Ave Jimius. Long Live the Emperor.

Following my friend Andrew Armstrong's blog I came upon the glorious house of Jimius. They say Rome wasn't built in a day. I say there was never one Rome and never one day. Check out the exploits of the Romans under the Jimean dynasty. http://houseofjimius.wordpress.com/.

Alternate history using Rome: Total War. Simply amazing. Ave.

Far Cry 2: Nearing the Heart of Darkness

Mosale Seto, 24th November, 2008: I am in this almost unknown African country, beset with a malarial epidemic and civil war and it seems I've got a long stay ahead. Came to kill the arms-dealer called 'The Jackal' but on the two occasions when i met him, I was either sick or half-dead and surprise of surprises, he actually saved my life and disappeared into nowhere. Who is this man? What does he want? I know for sure that I'm getting embroiled in the conflict of the APR and the UFLL because of the Jackal's war-mongering and arms-dealing. I started my hunt for the Jackal with the UFLL; 'Doctor' Leon Gakumba seemed a reasonable man, a politician with a vision ... I thought he would lead me to the Jackal and his country to a great future. While I was taking out his enemies, Gakumba betrayed me - God has truly forsaken these people. I killed Gakumba while he was lecturing his men. A Dragunov shot from a hilltop: I saw the bullet burst his skull. I am a hunted man now and only Nick Greaves and his APR masters can save me. I am doing missions for them and they pay me with diamonds. I am a shadow that all the men here are afraid of. They think I am an army but I am just Souvik ... sorry, or is it Warren.

Everybody is afraid but not that one man- him whom I am to kill. Because of whose machinations, my life is at stake every minute. Yet, twice he saved me. My saviour , my killer: this strange Kurtz in the Heart of Darkness ... shall I press the trigger (left mouse button) when I see him in my telescopic sights (right mouse zoom in) ... shall I kill him, or shall I stop because my sniperscope is now a mirror?

............................................

More episodes of my experience with Far Cry 2 will follow.

LINK Conference

This year's LINK conference for PhD students from Leicester, Loughborough and NTU was held at NTU, last Wednesday. As already mentioned on Ludus Ex, I presented a paper on identity in videogames. The paper addressed identity as what games criticism commonly views it as a simple and direct process of 'being a character', based on a rather simplified reading of the FPS, which is for some reason taken as the representative of all videogames. Through a close reading of the STALKER games, my paper tried to illustrate how even in the FPS, identity was a complex entity and how even the first-person or the 'I' that is assumed by the player is constantly undercut by many not-I's or not-not-I's that the game highlights, in the various aspects of the gameplay. In this paper, I am still playing with some ideas that I had after a long chat with Mark Butler on a Berlin train. The audience was entirely literary and I thought the most obvious example of this from earlier media that occurred to me would be quickly picked up by them. So it was: I spoke of the doppelganger in Wilfred Owen's poem 'Strange Meeting' and compared it to the 'egoshooting' in the FPS. Owen's protagonist speaks through the 'enemy you killed, my friend'. The main purpose of the paper, however, was to illustrate to a non-gaming literary audience how videogames do further complicate the nature of textuality and how they need to be read as doing such, rather than being seen as a medium that differs in essence from earlier media in providing an entirely 'new' form of participation. The paper and the slideshow are going to be uploaded to my website soon. It is always a challenging experience to present a videogaming paper to a non-gaming audience and this time was no easier. I was extremely happy with the range of the questions though. Besides the obvious Manhunt and violence issues, there were observations about how people felt like Lara Croft in real life, on whether videogames illustrate the Barthesian 'death of the author' or on whether the subversive music in GTA IV complicate perceptions of identity.

Besides a panel discussion on teaching after/ during a PhD, there were three other very interesting papers. One of these was a study of the cleft-palate (commonly called 'hare-lip') and the development of perceptions about it in Early Modern literature and another was a study of memory in the poems of the Victorian poetess, Augusta Webster. My personal favourite was 'The Re-read Tent', a gender studies analysis of Anita Diamant's novel The Red Tent, which the speaker analysed as an alternative reading of the Bible where the patriarchal bias was highlighted and overturned. The women's tent and the concept of the daughter regarding all the women there as her 'many mothers' seemed to remind me of the Deleuze and Guattari's nomadic rhizomatic structure. Oops ... didn't I promise not to bring them in, this time...

Speaking at NTU's LINK Event on Weds

My paper's called 'First-Person Shooting: Identity and I-Problems in Videogames'. Self evident - isn't it?

Yet another excuse to talk to academics about STALKER.

Goodbye to Lorenzo

Lorenzo, the computer on which i wrote my PhD is now with its new owner (in faraway India). Can't say that I'm not struggling not to think about it. Lorenzo's replacement is here now: Lorenzo 2 is an Asus eee pc. Virtually no gaming but should be very useful for research.

plus, it gives me a good reason to experiment with Linux. Open-source all the way.

Memories of Gamecity , November 1

Two weeks have passed without my noticing and it's been a very busy two weeks. The last day of GameCity 2008, however, must absolutely be remembered in Ludus ex. Hence this post - albeit delayed. I spent the whole day in town, hopping from venue to venue to catch the best of GameCity: it all started with a talk on how the world would be like if the world leaders were gamers. Then there was Sackboy and his creators in the Little Big Planet intro: some of the things that interested me were 1) the creators are called Media Molecule and they claim to have a molecular organisation structure (Deleuzian ?) 2) Sackboy character stops the game from becoming a tool (narrative-machinic-ludic?) 3)User generated content does not replace the game- just as blogs don't replace journalism (What a quote!). As I left Sackboy and went for a coffee with my new found friend Elsa, the Fable 2 expert, we started thinking of what to do next. The plan was to go to Indiecade. Am glad we went. Came across an awesome Indie CS mod with the graffiti and murals of Belfast's walls all over the game. Two computers playing CS where you shoot 'the other' - fenian or not. On a third connected computer randomly generated images of important figureheads deliver randomly generated speeches (not necessarily their own). Faith Denham, creator of the installation, explained that this was to indicate how the speeches were doctored and never played live in Northern Ireland. The division of the north and the south (and perhaps the illogicality of it all) was well described by the huge dividing wall, the tower and the mindless shooting. Very realistic ... didn't think of the potential of videogames as documentary media.

The final events of the day were a pub (curry, rather) quiz conducted by Guardian Gamesblog's Keith Stuart and a party. The questions were ... hard ... my ignorance of videogames despite doing a PhD on them became shamefully evident. Besides discovering Elsa's superlative Play-Doh skills, the other major find was an extremely game-knowledgeable informatics student, Andrew Armstrong. I'm planning an interview with him on Ludus ex: you listening, Andrew? The party, however, didn't go too well but I did get to join the team of green robots that defeated the hordes of red robots invading our territory. It's just that the 8-bit music got on my nerves. GameCity was over. For me, at least.