A long time ago, I thought I'd given up on my project, perhaps for good. I declared it an "artistic failure" in a post of mine which I pretty much stand by [http://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2016/08/a-brief-discourse-on-shame-that-attends.html]. But I am back on my bullshit. My extreme narcissism and personality issues have not been cured or even alleviated in the intervening period, and so it is natural that I return to this bizarre project, which provides me with tremendous succour for reasons I don't entirely understand. One of the sources of succour is the process of publication, even though I know of only one guaranteed attentive reader in the world who isn't me for these particular works (there may be one or two others... possibly). I guess I am just emotionally roused by the symbolic act of 'imposing' my life story on the world. Meaning to the suffering. Something like that...
Suffering is ubiquitous in human life, and most of it doesn't end up on the news or in literature, lamented by a large number of persons. Most of it goes by unlamented, or lamented by one or two intimate friends or family members at best. The idea that loads of people could empathise with your feelings is, I think, immensely attractive, however, which explains a lot of human behaviour, including my own in this case (and also helps us see that major social status-inequities, like the caste system and slavery and extreme poverty and racial oppression, are so fucked up and execrable (experiencing suffering and having no-one care about it is the absolute worst thing that can happen to a human, leading to unbearable distress unless the person develops the extremely hard-to-acquire Stoicist ability to largely ignore the perceptions of others which, in normal society, is a trait indicative of psychopathic derangement)).
Ok, onto Extract 10, and happier thoughts (this extract isn't even about suffering, and it's not very bleak at all!).
Extract 10: The Experience Machine
I think it was in 2004 that my dad finally agreed to buy a
Playstation 2. This was definitely one of the happiest moments of my life.
Knowing that we were going to walk out hauling a big Playstation 2 box, to stand in
EB Games and peruse the shelves for games was just super exciting – the kind of excitement that adults can only attain
by means of mind-altering substances. Bolstering the feelings of jubilation was
my awareness that my dad himself was joining in, browsing for a car game that
he could play with us. The more we explored the store, the more delirious I
became. Although Grand Theft Auto titles were off-limits – along with some other, exciting looking titles – there was still a
plethora of other treasures, and choosing just a couple of them was incredibly hard. I can’t really remember
how many games we bought on this first visit, though I know that dad’s choice
was a fast-paced game called Burnout 3, and
I think I got Fifa 2003 and possibly Jak II during that first visit (and
maybe Miranda persuaded dad to get us a Singstar set during that first visit,
too), and I think we also picked up Gran
Turismo 4 (again because of dad).
The one game the three of us
played together (two at a time) very often – perhaps including that very
afternoon after the excursion to EB Games – was Burnout 3. The controls for this game were very easy so my dad had
no problem, and he enjoyed the game as much as we did (a very pleasant surprise
for me and my sister). It was a ridiculously fun driving simulator for young
kids because of the absurd drifting, the boosters and the fact that you could
just smash cars into oblivion with total physical and legal impunity – in fact,
with a reward (a charge-up of the ‘boost’). Not much more to say. A great game.
Fifa 2003 was a game that only I played (I think my dad tried to
play it a couple of times soon after we got it, but he found the controls too
complicated and didn’t enjoy it). It had a wonderful introduction that remains
vivid in my memory due to the hundreds of times I watched it. I would love to
describe it but I don’t have to, because you can watch it yourself if you so
choose: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UhhMOe0Nys.
As for the game itself, well… Even though, even at the time, I was very aware
that the game had major flaws – often
horrifically incongruent commentary (a remarkable diving save would be
described as a save so simple that the keeper could have done it while reading
the newspaper, a spectacular goal would be described as a tap-in and vice
versa), awful graphics and animations (utterly unrealistic shooting
animations), and atrocious AI, undifferentiated in playing style by team (as it
still essentially was in all the subsequent FIFA instalments until maybe FIFA
16 or FIFA 17) – I seemed to derive an immense amount of pleasure from playing
it. This was before the invention of Career Mode, so I think that the game had
little more than an ‘exhibition match’ mode and perhaps several different
preset tournaments to choose from (and it probably gave you the ability to
create your own tournament, though I can’t claim this with any certainty).
Anyhow, what I remember doing almost every time I put the game into the
Playstation was selecting an Exhibition Match on Amateur difficulty, playing
with Manchester United against some other team chosen without too much concern
(perhaps randomly chosen, I can’t recall). I’m not sure if I chose to play with
Manchester United every time because they were the best team in the game or
what; they were probably the best team in the Premier League (Scholes, Giggs,
Beckham, Ferdinand…). Because I always played on Amateur difficulty, facing
defences so absurdly useless that they would literally part as you approached, I would always win these games by a margin
of 8+ goals, often achieving scorelines like 14-0. For some reason, I remember
that my favourite thing to do (at least for a certain period that sticks in my
mind) was score most of my goals with the centre back Laurent Blanc. I would
give him the ball and then just run with him, sprint held down even as he ran
out of stamina and could sprint no longer, from the back of the field to the
front before finally getting into the box and smashing the ball into the back
of the net (in hindsight, it seems like the relative shooting statistics made
no difference in FIFA 2003 – at least on Amateur – because whilst I’m sure I
did sometimes miss, I don’t remember usually having any great problem scoring
with Blanc). I really ended up taking a liking to Blanc, even though he was a
nobody to me when I had started playing the game. I suspect that David Beckham
was my overall favourite though. I also remember scoring loads of goals with
him.
If I’m not confusing FIFA 2003
with later instalments that I got for the PS2 (they were still making FIFA
games for the PS2 until at least FIFA 11, and I think I got my mum to buy FIFA
09, FIFA 10 and FIFA 11 for the PS2 (at roughly yearly intervals) even though
there was essentially no updating of the fundamental gameplay or career mode
system for the PS2 over these post-PS3 years), every time I went two goals up,
a pop-up box would appear on the screen saying something like “You appear to be
very comfortable at this difficulty setting. Are you sure you don’t want to try
Semi-Pro?” So fucking irritating.
The really shocking thing to me
about all this looking back is just the fact that I was able to wring so much
pleasure out of such a highly repetitive experience. I recall that my dad would
often get annoyed at how long I would spend playing this game on Saturdays and
Sundays, since it was at the expense of my reading (I was only allowed to play
on weekends but I don’t think I really read much on weeknights either). At one
point he instituted a regime where I could only use the Playstation once I had
done at least half an hour of reading. For some reason, I have vivid memories
of one particular weekend, maybe in year 3, where this rule was in force – perhaps
it was the very weekend where he first had this idea. I think it was a Sunday,
fairly early in the morning, when I asked him if I could play the Playstation.
Every time this happened, I think I did the asking in a very cutesy kind of
way, barely suppressing my effervescent excitement but with a strong awareness
that my dad would be reluctant to grant me approval (and actually I also
remember often feeling a low-level guilt that I wasn’t doing as much reading as
he was at my age, even if I was a much better reader than everyone in my year
bar M and K). In my specific memory, I think he might have first responded with
a reluctant “Yes” (replete with a heavy sigh), before suddenly changing his
mind and saying “Only after you read a book for half an hour”. I think I didn’t
mind this proposal all that much, since at that time I seem to have had an
unfinished Horrible Histories book to get through and the thought of spending
half an hour reading this was not at all repugnant to me. (I can’t remember
which Horrible Histories book it was. Incidentally, I think I read every
Horrible Histories book ever published (I missed one or two at most) and I have
kept them all on my bookshelf in my room at the family home (where I am right
now, on 3 December 2017, having moved back to the nest temporarily (I hope)
after eviction from my sharehouse in Forest Lodge).) Nevertheless, I recall that this half an
hour was spent in a state of jittery anticipation with very regular glances at
the clock, which impaired my concentration on the material. When the half-hour
had finally elapsed, I raced to find my dad (who may well have been mowing the
lawn – he was probably in the garden at any rate, as that’s what he typically
spent his Sundays in that era), and asked him if I could play Playstation now,
now that I had met the requirement laid down. I seem to recall that he tried to
push me to just read a bit longer – but I know that he did honour the agreement
by reluctantly granting me permission. As a man of honour, and a lawyer, what
other option did he have?
I have spent literally thousands
of hours playing FIFA games. Have they been well-spent? I don’t know. Frankly,
I doubt it. They have no effect upon the brain but stupefaction. But it’s fun
to squander away an entire day managing a major team, making massive transfer
deals until you have the best team in the world… and then getting super
frustrated when some bullshit goes down in your games, like when you hit the
post four trillion times and then in the last minute the AI team scores some
immensely hacky or fluky goal… Come to think of it, the largest impact FIFA
games have had on me is installing in my brain hundreds of memories of anger
and frustration.
One more FIFA memory. I remember
that in 2007 and 2008, I started to fill up my memory cards with recordings of
the highlights of the goals of which I was most proud, including ‘skill goals’
and long shots, scored mainly by Fernando Torres on my Manchester City career
mode (I chose Manchester City because they had an absurdly large transfer
budget and I could purchase the best players in the world for my 4-1-2-1-2
formation (I think this was FIFA 07… don’t quote me)). I felt sort of as if recording
some of my ‘skill goals’ was a ‘bad-faith’ move, because I never really
bothered to learn how to use the rightstick to do tricks systematically. I
would instead basically just randomly jerk it about when I wanted to try to get
passed a defender in a fancy way and hope for the best (I always hoped that the
player would pull off the rainbow flick). It helped that I always played on
Semi-Pro difficulty at that stage, which was generally pretty easy (I didn’t
like losing, or even drawing (not very much at any rate), and I was bad at
defending). Nevertheless, I recall that I was so proud of my best goals that,
when I invited my friend M. G. over in year 5 or year 6, I spent like half an
hour going through my memory card, playing the highlights clips. I knew I was
being a bit of a dick, but I guess I hoped he’d be impressed. What a total piece
of shit I was.
Jak II was another game that only I played. It was an astonishingly
good game from which I derived a huge number of hours of enjoyment. Moving
through the main storyline, unlocking increasingly powerful weapons and vehicles,
and exploring the largely open world in between quests, was amazingly enjoyable.
It was probably the first game which came to utterly dominate my thoughts even
when I was not playing – oh how I would drool to think of unlocking that next
weapon, of being able to smite my enemies without fear or intimidation. I had
endless fantasies of being Jak, running through the world with my pal Dexter
and kicking monsters to death. I also had at least one memorable dream set
inside the world. Unfortunately, I did find the game extremely hard, and I
believe that I never managed to finish it. My Newcastle cousin A (older than me
by a year, with a sister C who was younger than me by a year and a half) also
played this game, along with his friends, and I remember I was embarrassed and
gobsmacked to discover that he’d finished it four times (ok, maybe this was Jak
III he was talking about, which I’ll get to in one second – my memory isn’t
entirely solid).
Jak III was almost as good as Jak
II. I think I remember being disappointed that it was less open world (?) (this
might be wrong, though I know that there was something about it that was
inferior to Jak II), but it was
similarly sexy in terms of the upgrade system and the super engaging main
questline. I also did not finish it.
I think the part I got stuck on, like 70% through the game, was a platforming
section in a Lara-Croft-type gauntlet, where you had to swing between periodically
electrified monkey bars suspended over a void. I spent hours, maybe more than
ten hours, trying to beat this part, but I never could (boy have I always been
shite at playing video games). Many years ago, I would have had a vast amount
to say about both these games. In a way, I am relieved that I have forgotten so
much, because I do not have the will to write a vast amount about them. It is
the case that a cluster of mental images come to me when I think of these
games, but I do not wish to describe these because it would weary me. All I will
say is that HOVERBOARDING WAS THE COOLEST SHIT EVER HOLY SHIT.
Another game which only I played,
and at which I was even more atrocious, was Medal
of Honour: Pacific Assault. This game came into my life possibly between Jak II and Jak III (I have very little confidence in that statement though). I
played on the easiest difficulty setting but the game still scared the shit out
of me once I got past the first (amazing and fairly easy) Pearl Harbour mission. This first mission was both easier and less scary
than the subsequent ones because the main thing you did, once you escaped your
room in the unstable, trembling sub and headed out onto deck into a magnificent
display of cacophonous carnage, was shoot down Japanese planes (as opposed to
engaging enemies in direct combat). I must have played this mission a
ridiculous number of times over the years, because I have incredibly strong and
deeply ingrained memories of it, including of the cut scenes and the music. I
found the whole thing really quite emotionally powerful. If you want to get a
sense of why, please go and look it up on Youtube. Art!
As implied above, the later
missions required one to actually confront enemies directly and shoot them.
This was scary as fuck to me, and super hard. I hated the bit in the third
mission, set somewhere in France, where you had to wander through a town full
of Jerries and clear out buildings containing either one or two Germans,
desperately trying to avoid getting killed before picking up a health pack. I
fucking sucked so hard at this bit. I obviously can’t recall how many tries it
took me to finally get passed this bit, but I suspect it was a fair few. What
made matters worse is that when I had finally cleared out all the Germans from the
town, I had no idea what to do next… And it was only like four years later that
I found out (something to do with jumping over some rubble). Yes, that’s right,
I never got passed the third mission… Not an FPS natural.
There are two other games that only
I played worthy of mention. The first is the Lord of the Rings: Two Towers game, and the second is Ratchet: Gladiator (my first and only
game in the Ratchet and Clank series,
a fact which I regretted immensely). I believe the former of these comes much
earlier in our story. It was a fucking amazingly awesome game that I think a
lot of PS2 players have really fond memories of. I had a second-hand copy of it
(just as I had a second-copy of Jak II,
I think), but by the time I had finally abandoned playing it, it probably could
not be passed on once more. I do recall that the game had issues, of course. One
issue was that, though you could always choose to play a mission with either
Legolas, Aragorn or Gimli, Gimli was absolutely atrocious compared to the
others and only a criminally insane person would choose to play with him. A
major issue with the design of the game was that the characters levelled up separately,
and you upgraded their powers and unlocked combo moves for each character separately,
meaning that, if you neglected playing a character for several missions in a
row, using them again would become really difficult. One benefited from total
specialisation for this reason, but I always wanted to share the love between
Aragorn and Legolas. My desire to share the love may explain why I possibly
never even finished the final Helm’s Deep insane battle (there was this one
room with a gate which you had to defend jam-packed with orcs that was super
fucking hard for me to complete, and there weren’t enough health potions
(again, this was on the Easy difficulty setting, because I always played on the
Easy difficulty setting because I was terrible at video games)). I do remember
that I did keep getting stuck throughout this game because I couldn’t figure
out what strategy to use to defeat the boss or unique enemy-type that I needed
to defeat (e.g. the final task of Stage Five (a throwback to the first film) was
killing Lurtz, which became super easy once you worked out what you needed to
do (induce him via clever movement to slam his massive sword into the statues
and thereby get stuck), but was impossible if you hadn’t recognised this, and
in like the third mission you had to defeat this octopus creature by destroying
all its tentacles). This may have been the first game where I was pushed to
search online for solutions to my problems.
Ratchet: Gladiator was ridiculously fun, although the more you progressed
through the game and unlocked the more powerful weapons, the more OP your
character game, such that even the final arena battles weren’t that difficult.
I do remember playing it quite a lot though. Even though the game came out in
2005, I think I might even have been playing it in 2009. This was a game that
made me feel like I was good at FPSs, because there were load of weapons with
massive splash or room-wide damage that obviated the need for aiming skill. I enjoyed
this feeling.
As noted parenthetically before, I
can’t recall if we picked up the Singstar
set on that wonderful, ceremonial journey to EB Games in (I think) 2004. If
not, I think we did pick it up not too long after we got the PS2. I can’t
recall if we simultaneously picked up the Singstar
Pop and Singstar Eighties expansion
packs. I know we used these for many
years but we probably didn’t get them all together, since my dad was very
reluctant to spend a lot of money on these frivolous, hedonistic goods. (Let us
ignore the troubling and regularly re-rearing fact that my past is a murky and
scummy brown pond, adorned with twisted and tangled macrophytes.)
Whilst Singstar was more my sister’s thing, at least publicly, I actually derived a huge amount of pleasure out of it
myself and sometimes even played it alone (I think I usually tried to keep this
a secret but eventually my sister found out and maybe at that point I gave up
the ruse). I don’t think my sister ever played Singstar alone, since she regularly invited friends over to play it
(and do other girly things, obviously), and, if she didn’t have a friend over,
I would invariably be available to play it with her. I was not a great singer;
generally, my sister would achieve higher scores than me. I did gradually get
better at playing Singstar, however (I mean, I should clarify that the
pitch-perception system that we were relying on was by no means perfect (we
noticed that we could good marks with screaming on some song or other), but it
did give you a fairly good sense of how well you could hold onto a melody and
stay in tune). I have loads of evidence to think that I was born with a fairly
poor, or at least average, ‘ear’, which I inherited from my mother. My mum is
one of these people who doesn’t even realise when she is singing in a different
key from the song she is trying to sing along to (that is, she’s not tone-deaf
but she’s close to it), and she is not obsessed with music like my dad and I
are, despite years of conditioning from my dad. My ‘ear’ is now surely above
average (I am supremely confident I would score above average in an interval
perception test, although that would not constitute excellent evidence since
those are probably biased in favour of people who understand musical notation
and the conceptual apparatus of ‘semitones’ and ‘tones’), and I am now one of
those people for whom music is a major passion and wellspring of pleasure,
uplift, ‘transcendence’, ‘transfiguration’ and ‘edification’, with favourite composers/artists
representing most genres under the sun. This level of musicality and fine listening
sense I was able to achieve, I think, only because of years of musical
training, including doing musicianship exams and the like. Even then, I was
still one of those people, even in my final year of high school, who struggled
to hear if he was in tune in concert band. It’s a brain thing. I certainly
don’t have perfect pitch (when I hear a note, I can’t tell you what note it is
(though I never really practised that particular skill much and I have no doubt
that I could improve my capacity at that task quite significantly with
training)).
Being very competitive (even when
it came to a girly activity like Singstar
which I was not meant to be engaging in alone), I remember that I decided
to try to at least best some of the high scores that Miranda or her friends had
achieved, recorded on one or other of the memory cards we kept for yonks. I
definitely had specialist songs on Singstar.
I was utterly appalling at some songs, and got pretty hot scores at others.
I remember that the sex of the singer seemed to be mostly or entirely
irrelevant to this. One of the songs by a male singer that I remember wanting
to get good at was “Bohemian Like You” by The Dandy Warhols from the Singstar Pop collection. I really liked
the song, and my dad also approved of the song, which made me like it more. I
can’t remember if this became my absolute best song (“I Believe in a Thing
Called Love” by The Darkness was a major family favourite (The Darkness turned
out to be a terrible band, when we bought their album)), but I think it was one
of the ones I trained to the level that I beat the recorded high score. I have
a deep voice now, and I think I had a fairly deep (croaky) voice for a child,
though I probably still didn’t sing this song in the original octave… I assume.
I recall that I did enjoy trying to sing in a deep voice.
The active process of
recollecting my experiences with Singstar
that allowed for the writing of the above also helped dredge up some of my
memories with Eyetoy. Eyetoy was this
amazing Playstation-augmentation system which we picked up later than Singstar but from which I probably
derived more joy than Singstar. To use
the Eyetoy system, you put this
little grey camera on top of your TV (plugging in the RCA connector jacks to
the back of your TV), then inserted the Eyetoy
disc (or one of the later expansion packs (similar to Singstar in this way)) in your PS2, and at once began to enjoy the
experience of playing a Wii (without
a special plastic ‘nunchuck’), moving your body about in accordance with the
goals of the game and watching these movements become actions in a cartoon
world. Playing Eyetoy was just ridiculously enjoyable. I think I enjoyed the sports games the most. I do remember learning
from my younger cousin C that you could do super well in the base-running
component of the Baseball activity found in one of the Eyetoy sets (possibly the original, or possibly some ‘sports’-themed
expansion) by simply running up to the camera and waving your hand directly in
front of it…. But hey, no technology is perfect. And, to be perfectly honest, I
don’t think this massive bug in the gameplay experience bothered me at all; I
was just pleased to have been shown an exploit that I could use in both that
particular activity, and others, to get high scores. Also I recall that I could
consistently beat my family in some running activity or other by just rolling
my arms over madly and jumping up and down, rather than actually making running
motions. I fucking hacked that game.
The Buzz
PS2-augmentation-system was the last augmentation-system we ever picked up
(boy did I lobby hard for Guitar Hero when
that came out, but without any success). The Buzz system did not quite provide me or my family with quite the
persistent strength of gratification that these other systems supplied us, but
it was cool nonetheless. I liked doing the quizzes because I have always been
obsessed with trivia and ‘facts’… and learning. I am a minor trivia freak, with
a hugely diverse knowledge-base (although I’m not sure my speed of recall, even
on my areas of strength, is rapid enough that I could ever become, say, a star
of University Challenge (I certainly
do not have a brain like that of Gail Trimble, or my friend T, though such
people are extreme neuro-atypicals,
and I suspect there is no aspect of my cognitive-functioning that is extremely atypical, even if there is plenty
that is very atypical)). Certainly, in primary school, I remember that my
friends had absolutely nothing on me in terms of knowledge of history, biology,
botany, geography, politics and sport, even if my own knowledge within these
domains was, by adult standards, extremely paltry in itself (e.g. a good knowledge
of geography was knowing the names of a handful of African countries, a handful
of US states, a handful of South American countries, being able to roughly sort
European countries into Western and Eastern Europe, knowing the difference
between the Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn, and knowing where Cape York and the
Great Australian Bight are). I think the explanation for this skill has to do
more with what I enjoy doing and what I choose to pay attention to in my
environment, than my brain’s retentive capacities. I know that as a child I was
more interested than my peers in reading non-fiction, and I also am almost
certain that I was much more engaged by the intellectual discussions of adults
on the radio than my peers were (I enjoyed listening to the radio programs that
my parents listened to from an age that was probably highly ‘precocious’ (this
ranged from programs on dating and sex to gardening and everything in between)).
Anyhow, the funny thing is that I
think I (and my sister) ended up playing a lot more of non-knowledge-based Buzz! Junior than we ever did of the
original Buzz trivia games. I won’t
describe Buzz! Junior because I can’t
be fucked.
The Buzz system was particularly useful on account of the fact that four
people could join in on a Buzz
activity at the same time and the system came with four controllers by default.
This meant that it was particularly good to bring out when family friends came
over, with their kids…
Which brings me to the more
specific topic of my experiences with the Playstation 2 on our annual beach
holidays down the South Coast. I think I will talk in general about the annual
family holidays to the town of South Durras (a peaceful town with a beautiful,
unpatrolled (fairly good-for-surfing) beach 20 minutes from the bogan inferno known
as Bateman’s Bay) in a separate extract; for now, I will just discuss the significance
of the Playstation 2 within this experience.
And mainly what I have to say is
that, because our family always travelled down to this town to rent houses there
with two other families with kids, having Singstar
was awesome as a party game… Also the board game Balderdash, but this is not the occasion for discussing that
wonderful game and the countless memories I have of playing it.
Of all the artefacts I have possessed
in my life, the Playstation 2 was surely the most important. God I wish there
was some way of making this extract seem significant in some way, but there is
not. (I am dealing with my experiences with computer
gaming within the year-structured extracts, rather than giving it its own, and
this seems to make more sense.)
The final thing I will note is
that I pushed so hard for my dad to buy me a Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 when
they came out, but he never did. I salute him for this, in hindsight.
The Playstation is, in fact, the
devil’s work. Gaming is a mind-killer. Immersive games parasitise the brain,
totally consuming one’s every waking thought. They take away all time to read
and learn. I hate gaming and gaming culture.
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