The Gaming Media Awards: Best of Brit-ish.

The twelvethty-summeth Gaming Media Awards are upon us, a time to celebrate the best of British writing talents and also people who have something to do with magazines and blogs and podcasts and those little malformed sentences pertaining to the sandwich someone you only vaguely know just enjoyed, or didn’t enjoy, and here’s a picture of it in blurry, squiffy colours.

And far be it for me to argue with the list of nominees, all of whom seem drawn from my very own Twitter list except for that one guy I unfollowed even though his retweeted bile shows up in my feed all the blasted time. Fuck that guy. I mean, I’m sure he’s nice and if you’re on board the good ship Constant Venomous Negativity then more power to you--or as we say on the Seven Seas, grab an oar and put your back into it.

But the disparity here, this “I like everyone who’s been nominated except for you; you I don’t like” is a good way of summing up what the GMAs are, or have become, or always were and always will be. As perspicacious as it was of me to assemble such a pool of pleasant, interesting and downright talented individuals I’m not all-seeing. Even just the British contingent of Internet gaming professionals is massive, and the names on the GMA shortlist--names we recognise, names we’ve seen before--are interrelated and incestuous. I’d call it a Boys Club if the phrase wasn’t loaded with connotations. And while the writers, podcasters, video-makers and tweeters are all very deserving (yes, even that guy) that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few more sadly edged to the roadside, or perhaps stood outside the Dickensian window, nose pressed to the pane watching those inside feast on roast goose and free bubbly.

I feel bad for them. I want them to be nominated as well. They deserve it, G-- damn it. For their videos are just as good, their podcasts perhaps even better, their words are written finesse and their coats are sleek and glossy, and catch the light when they jump the dear little walls and scamper through the dear little tunnels of the Best In Breed assault course in the GMA arena. And while they mightn’t care (or maybe they do; who can fathom the mind of a games writer?) leaving them in a ditch while their friends and workmates embark on this glorious road trip to recognition seems as cruel as having all but one of them on my Twitter list, and then drawing attention to this fact.

It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. But if you read this morning’s list of GMA nominees and, before you put on your game face, before you nodded grim understanding and offered a smattering of applause to the guy or gal opposite who, at his or her desk, was already having his or her head fitted for a crown that says “BEST AT GAMES” on it and has sparklers on it also; if before that moment you felt a slight stirring, a slight sinking, a slight disappointment deep inside then know that hey, pal, I’ve got your back bro. You were overlooked, sure, and it sucks. But you’re absolutely right: you did deserve a nomination.

And even though you didn’t get one, at least you’re on my Twitter list. That’s gotta be some consolation, right?

No, hey, don’t cry. Why are you crying? Please don’t cry.

Game Saved: Rez

It’s nineteen-ninety something--two or three, I think--and I have these glasses.

This is important.

-- CYBERDELIA MUSIC --

They’re made from lurid dayglo cardboard and they came with a video cassette. The video’s called ‘VR Cyberdelia’. It’s a music video, only not the kind they play on Top of the Pops, or the ITV Chart Show. It’s rave music, the sound of the underground, with spaced-out, trippy visuals. It’s not as hard or as good as some of the stuff I like, but the visuals, the sights accompanying the sounds . . .

It’s MTV on acid.

On something, anyhow. Screensavers gone wild. Computer generated imagery flashing subliminal Spectrum loading screens and Amiga demo disks mashed together with soothing waves of plasma and crystalline reflections. It’s like someone pointed the camera lens beyond our physical dimensions and now, in fragments of colours the human eye can see if not comprehend, we can watch the vibrations that tickle our inner ear, sound-waves playing in their own environment, as surely and as clearly as if David Attenborough was narrating the footage.

But those  cardboard glasses, those 3D-looking glasses are in fact 5D, 7D or more-D. Omnidimensional glasses that expand your senses as they expand your mind.

In reality they lenses are prismatic, or some such. They make abundant lens flare, conjure fireworks from light fixtures, and when you slot VR Cyberdelia into your VCR they make TVs appear in your darkened room, eight new screens surrounding one that really exists in a dazzling halo, reflecting its graphics in all colours of every rainbow.

And it’s cool. To a techno kid like me it’s really cool, and I’ll watch that cassette so many times it wears thin and corrupts. Every glitch is like a cat’s lives, refracted nine times over.

-- MUSIC STOPS --

And then . . .

-- REZ MUSIC --

It’s many years later, and onto the nascent and mewling Internet is released footage of a Sega game people claim will change everything.

It’s called The K-Project--K for Kandinsky, the abstract painter whose art was a physical representation of music, of sound. The game is synesthetic, blending sound and visuals, one reflecting the other. Music triggers lightshows, lightshows trigger music. Actions in the gameworld prompt instruments and musical motifs. How it works isn’t entirely clear; it’s a shooter of some kind, but the RealVideos are blurry, indistinct. There’s nothing to latch upon, no characters or designs. It’s hard to tell what’s going on, as abstract as anything Kandinsky painted.

And I watch the videos too often, and they never wear through. Rumour has it The K-Project will have a different name by the time it’s complete and reaches British shores: a name more in line with the dance music culture I adore, that the K-Project sucks in and spits in hallucinatory rainbows.

The rumours prove correct. When released, the game is called Rez.

-- FEAR IS THE MIND KILLER --

I connect the Dreamcast to my sound system. It’s stereo; the cables are white and red. The room fills with swirling ambience, the ticking of one menu option moving to the next . . . but it’s not enough. The controller, rattling with Madkatz Force Pack vibration throbs, but it’s still not enough.

I dim the lights and put on the glasses.

-- REZ AREA 4 --

Squashed between a floor of bass sound and a wall of colour I’m the digital Indiana Jones delving intrepid into the system. Viruses fall with a wave of my hand; I’m sat in lotus position in my protective bubble, encircled by code like a hamster in a utoplastic ball running Straylight. Walls shimmer and crack, the ground rises and falls, mechano-organic lightships puffed on solar winds and solid state tides blot the sky with missiles, and every payload, every stroke and potential flatline is spotted, targeted, and dealt with.

Because I’m in the zone. Heart beating to the bass kick, eyes drying, dusty, fixed to the phantom screens, I’m sat cross-legged as my avatar ascends to the next form: a pulsating, spherical sound wave. From log-in through decryptions, maximum lock-on, maximum hitcount, racking up a high score above and beneath a grid the world of Tron can only dream of. The landscape mutates; it contorts as I melt ICE and unspool code. Towering wormlike monstrosities fire laser beams, curled, surrounded by nautili; everything’s a spiral, a Mandelbrot nightmare, except me, the Hacker, actual intelligence in an artificial world.

Things get serious in Area Five. It’s late--late enough for the neighbours to complain--but I’m too deep into the system to quit. I spin and dive into digital seas, and when I break the surface the sky opens in peach-gold sunset, soon darkened by a viral ship big as an Imperial Star Destroyer. It appears and falls gracefully over. It’s surely too big to move in such a way, but here in the bowels of the system physics operate to the whims of the incarcerated AI. The ship is exactly as heavy as it needs to be, and so it drifts with the ease of a feather.

The music flourishes, that Californian Soul. The ship becomes a dark tower choking space with viral craft. My omega beams move at sharp angles, hunting and seeking and ultimately destroying as I’m taken on a brief tour through history. This is the Earth that was, the game seems to say, and how it came to be.

And this is how things will be from here on in. Life is an aberration, or if not that, a facilitator, existing only to create new virtual worlds in which the next evolutionary link might flourish.

All this and more it tells me as holographic forests grow, fall, and are disassembled.

Security breached. Data analysation 100%.

Past metal falcons with wings outspread and far above the Earth within, every item collected, every enemy appearing only to dissolve in fire. I evolve into 2001’s star child, the ultimate human form, and enter into our final confrontation.

It’s Earth versus the almighty artificial intelligence.

My presence unwanted. Why am I here? What do I want? Our conflict is like a greatest hits compilation of our recent, meaningless skirmishes. Enemy bosses reappear as coarse reconstructions of their former selves. Overextending itself, the system has fractured.

I repel them and plunge deep into the core as some forgotten processor or memory chip begs:

Save me.

I claw back fragments, exorcise the virus and resurrect the ghost in the machine. She--undoubtedly ‘she’--turns to face the dawning sun, reaches for it, examines her half-formed hands, her half-formed form.

Black diamonds give chase, charging like current along an electric fence that seperates us. They open fire, desperately ramming into me, and I unleash my Overdrive, smartbombing them from the sky to claim the polygons scattered far below. They’re final pieces that might complete. They’re the final pieces that will give her life.

In that moment I am not sat on a carpet in a lounge in the South-West of England. I am not wearing cardboard glasses. My legs are neither cramping nor tingling with pins and needles. I do not look ridiculous wearing a relic from the days of VJs and 2 Unlimited.

Her skin is silicon and light. In her hands are cupped the beating wings of a thousand pink butterflies, which she sets free to other networks. She never thanks me--the music, the colour, the joy of it all is thanks enough. And as the game’s eye wanders from her expression and out to the butterflies dancing away from dawn I hear their colour, I see their joy, I feel the music . . .

I remember to breathe.

(This is important)

And mission accomplished, I log out.

-- FEAR IS THE MIND KILLER --

Game Saved: ICO

This is Game Saved. I’m Daniel Ness.

(Music: Castle in the Mists)

Imagine a windmill, fins spinning in the breeze, near a pond, in a castle, in a land far away.

It’s respite for weary travellers and we’ve travelled so far. We found a girl in a cage and rescued her, because that’s what we do when finding princesses imprisoned in castles. We fought shadow creatures with sticks, and lit fires with other sticks which we held like torches lighting the darkness and our way.

We ran through courtyards, under trees and over grass. And the sunlight, when it shines, is dappled by high leaves swaying in the wind that stirs the mill, and her dress, and our hair.

And the walls we’ve climbed support towers high above us; we ran along them stopping sharp at their edges. The ground below was lost beneath mists like a sea. If we fell now, we’d fall forever.

Has ground ever seemed harder? Has it ever flown to meet us so fast? There are no cartoon final moments after hitting that ground; no standing cross-eyed, no holding banners that read: that’s all folks. There are only long falls and sudden stops, and broken bodies, and games over.

So when we come to the bridge with the princess still holding our hand, and it breaks in the middle separating us, we know we should run. We know what’s down there. We’ve teetered on the brink of falling so many times and every time pulled away, treading carefully back from the edge. Every ladder, we’ve approached with caution; every rope we’ve swung on with care.

And every step of the way we took her with us. Trailing two steps behind, we held her hand and called her on. With the princess at our side the doors that blocked our path opened: if we hurried through them, we might escape.

But the bridge opens and the gap grows wide, and we reach for each other, arms stretched, fingers fumbling through air.

We needn’t turn back for her but we do so all the same. Faced with freedom we run toward death, toward the edge, toward her.

And we jump. And we slip. And we fall from a bridge, in a castle in the mist, over a lake, in a land far away.

Gamer Saved: Empty Slot

In 2012 I decided to start a podcast.

It was a foolish idea coming at a foolish time. The videogames market was saturated with podcasts, many following a familiar, tired execution: news, what the presenters had been playing, what they were looking forward to, and letters from their listeners. Threading these beads together was banter, a factor wholly dependant on the charisma and interaction of the hosts. The best podcasts made this an artform. Though it’s presented by four game writers Regular Features rarely mentions gaming at all. Neither does it rely upon a tired formula. It’s carried by wit, irreverence, spontaneity, and is a stronger product for it.

Few podcasts scale such heights, or even attempt to. Instead, they act as the recorded minutes of social gatherings. Once a week, gamers talk about what they’ve been playing, at the end of which a recording is uploaded to iTunes. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I decided if I was to make a show I didn’t want it to be another formulaic ‘bantz’ fest, lost in the crowd.

At around the same time Roman Mars launched a campaign to fund the next season of 99 Percent Invisible. 99 Percent Invisible is a shortform podcast about design that packs research, interviews, professional production and, yes, the odd moment of banter into ten-to-twenty minutes of the very best podcasting has to offer.

I’d always thought of it as one of the Internet’s best kept secrets, but Mars’s Kickstarter campaign proved me wrong. Fans donated in their thousands, raising its profile and making the third season stronger, more polished. Season three is littered with field reports from a wide roster of co-presenters, something the show had hitherto been lacking. Thanks to its fans Roman Mars’s small, personal podcast now spoke with the voice of thousands who were passionate or otherwise interested in design.

Another podcast in ascendence at that time, produced by a sometime contributor to 99 Percent Invisible, was Nate DiMeo’s The Memory Palace. Produced intermittently, it would soon find itself produced regularly for the Maximum Fun Network, the independent production organisation behind shows such as Judge John Hodgeman, RISK! and My Brother, My Brother and Me.

In The Memory Palace, DiMeo describes small, often forgotten stories from history in evocative and haunting detail. There are many fine history podcasts out there--Hardcore History and BackStory come to mind--but none are so vivid, so atmospheric, so magical as The Memory Palace. Whimsical and heart-wrenching, whether describing the hanging of a rogue circus elephant or the scammer who wormed his way into New York nobility, it is always essential listening.

And that’s what I wanted: a small show about the fun and wonder in games. I wanted it to conjure in my audience what it’s like to win or to lose and have a great time either way, to lose yourself in fantastic landscapes, to fret over decisions that in the real world matter not, to care about code and character, the moving of a piece or the roll of a die. What keeps us at a table, playing cards? What holds us in front of a screen, motionless bar the flicking of our thumbs?

All this and more I wanted to convey, in a short form podcast easily consumed on the way to or from work. The thrill of opening a new console. Staying up at E3, watching keynotes overnight. The joy--and perhaps I’m dating myself here--of standing in front of an arcade machine, watching the attract mode and pretending to be playing.

And if stories from past and present weren’t good enough, there was always the exhilarating march of technology. Who knows what gaming will be ten years from today? When I had the idea for this podcast I hadn’t heard of the Oculus Rift. But now, when I think of the future, I imagine gamers in VR headsets, lost in other worlds like kids in an arcade.

I called the show Game Saved. Hardly the most distinctive of titles, but there was something nostalgic about it, something fond.

After writing a number of scripts and recording a couple episodes, it fell by the wayside. Reactions were positive--and I thank those who offered advice--but it seemed gamers were uninterested in short form podcasts. A few months later Joe Martin would produce Unlimited Hyperbole, a short and nontraditional podcast about gaming. I don’t know how big a success it’s been, but I’m sure however many listeners it’s had, it isn’t nearly enough.

In the past year I’ve lost much of my passion for gaming. It’s a sad thing, to lose part of one’s self in such a way. Hopefully one day it will again find me.

Until then, here are the scripts for Game Saved. They were written to be spoken aloud, and some contain production directions, prompts for sound effects, beats of silence and such. By turns nostalgic, hopeful and bittersweet, they yearn for how things once were, how things might one day be, for other times and other days, for the probable, the actual, and the impossible.

And that, I think, is as fine way of summing up gaming as any.