“…I had often seen one placed at the end of a road on a hillock, and in the light of the sun its black arms, bending in every direction, always reminded me of the claws of an immense beetle, and I assure you it was never without emotion that I gazed on it, for I could not help thinking how wonderful it was that these various signs should be made to cleave the air with such precision as to convey to the distance of three hundred leagues the ideas and wishes of a man sitting at a table at one end of the line to another man similarly placed at the opposite extremity, and all this effected by a simple act of volition on the part of the sender of the message. I began to think of genii, sylphs, gnomes, in short, of all the ministers of the occult sciences, until I laughed aloud at the freaks of my own imagination. Now, it never occurred to me to wish for a nearer inspection of these large insects, with their long black claws, for I always feared to find under their stone wings some little human genius fagged to death with cabals, factions, and government intrigues. But one fine day I learned that the mover of this telegraph was only a poor wretch, hired for twelve hundred francs a year, and employed all day, not in studying the heavens like an astronomer, or in gazing on the water like an angler, or even in enjoying the privilege of observing the country around him, but all his monotonous life was passed in watching his white-bellied, black-clawed fellow insect, four or five leagues distant from him. At length I felt a desire to study this living chrysalis more closely, and to endeavor to understand the secret part played by these insect-actors when they occupy themselves simply with pulling different pieces of string.”

“And are you going there?”

“I am.”

“What telegraph do you intend visiting? that of the home department, or of the observatory?”

“Oh, no; I should find there people who would force me to understand things of which I would prefer to remain ignorant, and who would try to explain to me, in spite of myself, a mystery which even they do not understand. Ma foi, I should wish to keep my illusions concerning insects unimpaired; it is quite enough to have those dissipated which I had formed of my fellow-creatures. I shall, therefore, not visit either of these telegraphs, but one in the open country where I shall find a good-natured simpleton, who knows no more than the machine he is employed to work.”

“You are a singular man,” said Villefort.

Later, in a moment of pre-postmodern clarity, the Count strikes at something fundamental in the relationship between technology and meaning: “The moment I understand it there will no longer exist a telegraph for me; it will be nothing more than a sign from M. Duchatel, or from M. Montalivet, transmitted to the prefect of Bayonne, mystified by two Greek words, tele, graphein.”

It turns out he has a sufficient grasp of the mechanisms in operation to exploit a security weakness in the network through social engineering, using money and charisma to misdirect a vital packet of information upon which a financial empire rests – a “third-rate fortune”, unusually susceptible to such accidents:

“I make three assortments in fortune—first-rate, second-rate, and third-rate fortunes. I call those first-rate which are composed of treasures one possesses under one’s hand, such as mines, lands, and funded property, in such states as France, Austria, and England, provided these treasures and property form a total of about a hundred millions; I call those second-rate fortunes, that are gained by manufacturing enterprises, joint-stock companies, viceroyalties, and principalities, not drawing more than 1,500,000 francs, the whole forming a capital of about fifty millions; finally, I call those third-rate fortunes, which are composed of a fluctuating capital, dependent upon the will of others, or upon chances which a bankruptcy involves or a false telegram shakes, such as banks, speculations of the day—in fact, all operations under the influence of greater or less mischances, the whole bringing in a real or fictitious capital of about fifteen millions. I think this is about your position, is it not?”

“Confound it, yes!” replied Danglars.

I had the impression that these fortunes earned the scorn of the Count not for their vulnerability to the sort of events that get called “black swans” today, but for their fictitious nature, for being “like the locomotive on a railway, the size of which is magnified by the smoke and steam surrounding it”. There are lots of concerns I’m used to imagining as being particularly of our time by virtue of their technological or complex nature, but the little thrill I get when I see them reflected in a book written 150 years ago reminds me that “of our time” covers a longer period than I expect.

Morris Minor dancing

Wearing fake Morris minors (Bernie Clifton ostrich style) players reverse park, move off and negotiate a mini-roundabout (playing the part of a maypole, representing the sacred circles of a more pastoral England), to the sound of the pipe and tabor/picnic hamper, while a fool dressed as John Betjeman recites directions to the nearest out-of-town Tescos in rhyming couplets.

Tam Lin

Following the script of the ballad Tam Lin, players have to hold on to something they love as the opposed faery team change it into a roaring lion, a black biting dog, a black hissing snake and a bar of iron (or other modern variants).

Knights asleep under the hill

Players have to creep through the circle of sleeping knights, to reach the chalice without sounding the bell that wakes the sleepers.

Mayhem!

Players run through neighbourhood in spontaneous fashion, carrying flaming torches and hurling stones at foreigners. Winner is the last person hung at the county Assizes.

Smugglers Moon

Two teams, smugglers and customs, each have to infiltrate the other team by dressing in their costume and passing themselves off as something they’re not. Only problem is there’s a limited number of costumes, and they all start the game on someone else: your task is to persuade one of the opposing team to swap costumes with you, or leave them no alternative (bribery, threats of harm, etc.) Winning team is the first team to be swapped, at which point the customs agents (previously smugglers) arrest them all and ship them off to Exeter for the hangings.

Knights of the Conference Room Table

Players are seated around a circular table and each try to add an agenda point (recent decrease in chivalrous acts, increase in littering e.g. swords left in stones all over, lack of virgins for unicorn hunts). Winner is the first to persuade the anonymous Green Facilitator to call a comfort break.

Exscallybur

Find the lady hiding a sword down her tracksuit.

All yours! Looking forward to seeing the Igfest pictures, sure it’ll be another fantastic time.

Singapore recently celebrated its National Day: every residents’ association spent July providing decorations and bunting and exhorting residents to deck their parapets with ordered rows of red-and-white flags. There was a parade, rehearsed for weeks beforehand, and by the time it took place the novelty of the aircraft and the fireworks must have worn off, though you wouldn’t have known it from the applause. I really enjoyed it. Here’s a video:

(A week later they hosted the Youth Olympic Games opening ceremony. Watch the last three minutes or so: amazing set, Speer-like, shades of Metropolis, drifting in the half-shadow of Marina Bay, a place that’s no less artificial or considered than a stage)

This sort of thing is a reminder that in lots of ways Singapore is a made-up country, one created suddenly and with a sense of urgency only a generation or so ago. The patriotism that is encouraged here is genuine, of course, and there are very real threats to the island’s security which demand a sense of loyalty, but there’s an untested quality to it that draws your attention to the way it’s been made up, in schools and workplaces and televised events.

They make up other countries as well. These pictures were taken in the IKEA cafeteria, after eating meatballs and boiled potatoes.

“Dalarna. It is mythical. It is summer. Midsummer. An enchanting hilly landscape. A picture painted by famous artists. The sound of a happy violin. Folklore. Culture. Traditions. Bright nights. Breath-taking light. It is the most Swedish in Sweden. It is Dalarna.”

Sweden, mystical home of sensible interior planning and refreshing attitudes to public bathing. Of course, we do the same thing, and not just to Sweden: there’s a distance of a couple of thousand miles at which any country is more easily understood through the ways it’s made up than through any actual experience. People in the UK did it with various countries now in the Commonwealth, Americans did it with Japan, and now Singaporeans romanticise Northern European countries and the parts of the culture they like. The Swiss are used in a similar way: the highest quality butchers, embroiderers, dry cleaners and health food suppliers all have “Swiss” in their name. The British aren’t treated the same way, being a much more real part of recent history here.

None of this is a criticism. But all this making up other countries has made it more obvious to me how I choose the parts of England that I miss, how I make up my own country to be nostalgic about. Since I arrived I’ve been listening to Dave Swarbrick and Alistair Anderson, and to groups that imagine their own village more obviously: the Moon Wiring Club, Belbury Poly, the Focus Group and others on the Ghost Box label. When I miss home now, after watching other people construct their own ideas of countries, I feel much more aware that I’m missing somewhere I made up, and take more pleasure in populating it on purpose: old Children’s Film Foundation programmes, Greater London Council lettering on country roadsigns, AA badges, muted, textured countryside, Puffin books and Alan Garner countrysides, morris dancing, public works in rollling hills from Dacorum and Milton Keynes borough councils, long barrows and neolithic landscapes, greaseproof paper and boxes of orange juice, whimsical acts of principled civil disobedience, well-spoken male voices in children’s radio programmes, village flotsam from the Festival of Britain, electronic engineering, and further away the Channel and the North Sea and stories of smuggling and secrecy.

The Solitary Life of Cranes (via Phil Gyford on haddock)

Modern social life is being dominated to an ever-increasing extent by a quality that has something in common with play and yields the illusion of a strongly-developed play-factor. This quality I have ventured to call Puerilism, as being the most appropriate appellation for that blend of adolescence and barbarity which has been rampant all over the world for the past two or three decades
Homo Ludens (1945), p205

Later, he describes “walking in marching order or at a special pace” and “the wearing of badges and sundry items of political haberdashery” as “puerilism of the lowest order”, before remarking that

We have seen great nations losing every shred of honour, all sense of humour, the very idea of decency and fair play.

He was writing in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, and not surprisingly was locked up soon after writing this. Seen from the present-day, a lot of his views seem reactionary and at odds with current orthodoxies: for example, he thought the 18th century represented the pinnacle of civilisation and that the Boy Scouts were a “great innovation”, neither of which are fashionable opinions outside the offices of the Spectator. But there’s something inspiring and noble in this way of calling the Third Reich uncivilised. At around the same time I suppose Wodehouse must have been mocking Spode and his fascistic Black Shorts.

Distinguishing between genuine play and things that merely appear play-like is still important today. I’m grateful that, unlike Huizinga, I don’t have to think very hard about Nazis. But there are still large parts of my life that have been colonised by political and commercial interests who pretend to a kind of playful intimacy — “My Computer”, “the Big Conversation”, the kind of copywriting pioneered by Innocent — and it’s just as vital to call attention to the false nature of this ersatz playfulness.

Russell Davies suggests we need to steal other things from games than leaderboards:

…we’re going to encounter a bunch of crappy sorta-games foisted on us. Those rudimentary game schemes are going to be rolled out by everyone with a rewards card, CRM system, loyalty scheme or something that can be plotted on a graph. And they’re going to be no fun. They’re going to drive us all mad

Caroline McCarthy on “Social-media games: Badges or badgering?”

“Game mechanics,” as this sort of points-and-achievements gimmick is called, is tough to get right: Turning everything into a contest may grab some extra attention at first, but it can easily veer into the annoying

David Hayward at Gamasutra: “System Fatigue”

Mechanics and meta-game systems applied to everyday life are at risk of being so repetitive they never achieve any kind of worthwhile structure, let alone a peak.

Brad Hargreaves on “Cargo Cult Game Design“:

Ultimately, you’re better served by building something from the ground up. Start with the basic principles of psychology and game design and build them into your product at a fundamental level. Otherwise, it’s just an elaborate cargo cult ritual that mimics the process but fails to understand the underlying truths.

And there’s a really comprehensive round-up of critical responses to Jesse Schell’s talk (the one that set me off in the first place) from David Carlton here: “Critical Compilation: Jesse Schell, ‘Design outside the Box’“.

Really cheers me up to see so many people taking the time to respond thoughtfully: makes it easier to make the case that games are interesting not because of the technology or number-crunching, but because they let you play.

And the thing on the left is another thing I don’t have a name for, but it made a good dessert. Sesame donut with red bean sauce inside, just the right blend of sweet and savoury. I got these from the kitchen shop on Outram Road, but they’ve got a stall in the hawker centre that’s on my list now.

Jesse Schell should know better, actually: his book on game design is a fabulously sensitive journey through the complex and ephemeral things that make a game a game. Maybe I misunderstood his talk. But the thing that no-one’s saying, out of all the people who know better, is that games that depend solely on accumulating points are rubbish games. And there are lots of great games, games that inspire and transport, games that show you a diferent way of experiencing the world, that have nothing whatever to do with points. Points are for people with no imagination.

This is part of a wider tendency for people to overgeneralise when they talk about games, to take one part of it for the whole domain, to imagine that the part that grabs their attention most readily is the defining part. For a while now I’ve been talking and working with people in education who have an interest in games, usually because they see the way players devote their attention and focus to them and imagine that presenting their learning content in a game-like way will lead to that level of engagement being replicated. Frequently, it becomes apparent after a few minutes conversation that they think the game lives in the technology, and that as long as a screenshot looks game-y it’ll magically engage their students. They’re normally wrong, obviously, having never considered the structure of the experience, the careful thought that game designers (good ones) put in to keeping the level of challenge appropriate, or any of the other things that make games so much more than a mode of presentation. People who believe that assigning points to actions make an activity a game are making as large an error.

There are a few sources I can think of for the mistake. Firstly, it’s unavoidably true that points are frequently found in games, and it’s not unreasonable to think that they must be an important feature of games. Points are found in most early games, and when you’re working with a system as simple and limited as those early games, points are a pretty good reflection of what’s going on. There are only a few things to do, and usually one clear aim, and it’s easy to mimic a narrative by coding a repetitive mechanic, tweaking the difficulty and using points to provide a temporal structure (no points = “the beginning of time”, some points = “later”). Certainly there’s no room in a Pac-Man or Space Invaders cabinet for different maps, or new challenges. Points are good for keeping track of simple things, and when you don’t have many complex things they do fine. It’s noticeable, though, that there are fewer games released now that have the accumulation of points as a central mechanic.

The second root that springs to mind is the construction “to game”, in the sense of someone “gaming the system”. Huizinga offers a fascinating exploration of the etymology of play-related words like “game” in Homo Ludens, which makes clear that these words have a complex lineage, and the long history and central importance of our oldest parts of language can lead to misleading similarities. In short, where attributes are ranked numerically, people work to make themsleves appear higher in the ranking through actions that might not be what was being assessed. That is, they maniuplate their score: they game the system, in English. But, although this sense of “game” is related to the sense of “structured playful activity” via the card-tables and stock markets of renaissance Europe, it doesn’t actually mean the same thing. I have an idea that the association of this sense with scores, tables of achievement, ranking and so on makes it easier for people to elide the distinction and think they’re using the same word. But they aren’t, and a system that can be gamed is not necessarily a game. Metaphor is slippery, and hard to keep track of, and here I think it’s misled some people.

The third factor that occurs to me is our deep-rooted compulsive behaviour. People are good at behaving repetitively in search of some kind of chemical reward, whether it’s hammering mistakenly at a traffic-crossing button, or checking email again and again. Game designers are well-aware of this, of course, and make regular use of the principles of irregular reward that keep lab rats pressing buttons and hoping for sugared water: will there be a fuel dump there? Should I try walking into that wall? Using this sort of primal psychology in the service of the wider game seems more justifiable to me, somehow, than basing an entire game round it.

So none of these are so very important when considering actual games. What’s worrying, what makes it so vital that we clear this up now before it gets out of hand, is that there seems to be a wider enthusiasm for turning a lot of our online gardening into point-accumulation opportunities. People have noticed Xbox achievements; we’re familiar with the race to accumulate friends or followers on new online network tools; prototypical gaming forays into new forms of media (the first Facebook, or GPS, or AR games) tend to use the simplest possible game mechanics in the proof-of-concept stage. These seem to help to convince people of the supposedly increasingly playful nature of society, proof that games have won and that in the near future all our interactions will earn points. And it’s this that’s so worrying, this idea that it’s right our actions in the world should be quantified so thoroughly.

Play is dangerous and subversive. It’s a frivolous, unproductive, trivial waste of resources: these attitudes have been around for a long time (though perhaps not as long as play has). But the last hundred years of industrialisation and standardisation have made it even harder for activity that appears meaningless to be condoned, more difficult to sanction behaviour that seems not to be directed towards a particular goal, more important that effort be directed towards a clearly-defined outcome with economic value. Numbers are a big part of this. Nothing is usable, no information is meaningful, nothing can be recognised or acknowledged without it being quantifiable. Turning human interactions into opportunities to amass scores is just an extension of this way of thinking: ultimately, quantifying our relationships with people, or our driving habits, is something that serves advertisers much more than it serves us. It might be true that we’re finding more ways to award points for more of our activity, but this doesn’t mean that society is becoming more playful. It means that play is becoming more socialised.

Seeing the accumulation of points as the central, defining characteristic of games means we’ve taken the worst bits of games, the parts that we’ve nearly grown out of, the features that speak to the least human and most animal parts of us, and I don’t think we should do that. Computer games originally used points because they had to: with limited memory and little experience in designing games, it made sense to use points. Later, points were a way to reflect progress in a wider narrative, a way of quantifying progress that acted in the service of something larger. Now, it’s possible to design games that offer reward and track achievement through more subtle means than numbers. Chasing numbers is dehumanising and humiliating. Now computers have grown out of having to use scores to track our progress, shouldn’t we?

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’m expelled from school,’ said the boy between his sobs.

This was serious. People are not expelled for light offences.

‘Do you mind telling us what you’d done?’

‘I–I tore up a sheet of paper and threw it about in the playground,’ said the child, in the tone of one confessing an unutterable baseness. ‘You won’t talk to me any more now you know that,’ he added without looking up.

‘Was that all?’ asked Anthea.

‘It’s about enough,’ said the child; ‘and I’m expelled for the whole day!’

‘I don’t quite understand,’ said Anthea, gently. The boy lifted his face, rolled over, and sat up.

‘Why, whoever on earth are you?’ he said.

‘We’re strangers from a far country,’ said Anthea. ‘In our country it’s not a crime to leave a bit of paper about.’

‘It is here,’ said the child. ‘If grown-ups do it they’re fined. When we do it we’re expelled for the whole day.’

‘Well, but,’ said Robert, ‘that just means a day’s holiday.’

‘You MUST come from a long way off,’ said the little boy. ‘A holiday’s when you all have play and treats and jolliness, all of you together. On your expelled days no one’ll speak to you. Everyone sees you’re an Expelleder or you’d be in school.’

‘Suppose you were ill?’

‘Nobody is — hardly. If they are, of course they wear the badge, and everyone is kind to you. I know a boy that stole his sister’s illness badge and wore it when he was expelled for a day. HE got expelled for a week for that. It must be awful not to go to school for a week.’

‘Do you LIKE school, then?’ asked Robert incredulously.

‘Of course I do. It’s the loveliest place there is. I chose railways for my special subject this year, there are such splendid models and things, and now I shall be all behind because of that torn-up paper.’

‘You choose your own subject?’ asked Cyril.

‘Yes, of course. Where DID you come from? Don’t you know ANYTHING?’

‘No,’ said Jane definitely; ‘so you’d better tell us.’

‘Well, on Midsummer Day school breaks up and everything’s decorated with flowers, and you choose your special subject for next year. Of course you have to stick to it for a year at least. Then there are all your other subjects, of course, reading, and painting, and the rules of Citizenship.’

‘Good gracious!’ said Anthea.

‘Look here,’ said the child, jumping up, ‘it’s nearly four. The expelledness only lasts till then. Come home with me. Mother will tell you all about everything.’

‘Will your mother like you taking home strange children?’ asked Anthea.

‘I don’t understand,’ said the child, settling his leather belt over his honey-coloured smock and stepping out with hard little bare feet. ‘Come on.’

So they went.

The boy is named after Wells, “the great reformer”, who lived in the dark ages and argued for progress: their own age, with its sharp corners and infant deaths, so appalls their adult host that she is bodily evicted back to her own time, “where London is clean and beautiful, and the Thames runs clear and bright, and the green trees grow, and no one is afraid, or anxious, or in a hurry”.

When I read the book as a child, I remember noticing the way this section stood apart from the historic sections. The hint of back-to-nature romanticism of the boy’s bare feet sat oddly with the talk of Utopian future to someone raised on shiny metal futures, and the worthy nature of the “Citizenship” poetry seemed offputting. But I remember feeling very proud that someone thought enough of us to say a room in each house fit for a child’s needs was a basic necessity.

I’ve read Will Davies’ potlatch for a while, and always enjoyed his writing and the chance to engage with domains he knows much more about than I do. Catching up recently I enjoyed his reaction to the planned Westfield Mk II shopping centre, and the developers’ efforts to “harness that edgy, eclectic east London feel” through giving the artists and independent producers perceived as responsible for that edginess a central role in designing and filling the shopping centre. His piece highlights the absurdity of a mall co-opting the “messy, racially mixed, polluted, dangerous city street”, after a bit of a scoff at the surreality of putting Hackney bohemians next to Nandos. I enjoyed it: I recognised a shared response in his searching for ways to explain or understand the collision between mainstream corporate lifestyle provisioning and the real world.

But the things that seem to give rise to such tensions of authenticity and what looks like the co-opting of the ‘underground’ (or least a less visible) economy aren’t peculiar to Britain. When I arrived in Singapore from the UK, it took me a long time to understand that there was no irony or contradiction in having edgy independent outlets based in malls owned by pan-Asian conglomerates, except that generated by my own Eurocentric ideas about the correct places to situate particular ways of selling things. From the tone of the piece, Will might be surprised to learn (as I was) that there are plenty of hip young things here who “dream of one day draping antique suits and second hand books across the window of their own glass box”, and around Orchard Road it wouldn’t take you too long to find a pastiche of “anti-corporate urbanism”. I’m writing this in an educational establishment which has stalls available in the public foyer for those students who want to become ‘youthepreneurs’: perhaps that’s some indication that here the imaginary line between ‘real’ and ‘commercial’, the distinction between authentically hip and tragically imitative is blurred in ways that seem contradictory to European sensibilities. (Perhaps it never really existed – perhaps it was just us being embarassed about being in trade.)

Regardless, there’s a kind of honesty to the way ‘subculture’ is sold in airconditioned malls here that I missed when I lived in Dalston six years ago. The bus along the Kingsland Road to Liverpool Street took me past any number of independent shops working hard to avoid the impression that anything inside was associated with anything as crass and mainstream as commerce. The shops in the Cathay have copied their anti-shopping presentation, but by living inside a mall there’s no deceit or pretence. They have nice things and will exchange them for your money. That seems more authentic an approach than pretending your edgy east London isn’t lifted from an incomplete impression of New York in the seventies, or trying to pass Hoxton off as a sort of new media version of Berlin.

This isn’t to contradict or challenge Will, really, just to note that the notions of public space and urbanity that operate in his discussion seem tightly coupled to a particular place, and that the militia marshalled at the head of the piece are out of their jurisdiction in these parts. Globalisation might happen everywhere, but the frames used to understand it are always local.

(Related: I enjoyed this interesting paper on one of Singapore’s first malls: Chii, Wong Yunn and Lin, Tan Kar (2004) ‘Emergence of a cosmopolitan space for culture and consumption: the new world amusement park-Singapore (1923-70) in the inter-war years’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 5:2, 279 — 304)