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the coming of 3D video games

Technological change is extraordinarily rapid, yet somehow it seems to creep up on us. The internet went from being an obscure curiosity for the geeky to part of people’s everyday lives without most of us ever having a eureka moment when the change was brought home to us.

I have had a few such moments, though. I still remember the moment I saw my first proper 3D game, Virtua Fighter — in a Vegas casino, of all places — as incredibly exciting. I would quite seriously compare it to what it must have been like for the audiences when they first saw The Jazz Singer. It was jaw-dropping to see these graphics which were simply unlike anything I’d ever seen before.

It helped that it was completely unexpected. I didn’t read the gaming press, videogames barely made the mainstream media unless there was a moral panic going on, and the internet barely existed – I’d certainly never used it. So I had no prior knowledge; I just stumbled on the cabinet among all the other games and was blown away by it. What struck me most wasn’t the greater realism of the characters, exactly: even in the moment of first seeing it, the blockiness of the characters looked pretty primitive. But the way the characters moved in three dimensions really did make it feel more like you were controlling a ‘person’ rather than just an animation. And more than anything, it was the swooping camera, that moved around the action and zoomed in and out as you played, which brought home this shift from a flat game world to one with depth.

I’ve already compared it the shift from silent movies to talkies; a more exact comparison would be the invention of perspective in Renaissance painting. I don’t want to use hindsight to claim that I saw Virtua Fighter and immediately had a sense of all the ways 3D would have an impact on gaming, but it didn’t take any particular brilliance to see it and know that you were present at the start of something. Perhaps in C15th Italy there were people feeling the same way.

I still like the look of the original Virtua Fighter. I know that the minimalist environment — a bit of texture on the ground and a few clouds — is because of technical limitations rather than aesthetic choice, but I find it appealing. If you see the later versions of the game (they’re currently up to Virtua Fighter 4, with VF5 due out this year), the backgrounds are ever more lushly-detailed graphical marvels, mainly for the sake of eye-candy but also as part of a pointless attempt to build a narrative context. The places they fight are related to the characters’ elaborate back-stories. But really, what’s the point? It’s a beat-em-up; I don’t need to know my character’s motivation. And while I was excited as anyone else by the advances in computer graphics at the time, that lush, hyper-realistic aesthetic gets cloying after a while. It’s about time for a bit of less-is-more.

Comparisons with early cinema and Renaissance painting inevitably bring up the question of games as art. That’s not what I had in mind when I made them, and I certainly wouldn’t pick Virtua Fighter as a case study, since apart from the graphics it was the simplest and most formulaic game imaginable. But even discussing a game this simple, the kinds of things I find myself mentioning — the overall visual styling, the way the 3D characters made it more immersive, the characterisation, set design, lighting, camerawork — make comparisons with various artforms almost inevitable. That’s why it seems certain that descendants of today’s games will be treated as artworks with all the importance of films, novels or paintings. Someone will find a way of bringing it all together and making it into something more.

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Taboo vocabulary

Commenting on the current controversy surrounding Celebrity Big Brother and a bleeped-out word spoken by one of the contestants, the Telegraph printed this remarkable sentence:

Channel 4 was quick to clarify that Jack had referred to Shilpa as a ****, not a ‘paki’.

Channel 4 being a bit too clear for the delicate sensibilities of Telegraph readers there. Note that ‘paki’, which, by implication, is the more taboo word, is left en clair. Although to be fair, ‘Jack had referred to Shilpa as a ****, not a ****’ would be even more bizarre.

For more fun with taboo vocabulary, check out the Language Log, where they’ve conveniently compiled a list of posts on the subject. You might want to start with this one.

Oh, and if you were wondering: ‘cunt’.

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Soccer in the US

All the coverage about the position of soccer in the US, and whether Beckham moving there will have any impact, had me thinking. If his new home ground is only half-full, he’ll still be playing in front of about 13,000 fans. It’s true, that’s not very many compared to the Bernabéu or Old Trafford, but it’s a good crowd for a match in the Rugby Union Premiership and a miraculous one for county cricket.

Average attendances for soccer in the US (the 5th most popular team sport) are significantly higher than those for rugby in the UK (the 2nd most popular team sport). In fact, according to this list of sports attendances on Wikipedia, the English rugby premiership draws the biggest audiences of any non-soccer league in Europe, and it still only has an average attendance of 10,271; not just less than Major League Soccer, but less than the National Lacrosse League in the US.

Perhaps ‘why don’t Americans like soccer?’ is the wrong question. More interestingly: why does Europe only manage to support one team sport as a megabusiness while North America supports three or four? Why is Europe a sporting monoculture?

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FsotW: zoomify

Flickr set of the week is zoomify by Trazy.

This is scotch tape, being ripped from the dispenser:

This is salt and pepper:

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Beckham going to LA

David Beckham’s decision to leave Real Madrid and move to LA Galaxy is effectively a kind of retirement; an acceptance that he’s not going to be part of an England team that wins a trophy and that this year is his last chance to be part of another Champion’s League winning team. I suspect that it’s those trophies he measures his career in; that deep down, all those Premiership and FA Cup winners’ medals are second best. That’s a testament to just how dominant that Manchester United team of the 90s was, but also to the real drive and ambition of Beckham. I guess that means that by his own standards, he’s a failure; but I tend to admire him for aiming high rather than blame him for falling short. If more England players held themselves to the same high standards and had the same kind of work ethic, we might have won something since 1966.

The Premiership has been less interesting in his absence; sport is, among other things, a form of entertainment, and it needs people who generate buzz. Of course the competition still has its stars — Jose Mourinho and Christiano Ronaldo spring to mind — but Becks was, for a period, not just a famous sportsman or a celebrity, but a genuinely glamorous old-school superstar. And however silly much of the attention ultimately was — the hairstyles, the homoerotic photoshoots, the diamonds, the clothes, the tattoos, the wedding — it was all harmless fun which added to the gaiety of life. There’s also the football. Perhaps some people got quickly bored by the sight of opposition defenders standing around disconsolately with their hands on their hips, having just seen a free kick flash past them into the corner of the goal. Personally I could watch it all day.

Perhaps in a year or two, when the dust has settled and England fans have had some time to realise that players who can produce match-winning moments of brilliance aren’t easy to find, we’ll have less of the crap about Beckham being ‘over-rated’. It’s true, he’s not a Zidane or a Maradona or a Ronaldinho in terms of sheer talent, and he wasn’t the kind of player who could regularly dominate a match, but he was still better than nearly every player I’ve ever seen play for England. Even now, past his best, he’s better than most.

It feels like I’m writing an obituary. Footballers are like mayflies; one minute they’re gangly young things, full of potential, and then before you know it they’re struggling to keep up with the pace of the game and having to find something else to do with the rest of their lives. The rumour is that Becks wants to be a movie star, a prospect I find slightly horrifying. But it’s hard to see what else he could do. I imagine he wants to keep in the spotlight, but he doesn’t seem like an obvious candidate for commentator or manager. Fashion designer? Politician? Raconteur?

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Culture Other

‘Fish, Flesh and Good Red Herring’

I’m just reading a book by Alice Thomas Ellis called Fish, Flesh and Good Red Herring: A Gallimaufry. It’s a book about the history of food and it’s both very entertaining and extremely annoying. Annoying because it is indeed a gallimaufry (‘a confused jumble or medley of things’). The book is loosely organised into themed chapters, but within the chapters she cheerfully hops from topic to topic and period to period, often without so much as a paragraph break to mark an abrupt change of tack. The content is interesting enough to keep me reading, though. The emphasis is on English food from the 19th and early 20th century; more, I think as a reflection of Ellis’s collection of old books than for any other reason.

An example of the kind of thing I’ve been finding interesting. In the chapter about food for infants and invalids (the Victorians seem to have treated children as effectively invalids for several years) there’s some stuff about beef tea. I’ve seen references to beef tea in books but always assumed it was either like a consommé or broth, or something like Bovril (a beef concentrate sold in jars you can make into a hot drink). But no. Beef tea was made by taking finely minced beef and soaking it in warm water for a couple of hours. You can heat it, but allowing it to boil destroys the goodness. Obviously. One writer suggested serving it in a ruby-colored glass because, presumably, even Victorians found something slightly off-putting in a glass of warm, bloody water. And if you find that a bit icky, how about a drink for invalids called ‘liver cocktail’: half-cooked, sieved liver mixed with the juice of an orange and lemon and a pinch of sugar.

Much of the book is less repulsive, fortunatley, since just the idea of the liver cocktail makes me feel ill.