And so is my wife

I was watching some old Doctor Who recently. It's what I do. It's not sad. You're sad.

Anyway. This is how not sad I am. I was watching a reconstruction of an episode which was deleted decades ago. Luckily there are some photos, taken off the TV in the 60s, which someone has synchronised with the soundtrack, which someone else has recorded off their TV, also in the 60s.

Thanks to these weird people, who spent the 1960s recording Doctor Who off the telly before it was technically possible to do so, I was able to enjoy a weird and only slightly tedious slideshow of the story Fury From The Deep. And in it, there was a man who had a wife.

I know he had a wife because he kept calling her "My Wife!" Even though her name is Maggie Harris. And even though she worked in the same place as him, and everyone there knew her, he would only refer to her as "My Wife!"

"My Wife has disappeared! Where is My Wife? I think the seaweed creatures might have kidnapped My Wife! I gave the secret documents to My Wife!" It was most disconcerting. Maybe he was just very excited about having got married. But it came across as weird.


Trouble and Strife

It led  me to reflect that having a wife, in Doctor Who in the 1960s, was unusual. People tended not to be married. They just hung around in space, or in Ancient Egypt or wherever, having adventures and getting shot by Daleks.

And then I thought that actually, having a wife was a fairly unusual thing in adventure narratives, in general. I remember watching Firefly in 2002, thinking how refreshing it was that two of the ship's crew were married, and that the marriage was a good thing. It was still unusual then, 35 years after the crackly studio bound nonsense of early Doctor Who. How odd.

Soaps and dramas are full of wives, obviously. But that's because the focus is relationship and emotion. Narratives involving action tend to be uninterested in married couples. A wife is a thing you might get at the end of the story - a reward, in some respects. But also a signal that the adventure is over. Because the protagonist is "a man", obviously, and part of being "a man" is being single.


Ex Wives

Marriage is the end of story, or so popular narratives would have it. They are the opposite of adventure. That's why Wash and Zoe were so unusual, in Firefly. They continued the adventure. Even in excellent, forward looking television like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, there is a tension between the adventure the men want to go on and the fact that they are married. In fact, that's more or less the gimmick of The Sopranos, isn't it? He's a mob boss, but he's also a family man. How unusual and thought provoking. (Which, of course, it is, but why is it unusual to have such thoughts provoked?)

Uncharted 4, which I've both praised and moaned about recently, has a protagonist with a wife. Nathan Drake starts the story settled down, mucking about in suburbia with his wife, Elena. I sort of vaguely remember her from playing the earlier games, but I played 3 and 2 in the wrong order and so was utterly confused about who was who. And, to be honest, it didn't seem to matter much. All we did was run about killing people and watching temples explode.

The game does attempt to integrate Elena into the narrative, and she is clearly a capable and interesting character in her own right. But there is still an implicit tension between narrative excitement and domestic bliss. Nathan feels the need to deceive Elena in order to go on an adventure with his blokey mates. For much of the game she is a slightly nagging presence on a phone, lied to by Nathan in order to prolong the fun.

When she does turn up, she's a welcome addition to the hyper masculinity of the gameplay. Which begs the question, why wasn't she in this from the start? Why did the game feel the need to employ that tired old ideology - marriage is the enemy of adventure? They pay lip service, towards the end,  to the idea that their relationship is compatible with adventure, and I guess that's part of Nathan's arc. But that feels a little half heated when she's absent for so much of the game.

Still, at least Nathan does call her by her name. He doesn't just shout "Oh look, it's my wife!" all the time. So I suppose there's some progress.

More human than human

Have you seen Westworld? The new TV series from HBO? You should, it's very good. And it's sort of about video games.

HBO seem to be positioning the show as a high profile, Game of Thrones like property - presumably because they're currently panicking about what happens when we have to leave Westeros in a couple of years time. They'll do a Thrones prequel, I reckon.

But if they don't, I think Westworld might do pretty well as a cornerstone of their schedules, because it's great. The basic premise, which is based on a 70s film of the same name, is this. There is a theme park, like Jurassic Park, except instead of them having dinosaurs, they have robot cowboys.

In fact, they have more than just cowboys. They have a whole town full of sophisticated android bartenders, whores, heroes, villains, and mad old men in splendid hats. Customers go there to have a wonderful holiday, immersing themselves in a believable artificial world. The android hosts, meanwhile, believe that they are real, and have their personalities reset each night, no matter what happened to them in the day.

There are lots of reasons to recommend the show. It looks fantastic. The plot is intricate and enjoyable, with lots of different strands to follow and a huge cast of characters. And the story asks interesting questions about God, man, responsibility, humanity, memory - all that cool stuff.

And it seems to be talking about video games. The essential premise is startlingly close to the experience of playing a AAA, open world game. Timely, given the recent announcement of Red Dead Redemption 2. Just like players of Rockstar's epic original game, the guests at Westworld get to play at being cowboys, interact with NPCs, go on missions and shoot people in the face. All safe in the knowledge that they can't really get hurt.

It seems like the show is very deliberately commenting on the fact that we, as a culture, spend a lot of time playing games like this. The creators of the theme park, who spend their time in a vast, futuristic underground complex, are the game designers.

In episode one, we get this, from one of those designers:

"You keep making things more lifelike. But does anyone truly want that? Do you want to think that your husband is really sleeping with that beautiful girl or that you really just shot someone? This place works because the guests know the hosts aren't real."

A very interesting comment, I thought, on what we want from games. One one hand, the pleasure of play comes from transgression - doing things that we're not allowed to in the real world. It's not enough to just exist in the pretend world. We must make the most of our opportunity to misbehave whilst there are no consequences. So we kill, and we steal, and we treat the artificial inhabitants badly.

But if it gets too real, then it stops being fun. We might enjoy the thrill of a perfect headshot in Red Dead, but very few of us would enjoy the prospect of real violence if it burst into our actually-happening-now lives. And the closer games get to real experience, the more they risk losing their appeal.

I'm still enjoying Uncharted 4. But there's one little bit of it that I don't like. The crunch and snap when Nathan breaks a soldier's neck. For some reason I'm fine blowing their head off with a shotgun, but that neck snapping noise sends a shiver through me. I think it gets a little close to reality, and I can sort of feel it. Brrrr.

The guests in Westworld are shown as nice, normal people who can commit incredible acts of cruelty and violence once they find there are no consequences. I wonder, do they do it because they know that they won't be punished? Or because they know that no-one is really getting hurt?

And what does that say about our urges to kill things, as gamers?

The Girl With All The Gifts

Went to see The Girl With All The Gifts last night. Was in the unusual position of knowing almost nothing about it, except for a vague sense that it was kind of a zombie film but also a kind of British Drama thing.

My thoughts here will avoid major spoilers, but if you want to know nothing about it, you'd be better going to see it first. In fact, just go see it as soon as you can, because it's wonderful.

Wonder Girl

My main thoughts while watching were basically variations of "This is awesome. This is so well made. This is one of my favourite films already." It's basically the opposite to the thoughts and feelings I had while watching Suicide Squad.

Also ticking away was a thought that any gamer will have when watching this film, which is, "The Last of Us. This is like The Last of Us. Quite a lot."

Not that it shares the plot, so don't worry that I've just blown the narrative. GWATG is very much its own thing, and has a distinctive spirit and tone. But if you've played The Last of Us (which you certainly should have) you'll find some of the plot beats quite familiar. And the mise en scene is strongly reminiscent of the overgrown, deserted cityscapes that greet Joel and Ellie.

Girl Friend

The film follows a trend which I've seen developing over the last few years: the zombie as a sympathetic figure. From The Returned to In The Flesh to Warm Bodies, zombies (or things very much like zombies) have started to become more than faceless, shuffling monsters. They are sad, vulnerable, sometimes likeable. I wonder what that is about?

Are there any games following this trend? I'd be interested to see. And I'm curious as to what the trend means. Zombies have always had a significant symbolic purpose in culture, from the Western fear of foreigners in White Zombie to the directionless of 21st Century existence in Shaun of the Dead. So what does it mean when the zombies become likeable?

I'm aware that this is two blogs about zombies in a row, and neither have focused much on games. But we're talking about wider issues than just playing games here, I think. 

Anyway, go see this film. It is marvellous. 

How about them zombies

Early morning walk, listening to the 'Not a Game' podcast.

I've just started with this podcast, and so far feelings are mixed. The hosts are chatty and fun to listen to, and they know a fair bit about games, so that's good. But they seem to have some significant gaps in their knowledge.

The subject of zombies in games came up, as I suppose it must when discussing video games these days. Someone mentioned that they thought this fad was dying down, that people were losing interest in The Walking Dead and it's kind. That doesn't ring true to me. It seems that people have been predicting the end of the zombie 'fad' every couple of years, for about ten years. There's something about them that just seems to keep resonating.

They won't stay dead

The host alluded to the 'first cycle' of zombie films - the Romero films. And seemed to suggest that this was a similar cycle, and would also pass. Well, that first cycle lasted for about 17 years, with Romero's films being just three examples in a crowded market. So I'm not sure it was quite the short burst of activity this guy seems to think it was.

Worse, he seemed to think that Romero's films had a social significance that the current ones now lack. When he said this, I said 'Absolute rubbish!' out loud, in the street, apparently to myself.

Just because the zombies are no longer wandering around shopping malls, it doesn't mean that they're not a fundamental critique of society. Their very popularity would suggest that they are tapping into some very real cultural angst. For a start, I'd say The Walking Dead TV show is - like a lot of other Tv at the moment - about leadership and power. In a world where people like Trump can get scarily close to the Presidency of the USA, it's unsurprising to see television asking the question: whose leadership should we trust? Rick seems like a good leader, until you see his actions from another perspective, and then he looks a lot like some of the other, murderous, 'bad' leaders we've encountered.

And in games... Yeah, I get how we might get a bit tired of zombies becoming a kind of default enemy or add-on in so many games. But we're not long past The Last of Us, which managed to do something really engaging with the genre. So I think, ironically, there's life in them zombies yet.

I'm going to keep listening to the podcast for a bit - it's fun, and refreshingly uncynical. But I think they could do with a broader appreciation of wider cultural trends, at least when it comes to zombies.