Seen and heard: April to June 2020

The Stanley Parable – curious and amusing novelty adventure game. There are essentially only two characters: Stanley, played by you in first person view, and the narrator of the game. The game concept is a tension or struggle between you / Stanley and the narrator. Very near the start, for example, you / Stanley are confronted by two doors and the narrator says that Stanley went through the door on the left. Do you do what the narrator says or the opposite? Each leads to different consequences. As you / Stanley walk through his deserted office building, the narrator describes what Stanley is doing and thinking - trying to manipulate you? - and eventually addresses Stanley directly, reasoning, pleading or threatening. In one ending of the game, Stanley escapes from his bureaucratic nightmare building and emerges into open green countryside (like The Truman Show, or Brazil), but there are at least 14 other endings to the game, all very different and some completely surreal. This is a meta-game: a game which plays with the idea of a game, and what it is to play a game. A fun idea, well and throughly implemented.

Appalled Graphic Designer Shows Girls’ Life Magazine What Their Cover Should Look Like – extraordinary illustrations, showing the original Girls' Life magazine cover, with features like 'Fall fashion you'll love: 100+ ways to SLAY on the first day' and 'Your dream hair', and the re-designed cover replacing these with 'Girls doing good: 100+ ways to help others in your community' and 'Your dream career'. If you think that's over the top, look at what boys were getting in the corresponding Boy's Life magazine. ('Explore your future: Astronaut? Artist? Firefighter?Chef? Here's how to be what you want to be.') And I thought this kind of ambition-limiting gender stereotyping had quite gone away.

Ghost Trick – replaying this great puzzle adventure game, I once again enjoyed the vivid characters (especially the ultra-camp white-suited Inspector Cabanela), the tricky but not too tricky puzzles with a well-paced expansion of the game mechanic, and the fantastic but powerfully compelling storyline. And I marvelled again at how effectively the changes in mood and pace are conveyed through sound stings, graphic effects, and above all the music.

Foyle’s War – This seemed like the box set to rewatch during Covid-19 lockdown: a study in how different people respond to extraordinary changed and frequently desperate times, some with courage and nobility, some with greed and selfishness, and most with ordinary human frailty. Hardly any of the crimes and murders featured are really about the war, which is only the setting for the stories.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – More great lockdown box set rewatching, and an antidote to the dreadful film version which ruined the story by making it heroic instead of sleazy and spelling out everything explicitly. I remember how the original TV transmision gripped the country, despite – or because of – the fact that noone could understand it. I suppose you couldn't do TV like that now. The BBC's Radio Times had a cartoon on the letters page, where people had been complaining that it was too hard: on the set, one programme maker was saying to another 'Of course, we have to consider less sophisticated viewers,' while in front of the camera an actor was pointing to a large sign around his neck reading 'THE MOLE'. That's what the film was like.  

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – nice but predictable film about an author just after the Second World War investigating events during the German occupation of the Channel Islands.

Lockdown performance videos. Of all the great videos featuring isolated and invidually-recording performers, my favourites are: I Am Cow, sung by Peculi8;Let's Face the Music and Dance, performed by Down for the Count; The Liar Tweets Tonight, performed by Roy Zimmerman and the ReZisters; Libera nos, sung by The Sixteen; All in the Same Dance, with multiple dancers and music by Mauro Durante.

The Queen’s broadcasts for the Covid-19 outbreak and the 75th anniversary of VE Day – I reckon these are the best broadcasts she's ever done; she seems to be taking on a new role as the grandmother of the nation. 

A virtual prayer walk – since we can't get to Turvey Abbey during lockdown, we can at least do this virtual walking meditation around its grounds. Thank you, Sister Miriam. 

Grayson’s Art Club – A great show from the rapidly-becoming national treature Grayson Perry, produced during lockdown so featuring video calls with non-artist celebrities and members of the public who've sent in art. It's great to see him with his psychotherapist wife Philippa too; what a lovely couple they make. (Others think so too.)

A House Through Time, series 3 – Another great series from David Olusoga, this time featuring a Bristol house built by a slave-trading sea captain - which proved unexpectedly topical when Bristol race rights protesters pulled down the statue of slave trader (and philanthropist) Edward Colston and pushed it into the harbour, thus achieving in one afternoon what several years of lobbying and negotiation had failed to do.

Heaven Knows Mr Allison – Lovely classic odd couple film, with Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum as a nun and a US marine stranded together on a Pacific island in Japanese territory during the Second World War, and in their struggle to survive coming to a grudging mutual respect, and possibly more.

Black Books, Season 1 – A welcome repeat of this wonderful, surreal and emotional TV comedy.

Mirages of Winter – Meditative adventure game, in which you move slowly through a series of hand-painted Chinese-style scenes, as a fisherman passes the time through winter and into Spring. A game to savour and take time over, so the only bad parts are where you get stuck working out how to advance the story and start jabbing at everything in frustration, which dispels the mood. Better, as I did a couple of times, to put it down and return later, when another idea or possibility may arise. But I still needed to refer to a video walkthrough on several more occasions, having to listen to the player repeatedly saying, with increasing anger, "I don't know what I'm doing."

Whispers of a Machine – Much-awarded adventure game (for example here and here), and deservedly so. Sort of Scandi-cyberpunk-noir, with recently-qualified agent Vera Englund investigating murders in a remote northern European town. The neat gimmick is that she has cybernetic implants which enhance her investigative abilities – for example, being able to see microscopic biological residue or to detect changed vital signs when someone is lying. Which enhancements you get depends on how you play Vera: analytic, empathetic or assertive. Very good voice acting, and an interesting setting in a post-AI-apocalypse world, although the reviewer is right that the ending somehow lacks the energy which drove the story forward up till then. Vera is a tremendous character, though, who I'd be very happy to see return. 

The Salisbury Poisonings – Scary three-part drama, reconstructing the events of 2018 when a former Russian spy and his daughter were poisoned with nerve agent in central Salisbury, leading to a major public health emergency. Very interesting to watch now, and to see how promptly the Wiltshire Director of Public Health acted to isolate potentially contaminated areas and to track down people who might have come into contact with them – undoubtedly saving many lives; what a contrast with our governments lackadaisical attitude when Covid-19 arrived on these shores. Compelling performance from Anne Marie Duff as Tracy Daszkiewicz, the DPH, and some standout scenes – especially for me the painful public meeting at which she gets a roasting, because the people want facts and reassurance at a time when very little is known for sure. It culminates in one person asking her to answer "one simple question": “is Salisbury safe?” – and the scene ends right there, without showing her actual answer, thus leaving us with the awful realisation that there could be no good answer to such a question.

The Encounter – ingenious and powerful Complicité one-man show (well, one man on stage supported by some pretty amazing sound engineers) telling the story of Loren McIntyre, a photographer from National Geographic, who in 1969 got lost amongst the people of the remote Javari Valley in Brazil. Extraordinary use of multi-layered sound and great acting from Simon McBurney to conjure up powerful scenes in the imagination. (See also post-show Q&A and a video about the production.)

Star Trek 25th Anniversary (game) – I remember excitedly reading a review of this back in 1994 in the then cutting-edge magazine CD-ROM Today and lamenting my lack of a PC to play it on. Finding it at a bargain price on GOG (which stands for Good Old Games – they've done a great service in making old games available in forms which will run on today's machines), and seeing that player reviews were still good, I had a go – and was bitterly disappointed. The problem isn't the VGA graphics (which it's quite stylish to imitate, these days), or even the voice acting by the original TV cast, which was a bonus on the CD-ROM version (William Shatner is particularly poor), or the writing (which is okay, and does capture something of the feel of the original series). It's the interface which makes playing the game a continual frustration, penalising experimentation by bringing up a "nothing to see here" sound clip for each misplaced click (of which there are necessarily many, because there's a lot of pixel hunting involved), and generally never requiring just one click of the player when it can demand three. I gave up before the end of the first mission. I'd rather watch the old episodes on DVD instead.

The School that tried to End Racism – documentary following a brave, interesting attempt by one South London school to put racial awareness on the curriculum. Some dubious activities and an annoying American (very American) guru, but the kids themselves were great and game, and their authentic responses were riveting. Some standout moments for me: when the kids were told to divide into white and black / minority ethnic groups, and a mixed race girl didn’t know which one to join; the Japanese girl, who when they were asked to show something representing their culture produced the calligraphy with which she’d graduated from Japanese school; the South and East Asian kids who insisted on forming a third group because they didn’t feel they had much in common with the black kids; and the black kid who came home from school and told his (black) mother about what he’d said about the experience of having his bag searched in a shop because the shopkeeper thought that black kids were more likely to steal, to have his mother defend the reasonableness of the shopkeeper’s action and he (who’d been taught about internalised oppression) eventually, and in evident conflict and distress, saying “I don’t agree.” The kids showed how there are no easy solutions to racism, only difficult and painful ones; and that it’s not all black and white.

Cuttings: June 2020

Lecturer and student relationships matter even more online than on campus – article by Kate Roll (Head of Teaching and Asst. Prof at UCL's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose) and Marc Ventresca (Assoc. Prof at Oxford's Said Business School) in The Guardian. "In the early days of teaching online, the focus was on recreating the familiar set-up of the physical classroom with the professor positioned at the centre – often referred to as the 'sage on the stage'. ... But us lecturers aren’t feeling so in charge anymore. Our experience of online teaching has been destabilising, but also levelling and humanising. ... Recent research on student engagement in online learning has underscored the need to focus on the quality and variety of such relationships. Online, it is important to establish a strong teacher presence to motivate students and ensure they feel cared for. Hearteningly, the research also found that students did not see online platforms as the main barrier to meaningful interaction. Building relationships online will require lecturers to have closer contact with students through more small-group tutorials and fewer extended lectures. This involves more regular email communications, concise and actionable feedback, and staff participation in online chats. It’s also about bringing oneself into the classroom. "

Fairytale Lockdown Assessment: Little Red Riding Hood – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian. "(1) Going to see Grandma. 'Providing care or assistance to a vulnerable person.' (2) Big Bad Wolf in the woods. 'Visiting a public open space for the purpose of recreation.' (3) Conversation with wolf. 'Interaction with one member of another household.' (4) Wolf eats Grandma. 'Obtaining basic necessities including food.' (5) Woodcutter working. 'Carrying out work that cannot be done from home.' (6) Killing the wolf. “Providing emergency assistance.'”

The 100 greatest UK No 1s: No 3, The Beatles 'She Loves You' – article by Richard Williams in The Guardian. “To hear She Loves You bursting out of a radio in the last week of August 1963 was to recognise a shout of triumph. Everything the Beatles had promised through the first half of the year found its focus in their fourth single, an explosion of exuberance that forced the world, not just their teenage fans, to acknowledge their existence. The double-jolt of Ringo Starr’s drums kicked off a record that, unusually, began with the song’s chorus: ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.’ Straight away that Americanised triple ‘yeah’ (Paul McCartney’s father, the first to hear the completed song, asked if they could change it to ‘yes, yes, yes’) offered a fanfare for a culture on the brink of irreversible change. It marked the moment when the Beatles moved from being just another pop sensation to a national obsession: misquoted by prime ministers, cursed by barbers, viewed by schoolteachers as the vanguard of a revolution that must be stopped. And before long, almost universally adored.”

Good Science is Good Science – article by Marc Lipsitch in Boston Review, referenced in John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog. “Jonathan Fuller’s recent essay ...sees ... two ‘competing philosophies’ of scientific practice. One, he says, is characteristic of public health epidemiologists like me, who are ‘methodologically liberal and pragmatic’ and use models and diverse sources of data. The other, he explains, is characteristic of clinical epidemiologists like Stanford’s John Ioannidis, who draw on a tradition of skepticism about medical interventions in the literature of what has been known since the 1980s as ‘evidence-based medicine,’ privilege ‘gold standard’ evidence from randomized controlled trials (as opposed to mere ‘data’), and counsel inaction until a certain ideal form of evidence—Evidence with a capital E—justifies intervening. Fuller rightly points out that this distinction is only a rough approximation ... But the distinction is also misleading in a subtle way. If the COVID-19 crisis has revealed two ‘competing’ ways of thinking in distinct scientific traditions, it is not between two philosophies of science or two philosophies of evidence so much as between two philosophies of action.”

A Case for Cooperation Between Machines and Humans – article by John Markoff in The New York Times, referenced by John Naughton in his Observer column. "Ben Shneiderman, a University of Maryland computer scientist who has for decades warned against blindly automating tasks with computers, thinks fully automated cars and the tech industry’s vision for a robotic future is misguided. Even dangerous. Robots should collaborate with humans, he believes, rather than replace them.... Dr. Shneiderman, 72, began spreading his message decades ago. A pioneer in the field human-computer interaction, he co-founded in 1982 what is now the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and coined the term 'direct manipulation' to describe the way objects are moved on a computer screen either with a mouse or, more recently, with a finger.... Since then, Dr. Shneiderman has argued that designers run the risk not just of creating unsafe machines but of absolving humans of ethical responsibility of the actions taken by autonomous systems, ranging from cars to weapons."

The Salisbury Poisonings: TV drama revisits Novichok attack 'horror' – article by Steven McIntosh on the BBC website. "The three-part series is based on the events of March 2018, when the Wiltshire cathedral city faced one of the biggest threats to UK public health in recent years.... It's an extraordinary story, which Salisbury is still recovering from. But the dramatisation isn't some kind of James Bond-style spy thriller.... Instead, it focuses on the response of the local community and health officials.'We were drawn to the stories of the people who had to clean up this mess, rather than the people who made it,' says Declan Lawn, who co-wrote the script with Adam Patterson. 'It's about ordinary people who have to pick up the pieces. We thought that's where the drama was, where the emotion was.' ... At the centre of the The Salisbury Poisonings is Tracy Daszkiewicz (played by Anne-Marie Duff), the director of public health for Wiltshire.... 'To us now, it seems perfectly logical,' says Duff, referring to how common certain health measures have become since coronavirus. 'Of course we close our doors and windows and wear masks, but at the time, it seemed like she was being thoroughly extreme and overreacting. But what's glorious about Tracy is her background. Her background is in social work, she's very grassroots, she comes at things from a tactile level. So she'll ask, "What do we know to be true? What do we know if someone has food poisoning? What if the water source becomes contaminated?"' "

The Lancet has made one of the biggest retractions in modern history. How could this happen? – article by James Heathers in The Guardian. "The answer is quite simple. It happened because peer review, the formal process of reviewing scientific work before it is accepted for publication, is not designed to detect anomalous data. ... the sad truth is peer review in its entirety is struggling, and retractions like this drag its flaws into an incredibly bright spotlight. The ballistics of this problem are well known. To start with, the vast majority of peer review is entirely unrewarded. The internal currency of science consists entirely of producing new papers, which form the cornerstone of your scientific reputation. There is no emphasis on reviewing the work of others.... However, even if reliable volunteers for peer review can be found, it is increasingly clear that it is insufficient. The vast majority of peer-reviewed articles are never checked for any form of analytical consistency, nor can they be – journals do not require manuscripts to have accompanying data or analytical code and often will not help you obtain them from authors if you wish to see them.... Peer review during a pandemic faces a brutal dilemma – the moral importance of releasing important information with planetary consequences quickly, versus the scientific importance of evaluating the presented work fully – while trying to recruit scientists, already busier than usual due to their disrupted lives, to review work for free."

Fighting over statues obscures the real problem: Britain's delusion about its past – article by Martin Kettle in The Guardian. "When history waves a national flag, it always tells a partisan story not a true one. Britain is a very divided country on class, culture and other grounds. We thus react to the inherited celebrations of British greatness either by embracing or by rejecting them, but always too emphatically. Events such as the toppling of the Colston statue do not solve this divide. There is too little shared imaginative space, not enough humility and tolerance within civil society, and therefore a less generous approach than there should be to the task of evolving a shared culture. The absence of a national museum of British history, underpinned by a better history curriculum, disables the country. As a consequence, British history continues to be a political battleground between those who insist that our historic greatness is self-evident and empowering, and those who cannot bring themselves to see much in our history beyond lies about crimes. In public policy, public rituals and public debate the old, island-story narratives of greatness still have the upper hand.... The failure to look the history of empire in the eye is not the only neglected issue in Britain’s enduringly delusional relationship with its past. But it is the one that more than any other impoverishes modern Britain’s understanding of itself and the world of 2020."

Britain can no longer ignore its darkest chapters: we must teach black history – article by David Olusoga in The Guardian. "I went to school in the 70s and the 80s, and the last thing I expected of my schools back then was that they would be the places in which I would be taught about black history. In my school, racism was ubiquitous and unrelenting, and not just from the pupils. For a year I was terrorised by one of my teachers. A man who drank his tea from a mug emblazoned with one of the National Front’s slogans.... At that school, and the next one, there was no such thing as black history. The history of the British empire, the chapter of our national story that would have explained to my classmates why a child born in Nigeria was sat among them, was similarly missing from the curriculum. ... There have long been calls for the national curriculum to properly incorporate black British history.... This week [Lavinya Stennett] launched a new campaign in which members of the public are being asked to sign an open letter to the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, requesting that black history be made compulsory, in order to help 'build a sense of identity in every young person in the UK', Stennett says.... Little about the actions of the young people who pulled Colston from his pedestal and those who cheered him on his descent to the bottom of Bristol harbour, was random. Much of it was emblematic of a generation of young black Britons and their white friends and classmates who have educated themselves on the realities of the slave trade and slavery just as they have on the structural nature of racism. They know that they cannot rely on the national curriculum to provide the history that we all need, no matter our race or ethnicity. They know how urgently we need a new curriculum that makes sense of our history, with all its dark chapters included. It is those stories, the ones we find uncomfortable as well as the ones we celebrate, that have created the nation we have become. This, along with much else, is what has to change."

Ways to make online literary festivals feel more realistic – cartoon by Tom Gauld in The Guardian.  "Give this summer's online literary festivals a more realistic feel by picking one of these cards. (1) Mislaid ticket. Rifle through your bag in a blind panic for 15 minutes. (2) Bad seat. Sit as far as you can from the computer. (3) Sudden downpour. Stand fully-clothed in the shower for three minutes. (4) Talkative neighbours. Turn the radio on throughout the event. (5) Queue for a coffee. Wait 25 minutes and then make yourself a really terrible cup of coffee. (6) Behind a tall person. Place a watermelon in front of your screen. (7) Went to wrong event. Watch random YouTube videos for one hour."

Solving online events – blog post by Benedict Evans, referenced in John Naughton's Observer column. "A conference, or an ‘event’, is a bundle. There is content from a stage, with people talking or presenting or doing panels and maybe taking questions. Then, everyone talks to each other in the hallways and over coffee and lunch and drinks. Separately, there may be a trade fair of dozens or thousands of booths and stands, where you go to see all of the products in the industry at once, and talk to the engineers and salespeople. And then, there are all of the meetings that you schedule because everyone is there. ... The only part of that bundle that obviously works online today is the content. It’s really straightforward to turn a conference presentation or a panel into a video stream, but none of the rest is straightforward at all.... I understand why events organisers and events platforms want to try to put all of these things into one website on one date, but the results generally remind me of ‘virtual malls’ in the 1990s. A mall aggregates people and retailers, and that has value for both sides. Then the web came along, and clearly people would shop online, but how? Should retailers have their own websites, or should there be landlords who would aggregate that traffic? And should there be lots and lots of different ‘virtual shopping malls'? No. That aggregation model makes no sense online. Today, of course, we do have aggregators, in Google or Instagram, but they don’t work anything like a shopping mall. Going online breaks the bundle, and conferences will be the same."

The Long Shadow Of The Future – article by Steven Weber and Nils Gilman on Noēma website, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "One of the less-positive effects of digital social media over the last decade has been to contribute to a set of mythologies about the special value of ideas. Ideas are of course powerful and ultimately the source of innovation and social change, but the pandemic is revealing a sharp difference between power and value. ... Put simply, ideas are cheap and easy to create and distribute — never more so than on social media platforms. But really knowing how to get things done effectively requires a set of capabilities that are difficult to create, expensive to maintain and improve, and not something you describe in 280 characters. Pandemics and other mass emergencies and mobilizations like wars demonstrate the difference in sharp relief. The ability to execute becomes visibly more important than the ability to ideate. What’s more, the best ideas are rarely discovered in isolation from practical implementation. Improvement depends on concrete feedback from what happens when ideas are put into practice in the world. What works and what doesn’t reveals itself to operators before (and often more clearly than) it reveals itself to idea generators."

Are Universities Going the Way of CDs and Cable TV? – article by Michael D. Smith in The Atlantic, referenced in John Naughton's Memex 1.1 blog. "After the Coronavirus upended American life, millions of college students made the transition from sitting in campus lecture halls to live-streaming seminars at their kitchen tables. Do students think their pricey degrees are worth the cost when delivered remotely? The Wall Street Journal asked that question in April, and one student responded with this zinger: 'Would you pay $75,000 for front-row seats to a Beyoncé concert and be satisfied with a livestream instead?' Another compared higher education to premium cable—an annoyingly expensive bundle with more options than most people need. 'Give me the basic package,' he said. ... I need no convincing of the value of campus life and in-classroom education. I recognize that online platforms can’t perfectly replace what we deliver on campus. But they can fulfill key pieces of our core mission and reach many more students, of all ages and economic backgrounds, at a far lower cost. What online services lack in quality, they make up for in convenience—and as they get more popular, they’re only going to get better, which in turn could unbundle the prevailing model of higher education. Indeed, that unbundling is already happening. Employers such as Google, Apple, IBM, and Ernst & Young have stopped requiring traditional university degrees, even for some of their most highly skilled positions. Inevitably, as employers embrace new skills-based certifications, many students may question the value of the traditional four-year degree."