I will keep this site here until WordPress decide to get rid of it, but I will not be updating it anymore.

Word.

Press.

Peace,

John Clark

Your view on yourself:

Other people find you very interesting, but you are really hiding your true self. Your friends love you because you are a good listener. They’ll probably still love you if you learn to be yourself with them.

The type of girlfriend/boyfriend you are looking for:

You are a true romantic. When you are in love, you will do anything and everything to keep your love true.

Your readiness to commit to a relationship:

You are ready to commit as soon as you meet the right person. And you believe you will pretty much know as soon as you might that person.

The seriousness of your love:

Your have very sensible tactics when approaching the opposite sex. In many ways people find your straightforwardness attractive, so you will find yourself with plenty of dates.

Your views on education

You may not like to study but you have many practical ideas. You listen to your own instincts and tend to follow your heart, so you will probably end up with an unusual job.

The right job for you:

You’re a practical person and will choose a secure job with a steady income. Knowing what you like to do is important. Find a regular job doing just that and you’ll be set for life.

How do you view success:

You are afraid of failure and scared to have a go at the career you would like to have in case you don’t succeed. Don’t give up when you haven’t yet even started! Be courageous.

What are you most afraid of:

You are concerned about your image and the way others see you. This means that you try very hard to be accepted by other people. It’s time for you to believe in who you are, not what you wear.

Who is your true self:

You are mature, reasonable, honest and give good advice. People ask for your comments on all sorts of different issues. Sometimes you might find yourself in a dilemma when trapped with a problem, which your heart rather than your head needs to solve.

IMAGINE the happy, idyllic world that the Australian censorship board wants us to live in.

The sun beats down upon rolling green hills where children of all creeds and nations link arms and skip merrily through the daisies, singing their simple innocent songs of joy.

Not a single confrontational thought crosses these children’s minds until the moment they turn 15, when they are wrapped in bin liners to cover their shameful pubescent bodies and dropped off a bridge.

It’s a lovely ideal. It’s also totally unlike the world in which we actually live.

Since there are only two people left in the country who think Australia doesn’t need an R18+ rating for games – those being South Australian Attorney General Michael Atkinson and the sock puppet on his hand –

Instead, I want to examine the issue from the artistic side of things. The question the ratings debate raises is this – creative freedom aside, does toning down adult themes in certain games make us at all culturally poorer?

At first glance, the answer is “not really”. When you’re talking about adult themes in games, you usually mean buckets of blood, bodily trauma and sweaty bosoms straining against alarmingly-lightweight armour. And there are few games in which such things are an immovable part of the message the game is trying to bring across.

Take something like the surreal and compelling Wii title No More Heroes. The US version featured dying enemies squirting out hilariously copious amounts of blood, while the censors insisted that the local version show them bursting into perfectly acceptable black ashes. At one point a woman being decapitated by a grenade became a woman being killed by having her face blackened, Loony Toons-style.

If you try to oppose changes such as these you have to argue that gore is essential to the intended experience, which isn’t the case and makes you come across as slightly psychotic. Let the censors have their petty moment of fuss – I hope their victory feels satisfying from their little temple of total bloody irrelevance on the moon.

But the refusal of classification for Silent Hill: Homecoming last month opens up a whole new can of giant carnivorous plague worms. Silent Hill is a horror series, and one of the best of its kind at that. Asking for a horror game to tone itself down for the kiddies is like sending an order of spaghetti back to the kitchen and asking that it be made less Italian.

Insofar as art can be said to have any definitive purpose, it exists to explore human emotions. One of those is fear. It’s one of the big ones, too – one of the old hands, still serving us as well today as it did thousands of years ago when Smilodons were casting shadows on the local cave wall.

Horror as a genre of art exists for the same reason as roller coasters and the terrorist watch list – because for the most part modern society is so stable and orderly and boring that the occasional artificial scare is what we need to make us feel alive.

Evoking fear is, in itself, an art form – and nothing in the entire history of storytelling has explored it better than video games.

That sounds like a pretty bold claim, but I genuinely believe it. Books can never be as unnerving as visual-based mediums because actually seeing a ghost always trumps reading the word “boo” – no matter how hard you embolden the text.

Horror movies are better, but very rarely advance beyond having the monster jump out on the business end of an orchestral sting. Even then a lot of them seem to be populated by the kind of heroes with such poor self-preservation instincts that you end up rooting for Jason just to get it over with.

In video games, the breaking down of the barrier between audience and protagonist creates an ideal environment to explore the science of fear.

Silent Hill 2, the pre-pre-prequel to Silent Hill Homecoming, is still my favourite horror experience of all time, in any medium. It doesn’t rely on clichéd jump-out scares, but instead creates a masterfully-sculpted atmosphere of creeping anxiety that grabs you by the throat and never lets go.

At the very start of the game, I was guiding the main character James Sunderland along a forest path towards the titular haunted town. For most of the way all was silent but for an oppressive background hum and the crunch of gravel under my feet. And then, as I walked, I heard a second set of footprints start up, keeping time with mine but clearly separate. I stopped. The other footsteps also stopped. I looked behind me, but couldn’t see further than ten feet into the fog. There didn’t seem to be anybody around. I continued walking and after a while the other footfalls started up again. And was it just my imagination, but were they a little louder than before?

It would be another twenty or so minutes before I encountered the first monster, but I was already on the edge of my seat – driven half-mad by the expectations and the subtle chipping away of my nerves.

James Sunderland might have had the combat skills of a prune and the voice acting of another prune, but the passive hostility of the environment coupled with the sense of “we’re in this together” caused me to develop a rapport and affection for him greater than any I’ve had for a character in a film or a book and probably any other video game.

Of course, that’s what made the endgame revelations about his past such a beautifully executed kick to the stomach.

You could argue that games don’t need to include gore to be this effectively scary, but that’s missing the point. It’s not just gore that makes this sort of thing unsuitable for children.

Consider how The Dark Knight got away with a rating of PG-13 in the US by skilfully not showing any blood. Does that make it any more suitable for children? Or will there be a generation of youngsters haunted by visions of white-faced sadists brandishing pencils? It’s a case of following the letter rather than the spirit of the law.

Silent Hill 2 isn’t just my favourite story-based video game – I’d go as far to say that I’ve never been affected as much by a story in any other medium. And it would never have worked as a film, as the creators of the Silent Hill movie adaptation deftly demonstrated.

If we willingly delude ourselves that video games are just for children and banish everything beastly and unwholesome, we miss out on something important. We miss out on a vital branch of art – the art of the grotesque, the unnerving, the terrifying.

With video games, this kind of art has an opportunity to grow in ways it never could before. Why shackle it?

Ben Croshaw is a video game journalist and independent game developer. He writes for PC Gamer, Hyper and is the star of The Escapist’s Zero Punctuation series.

Anyway, link is here and content is below.

It all uses bandwidth. It all clogs up the intertubes. And its just not needed.

Sure, create what you want. Sure, even put it up on your blog that no one reads. But don’t advertise or present it as something for everyone else. If you wish to do so, design it to be like that from the beginning or at least adapt it so that things like Twitter’s current scaling issues don’t happen to you and don’t fuck us up.

Content is great. User-Created content, also great. Just…. I dunno, some kind of regulation would be lovely, because otherwise the internet, with its Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Reddit, Slashdot, Stumbleupon and its billions of blogs will turn into a giant version of Digg, where people put things up and if you have enough friends to vote for you, you become famous. If not, then you don’t, no matter the quality of your work.

I swear to God, if I wake up one morning and I see:

as my home page, I am going to eat all of your souls personally.

PERSONALLY.

I was dragged to see Wall-E last night. Now, objective quality of that film and possible anti-corporate agenda aside, here’s a small plot synopsis:

One or more lovable protagonists have existed for some time in a stable but fundamentally flawed routine, which is shaken up by the introduction of a foreign entity, usually another character, around whom attitudes are initially hostile. Attempts to deal with this character eventually lead to the protagonist(s) discovering a new, unfamiliar world, and in doing so discover the nature of the fundamental flaw in their routine. Villains are usually introduced or only become truly villainous from around the mid-point or quite late into the film. Along the way the heroes enlist the help of various lesser characters with clearly definable quirks and at one point reluctantly enter a high-speed chase. The villain is generally finally defeated with surprising ease, and everything concludes in an emotionally manipulative ending in which routine is restored with the fundamental flaw excised.

Now, consider how many Pixar movies that could be describing. Consider it, bitches.

Also, got myself a girlfriend too. Her name is Estee and she goes to film school with me. That picture is her, taken with the iPhone.

I’ll update some more soon.