Funny women

Who do you think is funny? Or, and this will give you the real answer, who have you known, who you have found funny? It was this kind of questioning that led me to a surprising conclusion, given the received wisdom on the matter. Almost everyone I’ve met in my life, who I’ve found really funny, has been female.

My dad has quite a good line in dad jokes, but it was mum who wrote rhyming comedy pantomimes for the kids to entertain the extended family with every year. The boys I went to school with had a cocky nerve, but when they shouted “Fuck you!”, it was the female teachers who snapped back “Huh! You’d have a job”. When I think of funny people I think of teachers (mainly female). I think of the aunties who taught me practical jokes.

I think of My Naughty Little Sister and Marmalade Atkinson. I think of my primary school friend Christina telling me those years were “if not the best, certainly the funniest” of her life. Of Sophie, whose letters came in envelopes covered in notes for the postman that made me cry with laughter. Of Sarah, who wore “baggy men’s shirts” and felt it essential to point out “the shirts are baggy, not the men”. Of Gayle, who made me tapes I wish I still had. Of Katie and Lucy and Polly and Helen and Sarah and Jo.

But the funniest person I’ve ever met was a barista I once worked with called Becky.

What is a story?

Stories aren’t just a way of teaching a lesson. They’re a presumptious connection between scattered dots that, in themselves, don’t necessarily have anything to say. A story is an angle. It’s formed out of exclusion – it’s a pattern made from a series of closed doors. And stories are having a bit of a moment.

First there was James’s audacious Baron Munchausen game. Then there were all those Enemy of Chaos interview questions I found myself confronting – questions about meta-fiction and the future of storytelling, which I just hadn’t seen coming at all. The subject came up a lot at Playful, most interestingly, I think, in the shape of Duncan’s Fictive Worlds theory. And I’ve been invited to all sorts of story-related things since doing the book, often by shining intellectual benefactors such as Peter. There’s even a whole conference about storytelling coming up later this month. It feels like everyone is suddenly talking about stories. But why are stories important? What are they, anyway? And can we trust them?

Writing, feeling, gaming

I’m quite keen on the idea that one should avoid aiming to be ‘a writer’. It makes no more sense than dreaming of being ‘a speaker’. Partly I suspect those with ill-defined romantic notions of anything are likely not to be very good at it; we’re drawn to ideas and people who represent what’s lacking in ourselves. But also it seems that writing for its own sake is tremendously self-indulgent, despite the internet’s overwhelming propaganda to the contrary. People who want to write, without wanting to write about anything, concern me because I know myself how seductive the illusion of creation fostered by the writing process is. We are all writers, aren’t we. So doing it for a living feels within the grasp of anyone who can string a sentence together. This mysterious profession happens behind closed doors – it’s vastly flattering, because it promises a personal deal: one equally valid writer per human life. The writer within us is already there – it is us, it must be, and a terrible clever and glamorous version of us at that.

Funny games

The author, journo, gamer and all-round good geek Naomi Alderman wrote about humorous games in her Guardian column this week. She says that funny video games are the ones that stand out in the memories of gamers. I’d add that these are the ones non-gamers remember too.

More than meets the eye

These days the phrase is associated with everything from Transformers to Napalm Death. But I remember the very first time I heard it, because it was written on a poster above my bed, and I didn’t know what it meant. I think I found the idea of anything ‘meeting’ my eye a bit unsettling. The poster was an advert for (I think) IBM – a picture of a large wooden horse taken on a thermal imaging camera, filled with soldiers. Of course, I didn’t know what thermal imaging was then; I barely know now. But it was fuzzy and colourful and involved a horse, so of course I enjoyed it. Even if it was a bit military. I think about that poster sometimes. What an odd, yet ideal, choice it was for a little girl’s bedroom. The cleverness of the idea. And how my memory of it sums up so much about the early 80s – the idealism and paranoia about technology, the make-do mindset and imagination that could turn free promotional posters into kids’ wall art. I’d like to see that poster again. Just to prove to myself it was real.

The hero’s journey

I might do a proper blog post about Pan’s Labrynth, which I watched for the first time yesterday, but for now I thought this piece on overthinkingit.com was very interesting. It begins with an outline of the structure of legends – the particular formats of of “boy quests” and “girl quests”. I was struck by how much my book Enemy of Chaos (played down the ‘correct’ route) conforms to the format of the boy quest, obviously without me consciously planning it like that. Or indeed planning it in any real sense at all. Spoilers of Pan’s and EOC over the turn!

Enemy of Chaos – structure reviewed

If there’s one thing that has surprised me about doing EOC (and it shouldn’t have), it’s how interested people have been in the game structure of the book. I’ve had more questions and comments about the format than anything else. Most who’ve read it will have worked out that I was much more interested in jokes and funny scenarios than apeing the Fighting Fantasy game format precisely (as, for instance, The Regional Accounts Director of Firetop Mountain). And as this blog has tried to show, the response to the ideas and jokes has been pretty good so far.

So finding this today was interesting.

Wizards of the Coast interview “I like to think it’s for the middle-aged man in all of us”

As I mentioned in a recent post, I was asked to do an email interview with Wizards of the Coast for their website. It was fun and a privilege to do, I love thinking about these things (as you can probably tell) so I’m very pleased to see it’s now up.

Read me saying things like “My encounter box is full of potential—I’ve met an extraordinary range of talented people recently, and I can honestly say I have hardly wanted to fight any of them,” and explaining Fighting Fantasy to the US audience, alongside some nice monstery illustrations here.

The language barrier

Interesting Charlie Brooker piece about the language of games, though I’m not 100% clear on the point he was making.

“Veteran players have years of experience. We’re schooled in the way games work. It’s as if we have learned a new man-made language, like Esperanto. And games are the equivalent of Esperanto-language movies – except they’re better than movies. They’re engrossing and exciting, playful and challenging, constantly evolving, constantly surprising.”

I think the language thing is true and it’s a problem, which is why I like the idea of using languages everyone’s familiar with to make better fresher games that people immediately, intuitively understand – e.g. new kinds of games informed by webby interfaces.

I’m also reminded of some stuff Adam Curtis was telling us on Shift Run Stop about how we’ve become infantilised as a culture, and in the face of mass despair, there’s a sense of “Well, if we can’t really change anything, why don’t we just play?” And that although he had sympathy for this perspective, it is another symptom of the era of “decadence in the old fashioned sense of the word” that he believes we’re entering now.

Playing in time

There are games that exist outside of time, games that know the shape of a block of time and can be dropped through it like a cookie cutter, and games that only run once, through ‘real’ time, and can never be repeated. All of these relationships with time interest me although you wouldn’t know it from Enemy of Chaos, a game that doesn’t really care for time but is all about the endings. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about, and something that keeps coming up. We had Russell Davies on the podcast that I make with Roo Reynolds recently. He was talking about how Snakes and Ladders is actually a weighted game – not a random one as you might assume – and that there could easily be different versions with different tunings of difficulty. You could buy a version tailored to longer lasting, more pessimistic gameplay. Or you could go for a shorter, easily winnable, ladder-heavy one.