Seen and heard: April to June 2019

First you write a sentence by Joe Moran – practical reflections on the nuts and bolts of language and how effects are created (see adapted extract). All good sense, though less impressive than I expected given the glowing review. I think I prefer Tom Gauld’s cartoon on the subject.

A House through Time – another tremendous TV series from David Olusoga, this time focusing on a house in Newcastle. Once again, a single building becomes a microcosm for the history of the city, and of Britain, with a surprising variety of occupants and uses over the years, and alarmingly abrupt changes of fortune. No doubt there were uncredited researchers who sourced a lot of the material, but Olusoga is a tremendous story-teller who gets straight to the heart of his tales. Proper history.

Reviews of Life is Strange 2 and The Walking Dead final season – the reviews, not the games themselves. Very interesting signs of how video games are growing up: in both of these games, you play a young adult looking after a smaller child, and you’re made very aware of how they’re learning behaviour and attitudes from you, so that your choices, even if they don’t massively change the storyline, play back at you later through what the child does and says. Responsible adulthood in video games? Who’d have thought it! (Postscript 12 November 2019: the video Daniel's Education Explained goes into detail about how the younger child learns from your choices in Life is Strange 2. Postscript 30 December 2019: this full review of Life is Strange 2 on Adventure Gamers relates a player's experience of the choices and the emotional impact of the game.)

The Ballad of the Judas Tree – powerful little poem by Ruth Etchells. read as part of the King's College Cambridge Easter service, and reproduced in her obituary.

Lyra McKee’s TEDx Stormont Women talk and her ‘A Letter to my 14-year-old Self’ – excerpted on Channel 4 News after her shooting during Northern Ireland protests. Compassionate and outspoken, and a lesson to us all.

Victoria – ballet by Northern Ballet. Not stunning like some of their productions, but no Northern Ballet show is ever money wasted. A nice conception: Victoria’s youngest daughter Beatrice reads her mother’s journals after her death, and sees the queen’s past life in flashback. The most emotionally powerful parts were where she enters the scene that she’s seeing: trying to tear her mother and John Brown apart, or clinging to her younger self and her future husband (now dead) as they share their first embrace.

Alastair Campbell: Depression and Me – surprisingly moving TV documentary, with Campbell’s video diaries for the programme revealing a side to him far removed from his public image.

Deep Space Nine: What We Left Behind – Deep Space Nine was the unpopular middle child of the Star Trek franchise, despised and rejected by many Trekkies, but it was always my favourite, as the most grown-up and complex of the shows, without the sunny optimism which characterised most of the others. This celebratory 25th anniversary documentary, which I helped crowdfund, not only does the usual interviews with the cast and producers, but reunites the writing team to plan out an opening episode of an imagined eighth season – and it’s a blinder. Oh what we left behind!

Telling True Stories – collection of teaching stories and sound advice from Harvard’s Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, by the best in the business. Some of it is narrowly journalism-focused, but much of it applies to non-fiction writing of any kind. Much cheaper than going to journalism school.

Firewatch – well-reviewed adventure game, essentially a “walking simulator” with the neat USP that you’re walking in a US National park, because your character has taken a summer job as a firewatcher and the storyline sends him all over the terrain to investigate this, that and the other. Or – as I did – you can just walk around and admire the varied and stunning scenery, without breaking a sweat.

Summer of Rockets – this year’s Stephen Poliakoff drama, and a beauty too: striking characters and vivid locations, with distinctive period features (it’s set in 1958) and neat recurring themes (secrets kept and revealed, searching for a lost loved one). The plot constantly moves on and keeps you watching, even as it meanders to the point where you wonder whether all the storylines can possibly be resolved – and then they are. Poliakoff’s father – an engineer and manufacturer of hearing aids, like the lead character – would have been very proud.

Gentleman Jack – costume romp inspired by the diaries of celebrated 18th century lesbian Anne Lister. I’d love to know just how much was historical and how much was invented, but certainly Sally Wainwright gave us a cracking story which Suranne Jones and a stellar cast realised with wit and style. The earwormingly catchy faux folk title music, though surely historically inappropriate for someone of Lister’s social class, precisely set the tone, capturing her jaunty swagger. I know some people thought there was too much about the coal-mining, but I think it was important: we needed to see Lister cutting a dash in business and estate management, otherwise it would just have been lesbian Jane Austen.

Burghley House – a lovely day out with the grandchildren, the elder fascinated by the opulence of the house, which she conceded was “cool”, the younger by the mirrors and water jets of the Garden of Surprises.

A History of Music and Technology – excellent BBC / OU radio co-production, with great archive recordings and great insights in each episode. My most important take-away: that when recording technology was first developed many musicians either couldn’t cope with the demands of recreating their performance in a studio or maintained that recorded music could never replace the live connection between performer and audience – very real issues which parallel those I continue to encounter when getting university teachers to write online distance learning materials.

Arrival / The Story of Your Life – Watching the film again on TV prompted me to read the short story on which it's based, in which the main theme – the alien writing system in which all parts of a sentence are written simultaneously, through which the protagonist comes to perceive past present and future all together – is much clearer, shorn of the thriller-like elements necessary for a Hollywood movie. The short story also contains the powerful metaphor, not in the film, of the principle of least time: a refracting beam of light travels along the path which minimises the time to its destination, which on a cause-and-effect view makes no sense because the light can’t have advance knowledge of where it’s going to end up. The film is much more comprehensible on second viewing, when you know that what you first think are flashbacks (to the protagonist’s daughter growing up and dying of a congenital illness) are in fact flashforwards, but the story is much better in taking one some way towards acquiring that simultaneity perspective oneself and much clearer about what you have to abandon: “What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know.” I seem to be encountering references to this kind of time-collapsed vision a lot right now; it’s either a sign of wisdom, or just of getting old.

Heaven’s Vault – ground-breaking game from Inkle Studios, who also produced the excellent 80 Days. It’s an archaeology simulator which has actually won the approval of archaeologists. as well as great reviews from gamers (see Adventure Gamers and The Guardian). You play Alisa, who with her risk-averse robot companion searches for artefacts and deciphers inscriptions across a fantasy universe of river-connected moons. There’s an overall investigation plotline which advances slowly, though you have a great deal of choice in which sub-investigations you pursue and how, so the situations and dialogues are highly responsive. Overall I think I prefer more tightly structured narratives – I find Heaven’s Vault intriguing rather than compelling – but I’ll definitely play it through to the end. Blow me down, though, if there isn’t a cyclical time theme to the game: most of the inhabitants of this universe believe in The Loop – that everything that has happened will happen again – and although Alisa is sceptical we can anticipate that her character arc will have come to appreciate The Loop by the end of the game. (Postscript: see this discussion of the "end" – or is it? – and replayability of Heaven's Vault.)

The Tower of Babylon – And then I start to read another short story by Ted Chiang, who wrote ‘Story of your life’, and find that it’s about the vault of heaven. It’s a closely realised imagination of the building of the Tower of Babel, or Babylon, with detailed discussion of the engineering problems – for example how their construction techniques had to be modified when building past the orbits of the moon and sun. The protagonist is one of a team of miners who ascend the tower as it nears heaven’s vault, in order to tunnel into the firmament. He nearly drowns, when they break through into the waters above the firmament, and then emerges ...  on the surface of the earth, not far from the base of the tower. So the universe is a loop. (There's that loop again, this time in space, not in time. What's going on?)

Seen and Heard: July to September 2022

The Darkside Detective – really fun and funny (I mean LOL funny) adventure game, with a small town detective and his idiot sidekick solving paranormal / occult mysteries. (See review.) No voice acting and super-chunky pixel graphics, which work surprisingly well. Solutions to puzzles are often bizarre but well-cued, making the playing a very enjoyable experience. A well-deserved winner of the 2017 Aggie awards for Best comedy writing, and a runner up for the readers’ choice Best adventure of 2017.

The Age of the Image – repeat of BBC documentary series presented by James Fox, taking a trip through twentieth-century image-making and image-use, part history of technology, part semiotics and cultural studies – nothing revolutionary, but just very, very well told. What also struck me on this re-viewing was the effort the production team put into getting Fox constantly into the frame: handling unique works of art and craft such as a matte painting used in Star Wars, walking round gallery installations, standing in the actual street locations of classic photos. Contrast this continual presence with the style of Adam Curtis, who is only ever a voiceover in his documentaries.

‘Science Fiction Audiences: Watching “Doctor Who” and "Star Trek”’ by John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins – proper academic book from Routledge freely available as a PDF. Slightly dated (1995), but some observations which are still interesting, for example how the original Star Trek self-consciously merged three genres (the technological utopianism of ‘hard’ SF, the social utopianism of 1960s ‘soft’ SF and the action adventure of space opera). An interesting chapter on MIT students who see Star Trek as an embodiment and validation of their scientific technical outlook, much interested in reconciling scientific inaccuracies and in the quality of special effects, and misogynist in their humour. And two interesting chapters on how female and gay fans, far from the passive consumers of classic literary theory, have wrestled with the many respects in which the show did not live up to its progressive social values, not by rejecting the show but seeking to resolve these tensions within the fictional world: first by fan fiction, focusing on female characters marginalised in the television series, and second by agitating for the inclusion of a gay character in The Next Generation cast, not just an “issue” show about homosexuality (such as ‘The Host’ or ‘The Outcast’).

Syberia 3 – a decent game, as I was pleasantly surprised to find, given the poor reviews, though perhaps not up to the quality of the first two. The weaknesses are the non-player characters, especially the clichéd villains and the infantalised generic members of the Yukol tribe. Its strengths are what they always were: the graphic design and the mechanical puzzles, now with a simple but satisfying twist in that you have to accomplish tasks physically: you have to use the joystick (or mouse) to rotate keys, turn handles, pull levers, instead of just clicking on them. The story is perhaps a bit linear with the next step spelled out in a list of objectives, but I have no objections to an easier game. Well, I’m up to date now, and ready for the much-anticipated and well-reviewed Syberia 4: The World Before.

Proofreading Theses and Dissertations, by Stephen Cashmore – a CIEP guide for editors working with university students. Very good on establishing with the student exactly which aspects of their work you will check and which you won’t, and on ethical aspects such as dealing with plagiarism (including unmarked and unacknowledged quotations, which is its most common form) and querying facts (as distinct from checking facts, which you should definitely not do).

Heaven’s Vault – two-volume novel by Jon Ingold, based on his well-reviewed and award-winning adventure game. Although I liked the game, I enjoyed the novel more. The game is quite emotionally flat, whereas the novel has peril, tension and tender resolution, and I’m sure there are entire sequences which have no equivalent in the game, such as Alysia’s childhood in Elboreth and the origins of her friendship with Oroi which is a major theme in the book. There are also many things which I didn’t understand properly, such as that the robots were not made in Alysia’s time but were a product of an earlier civilisation, unearthed on Iox and reactivated. Perhaps these were things I was supposed to infer or work out for myself in the game? In which case there was a great deal that I missed. Perhaps I’d better play it again…

Dear Esther – classic game, the original “walking simulator”. There are no dangers, no puzzles, no objects to pick up and use; just a Hebridean island, with a flashing tower-top light in the distance and a path to follow, and an occasional man’s voice – yours? someone else’s? – reading out letters to the titular Esther, or perhaps thinking aloud. There is a back-story of some kind, though the authors left it deliberately unclear so that all you have is suggestions, hints, clues. The island is really beautifully realised; I found myself repeatedly stopping just to watch the waves breaking on the shore, the plants waving in the wind, the mist rolling across the sea, the flickering of lighted candles as the night slowly falls. A true classic, which paved the way for later walking simulators such as Gone Home and Firewatch (played by me in February 2015,  with discussion, and April-June 2019). See review on Adventure Gamers, the story of its development, and various attempts at explaining the story, see especially the post by Prismfalcon (Sept 17 2018).

Live from London Summer – another fine series of livestreamed concerts from those nice people and most excellent singers Voces8.,though I have to say the knock-out performances were their own single-piece videos, recorded at various locations around the world while on tour. The best were Giovanni Croce’s double choir ‘Buccinate in neomenia tuba’ and a clever mash-up of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ and ‘Come Fly with Me’; those videos are unfortunately not on YouTube, but their beautiful rendering of Grieg’s ‘Ave Maris Stella’ happily is.

Let’s Talk: How English Conversation Works, by David Crystal – lovely, accessible but academically-founded book by everyone’s favourite linguist on the pragmatics of how conversations are started, maintained and ended. Some nice points, such as that interruptions, fuzziness and imprecision, and parenthetical comment clauses (such as “you know”) are not only normal but actually critical to keeping a conversation going. Great examples, lots of fun.