it remains thrillingly, unsettlingly, untethered by comparison.

The Machine is touring. Visit The Third Angel website for more information.

Join us at 8pm on Monday 31st and watch us get scared witless by pixels.

To round off a month of videogaming, Rob and I are hosting a hangout on Google+ this Halloween (that’s the social network’s built in video chat if you didn’t know). For this, the second Overlap online social, we’re getting to the bones of horror games. Controllers in hand, we’ll nervously guide characters to their certain doom while chatting about what makes the games tick with the help of classics such as Silent Hill, Resident Evil and Siren. What makes a game genuinely terrifying? How do games compare to other horror genres? Where does the story sit amongst the shocks?

To join us, you’ll need to be signed up and in our Overlap circle. If you add me on Google+ and post on the thread on my profile, I’ll make sure you’re able to join the hangout.

Spaces in hangouts are limited to 9 participants, so if any of you want to share a a web cam that would be great. We’ll post a list of games we’ll be walking through before the night — if you want to catch us for part of the evening you can pick the part that spooks you most. Feel free to share any scary (gaming) movies you’ve found on YouTube too as we can stream those within the hangout on the night. We’re going to attempt to rig our cameras so you can see exactly what’s making us jump.

Join us…

I hope you all had a good time, I certainly did and it was great to see the responses to my game-making challenge (a selection can be seen in the image above). With ideas ranging from multiple personality issues to blind brothers in love (with each other) it was certainly an interesting look into stories that tell complex stories, but remember to keep the player engaged.

I’ve edited down a half hour segment of the talk, which carries up until I started what turned into the gargantuan activity session that lasted for about another half hour.

The Secret Agent Talk by Russell Stearman

I like to keep a tab on my examples so below is a run-down of the references used in the speech, why I used them and how to get hold of some of the rarer ones.

How Did That Get Up There? – Robot/Lizard’s new game with a story by Tim Cooper and myself. To be released on December 15^th from the Adult Swim US site.  We hope you like it!

Fawlty Towers Series 1, Episode 6, The Germans – An example of typical British sitcom, and very funny too. Available from Amazon or iTunes.

Call of Duty: Black Ops – My example of a player gratifying narrative.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – A great Western with a great ending.

Red Dead Redemption – A great Western game, and one that takes the caveats of games and tries to tell a good story.

No Country For Old Men – It’s fast becoming a staple of Overlap talks to include a Coen Brothers reference, and this would be damn hard to turn into a good game.

Deus Ex – A true classic, which is why they periodically make sequels so they can hark back to the original. Currently available in a double pack with it’s less-well received sequel.

Blade Runner – Highly recommended game for both lovers of the film, and those seeking to play a game which tries to play on you. Looks a bit dated now and none of the digital distributors seem to offer it. Ebay seems to be the best bet.

The Last Express – Highly praised game that is truely innovative, and also cost an absolute bomb to make. Please do give this game a proper try, it’s enjoying something of a renaissance, being available on both Good Old Games and DotEmu.

North By Northwest – A Hitchcock classic that deserves to be seen by everyone. It has a great story and really sets the mould for chase thrillers. Also has groovy opening titles.

Bejewelled Blitz – Only really included as a non-narrative game, see Facebook for more!

Not explicitly mentioned in the talk but also worth looking at is Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck. It’s rather old now and the examples don’t quite live up to her claims, but offers an insight into interactive narrative.

Hope to see you all at the next event soon!

Russell

Or ‘How Telling Tales While Being Chased By Zombies Helped Me Survive Slingshot’s ’2.8 Hours Later’…

Taking part in Slingshot’s City Wide Zombie Chase Game 2.8 Hours Later in Leeds last month, my fellow apocalyptic survivors and I found ourselves wondering two things: Did we have what it takes to survive an undead uprising? And, if so, what stories would we have to tell? To spoil the first question for you right off the blood-stained bat, we did survive. But it’s taken me several weeks since the zombie outbreak to bring myself to tell the tale…

2.8 Hours Later is essentially a game of tag that spans a city centre. You and your friends take on the role of survivors moving from checkpoint to checkpoint on a map and attempt to outmanoeuvre  any hordes of the undead that stand in your way as you try and locate a final safe-house. Beyond ‘here there be zombies’, there’s no real plot to speak of, no backstory for the outbreak, but that didn’t mean the players didn’t feel like they were part of a story. Perhaps the genius of this kind of storytelling – and what differentiated it from most computer games and live-action role-play scenarios – is the protagonist was genuinely me. As much as I play games to pretend I’m someone else, the unrelenting realism of me being me (dodgy knees, over-cautious nature, malapropic profanity and all) ensured an authenticity to the simple story idea ‘I am being chased’.

As well as the other hundreds of survivors sprinting round Leeds, I was playing the game with two friends. Like most of us, I choose friends who are smarter, faster and generally better than I am to try and make myself look good, but here the nature of the game meant we were all ‘playing alone, together’ as with MMORPGs so, within its loose parameters, anything could happen. So that’s what we imagined could happen. With hindsight, the zombies were only likely to be grazing in certain places, but you try telling your adrenaline-fuelled self that when you’re walking down a suspiciously dark alley way, knowing that your puffed-out breathing can probably be heard from streets away.

Fig 1. Running from zombies in the empty market

My paranoia when we were joined by another survivor ‘Chris’ who had been separated from his own group early on also kept me searching for possible traitors within our midst. More than likely, he had genuinely just lost his friends, but then why weren’t they answering their mobiles? Getting Chris’ story from him became like a fun mini-game in itself (especially as, even after an hour at the bar in the final safehouse, his friends still hadn’t surfaced – I hope they were all okay!)

Perhaps the only downfall of the evening’s storytelling was that we really were playing like impatient gamers. At each of the checkpoints, we would have to persuade a character to give us our next grid-reference – essentially a live-action dialogue-tree game but with less clear ‘rules’ so these became like cut scenes that the player just wanted to click through in order to get back to the main mechanic of running through the dark. That said, a little mini-game where one of the characters sent us back through a zombie-run shopping mall to fetch her some food before she’d let us through was brilliantly mean and I even managed my own take on Pac-Man as I somehow managed to outmanoeuvre two zombies around empty market stalls which I had no right surviving.

This was the main effect of the game. Did the fact I was pretending to be really chased by a zombie make me play harder, play better and just run faster? I’m pretty sure I’ve done okay at games of tag, British Bulldog and not totally shamed myself on Fun Runs or with general map-reading in the past.

But this is the experience I’ll remember, the story that I’ll tell and, more than likely, the thing that will ensure I’m zombie fodder when the real apocalypse comes because I’m all blasé. This wasn’t real after all… Apart from the fear, the adrenaline, the running and the thrill over a lack of teeth marks anywhere on me at the end…

Hmmn. Real enough maybe.

John Hunter is a writer living  in Sheffield. Read his blog here. Visit the 2.8 Hours website here.