One of the things that I have found challenging about this course has been the online game requirement.
I’ve always had pretty mixed feelings towards all forms of video games and online games. Xbox means nothing to me. Playstation passed me by. Video games remind me only of the smell of cheesy socks and teenage boy feet and overlarge serves of drive-thru takeaway bought by someone only just old enough to have a licence.
When I close my eyes and think of video games I hear the words “Hurry, baby, next pick up!” as I remember endless games of Smuggler’s Run played by my boyfriend with one of his mates in Scotland. In this game the players are couriers driving contraband across the Mexican border, and the words are spoken by the gangster’s mole sitting in the passenger seat who seems to be the only female in that entire game’s world. I always used to say “Hurry, baby, let’s go home, I’m bored!”
Online games have always seemed to me like an extension of the same thing. Online games, I always thought, are surely played mostly by obsessives like this or else by armies of Chinese guys in stonewashed jeans in midnight web cafes, paid by the hour to play fat New Jersey high school kids up to the next level by dawn.
So I’ve been putting off the course requirement to play Graal, or any other online game. Why would I want to be a pixelated simulation of a little dwarf-man stepping across a grid when I could do stuff like…my job? Or the shopping? Or read a book or even surf the web for weird bits of trivia. It seemed stifling and boring to shuffle around a tiny, man made world when you could be out in the actual world or could be using the internet in a more enjoyable way.
But then I discovered that one of my favourite film directors, Peter Greenaway, has been busily expanding into the online medium. I read an interview with him on the weekend and he was saying he believes cinema is dead and the future lies in multimedia.
One funny result of this was that he has taken up VJing, which is kind of mind boggling – the idea of rocking up to some sweaty rave in Amsterdam and looking into the VJ box and there is this austere 64 year old filmmaker musing about the purity of the visual medium and arranging long lists of stills according to their vertical features. Apparently his VJing goes off though!
But another result of Greenaway’s shift in direction is that he now has an online game, the Tulse Luper Journey. Tulse Luper is a character in a favourite book/film of mine, The Falls I’ve loved this book and film ever since high school as it has a nice narrative trick. It is presented as a compilation of case studies of people affected by a ‘Violent Unknown Event’ which turns them into birds in varying degrees and also creates new languages. For someone who professes to be too cool for narrative, I’ve always found Greenaway’s narratives pretty cool.
So in one instant, this revelation changed my whole idea of online games. I can’t wait to go home, get online and start playing the Tulse Luper Journey!
There is also an exhibition at ACMI which runs until 28 October where installations based on the Tulse Luper Journey are set up. Hopefully I’ll manage to catch this at some point as well.
