08

May

Writing Dark for Young People

I’m in the middle of writing a play which may or may not involve the death of young people. I’m trying to decide. It’s a tough call. I’m wary of making the show too light or too dark. The play, in short, is suffering from an identity crisis.

But darkness in young adult literature and entertainment isn’t exactly a novelty, in fact, it’s the norm. Somewhere between 11 and 13, young readers and consumers go from wacky care-free colourful adventures to serious encounters with death and doom. The Hunger Games pits a group of young people together in a fight to the death. Divergent has a small group of young people fighting for survival under a fascist dystopian government. Harry Potter is about spells and friendship, but also how we overcome grief and the death of those closest to us. The Fault in Our Stars has a host of main characters all suffering from terminal cancer.

I would argue, in fact, (and I’m not saying this is wrong), that young adult literature and stories are more darker than a lot of adult content. In adult books and films, death can be meaningless – innocent passer-bys killed in an explosion that was narrowly escaped by our hero, or shallow thugs who suffer ostensibly justified horrific deaths. In young adult literature, death means something. Every fallen character leaves ripples in the story, and against the main group of characters. It drips in meaning.

So that’s why I’m a little uncertain about playing with death for this audience. Death is handy to writers. It raises the stakes to the highest level. Characters fighting for their lives is way more exciting than characters fighting for…well, just about anything else, actually. So it’s kind of hard to avoid. A death easily written for an adult audience is more hesitantly created for a younger crowd. You’re always creating under a cloud of ‘responsibility’ for young people. Or at least, I am. As if your words mean more, as if younger people are any more or less resilient than adults.

Adults are reading more and more young adult fiction, of course, further complicating matters. Young adult fiction is an invention of the last century, as well. I can only presume that parents took their six year olds to see ‘Oedipus’ back in the day.

The Young Adult Renaissance is a welcome one. The popcorn but meaningful stories that are being created are rich with fun and morals.

If anybody needs me, I’ll be deciding whether to kill some teenagers.

14 days ago Short URL Comments

publishing/books/theatre

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01

May

Shame and Brenè Brown

Two months ago a colleague sent the two TED talks below to me and I spent a short morning tea break watching them. A fortnight later, I’d devoured Brenè Brown’s first book on shame, and will soon take to her second.

Too often, I find so many of us suffer from vulnerability hangovers – a space of negativity and inner-shaming when we reveal something a little too close to the bone. It may be a sacred memory, or a flirtatious smile, or something as innocent as a fart joke. Whatever it is, the wrath of self-hatred that can follow a brief release of vulnerability can be deeply crippling and powerful. I suffer from these a lot. I know a bunch of people who do. Barely a day goes by where I don’t have some moment of desperate self-punishment.

Why is shame and self-hatred so prevalent in Western society? Why is it so powerful? How do we perpetuate it? How do we live it with it? The questions are fascinating and reap complex answers. It’s an endless search that has meant a pleasing metaxis of some of my favourite non-fiction ramblings: self-improvement, spirituality, psychology and neuroscience.

I’m glad to be having this conversation with a few colleagues right now, and I thought it was worth sharing here too. Grab a cup of tea and have a watch.

21 days ago Short URL Comments

personal/publishing/books/spirituality

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30

Apr

Tomb Raider: Rebooted, re-played, reviewed

If you go back about thirteen years ago into this gangly writer’s even ganglier adolescence, chances are you would’ve found me or one of my brothers strapped to an original Playstation with a controller in our sweaty hands (attached to the console by a a wire) swearing at each other and yelling in frustration as we tried to find the right fucking sequence of the fucking levers to light the fucking torch to get the fucking relic in one of the original Tomb Raider games. To be honest, we loved every second of it.

The incorrect assumptions outsiders often make about Tomb Raider is that the majority of the franchise’s success is due to the occasionally mis-proportioned female lead character. While this argument holds more water now (her breasts ironically hold less), it’s difficult to argue that any teenager could be attracted to a woman made out of poorly rendered polygons. Then again, the wonders of a thirteen year old’s imagination never cease to amaze. Although sex in video games isn’t exactly rare…

Tomb Raider is a success because the developers managed to release a competent string of thrilling, well-defined games that presented a solid mix of third-person shooter and brain-fizzing puzzler. The first five, all for the very first Playstation: Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider II, Tomb Raider III, Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation and Tomb Raider: Chronicles were all consistently great games. I struggle to think of another video game franchise that has made it to five games and managed to keep their quality anywhere near as high.

But the second Playstation and the era of blockbuster gaming, in part assisted by Tomb Raider‘s record-breaking success, offered less convincing outings for Lara Croft. A promising popcorn movie and an awful sequel meant that it was hard to imagine Lara had a future. Luckily, game developers are never reluctant to ever let any franchise ever die. Ever.

Ever.

The latest Tomb Raider is a return to the franchise’s glory days. There’s little that has stayed the same. The basic game structure and form: puzzler and third-person shooter, are there. Everything else is different. Lara is young, there are RPG-lite elements, she travels with a team, and her famous dual-pistols, while teased, are never used as weapons (or maybe they are…).

Lara, a young adventurer, sets about with a scientific team to investigate a series of mysterious events in a Bermuda Triangle-style section of anonymous ocean. The ship crashes, and the game centres around Lara’s attempts to survive and escape a menacing island. It is a black smoke monster and some bad acting away from being an episode of Lost.

But the story is good. The original game’s narratives were frequently incomprehensible, written, as they often were in the 90′s, by game developers as opposed to, you know, writers. Although a fiery climax in the middle of the game feels a little mis-placed and over-sized, so that the actual climax, five or six hours of game play later, feels a little mis-matched.

The voice-acting and motion capture, which could so easily make Lara a whining teenager, manages to create a wonderful leading lady. The supporting cast, however, rests on action-film racial stereotypes that I pray video games can move past. There’s an assertive and severe African-American woman, a large esoteric and spiritual Polynesian (or Maori?) man who is the first to accept the island’s spiritual capabilities, a smart and softly spoken Asian scientist, and a British white colonialist whose tendency towards being a Judas is foreshadowed way too early.

But, most importantly, the game play is fast, well-paced, beautiful and compelling. The decision to give Lara a bow and arrow is fantastic, and is a gateway to creating one of the best ranged combat systems I’ve ever played. All weapons, including a range of modifiable guns, are fantastic. Melee and close combat, however, is clumsy and unfortunately lets the game down. With only one melee weapon that is able to be used, and used frequently, I often found myself trapped in awkward polygon-land, or unable to manipulate the camera to a suitable angle, or getting killed abruptly from an unseen and unknown enemy. A shame, as all other elements of combat, including difficulty level, pacing and NPC AI, is spot-on.

This is a great game. Playing for the scenery and suspense alone reaps rich rewards. It’s a fantastic and welcome return for Lara. Her introduction to an open-world means the crafting of an individual experience. Puzzle-heavy tombs, for example, are mostly optional. Personally, I’d love to see more of them, but as a third-person shooter, the game is equally as compelling.

Welcome back Lara. Now try not to screw it up by releasing six sequels in four years.

 

 

22 days ago Short URL Comments

review/video games

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24

Apr

The Change – what I didn’t expect about e-readers

While I wasn’t exactly reluctant to buy a Kindle, I was a little wary. I was one of the biblio conservatives when the rush first started happening – ‘you can’t kill books!’

You know what the basis of my argument was? The smell. I wouldn’t tell anybody this, but the true emotional centre of my plea for book’s survival was their smell. Readers everywhere have long fetishsised the glorious musky odour of an old volume. There is, surprisingly, no English word that is used for the sensation. Perhaps we can come up with one…

The smell comes with other things, however, it means you’re holding a physical object, which by proxy means that you’ve physically entered a physical bookshop and had a physical interaction with a physical human being. This is a point that I will probably never yield: bookshops are marvelous and one of the few retail havens left that can ever be described as romantic. Try experiencing romance as you download a book from your office computer or phone. Yuck.

Have the experience of walking into Archives Fine Books, a huge second hand bookstore that I’ve visited (and my father visited) since we were both teenagers, and catch a hefty whiff of paradise. Or pop down to Riverbend  on a bright Brisbane weekend and have a fresh coffee and flick through the latest offerings in natural sunlight. If you’re a Brisbane author or reader, then Avid Reader  is your inevitable best friend, as it manages to straddle the divide between West End grotto and a place of bright wonder and intellectual mirth. Brisbane’s also blessed to be surrounded by exquisite genre stores like Comics Etc, Pulp Fiction or Rosemary’s Romance Books. What fun.

I visit these stores (and my local library) constantly, and will keep doing so.

If you’d asked me three or four years ago, I would’ve said that no digital experience could compare with ‘curling up’ with a good paperback. How can you ‘curl up’ with a bit of plastic?

I bought the Kindle when I was travelling. And let me tell you, the saving on luggage weight alone was worth the purchase while I was trekking around. But it was what happened after that I didn’t expect. While I kept going back to hard copies, I find myself consistently drifting towards the cheaper, lighter, more convenient e-book counterpart. Why? Because, friends, while it doesn’t smell, I’ve developed feelings for my e-reader. In the same way that you cherish a well worn paperback or hold a special place in your heart for a gently disintegrating hardcover, I’ve formed an emotional attachment to my e-reader. I curl up with it. I interact with it in a way that is markedly different to my phone, laptop, or gaming console. It evokes something from me. It did something I thought only a real book could – become a physical agent for an emotional experience.

Amazon reported last year that its e-books now out rank its physical sales. The market is only going to rise. However, to say this marks the death of the book is alarmist. It means there’s more pressure on the stores listed above to provide unique shopping experiences and communities that can’t be found online, something which all of them do. (Many also provide the ability to shop online also.) I can only hope we see more quirky book retail experiences blossoming that provide something that online can’t. Connection, the random act of browsing, and of course, the smell.

Dear God, the smell.

 

P.S. While researching this blog I found this, the smell of books – in a can! Yuck.

28 days ago Short URL Comments

publishing/books

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22

Apr

Follow your bliss

Every week for years now I’ve met with one group of kids or another to learn about drama. These sessions start just after school, and they’re any age from twelve upwards. These young people are bright, ambitious, and often incredibly funny. They share stories before we get down to the workshop proper. They wearily list off the amount of assignments that are due, count off the number of the extra-curricula activities that each have a public outcome, and they wander and how they’ll ever get through the stress of it all. When you teach a kid for a couple of years, you see the stress get more and more defined. They get thinner, they show up to class less. They worry. The stakes only get higher as they get closer to adulthood. One wrong move could ostensibly jeopardise their entire future.

Lucky, the work-until-you-burn-out model of business and the worry-about-outcomes-constantly methodology stop when you turn eighteen and graduate high school.

At some point you’ve got to stop reaching for other people’s goal posts. At some point you’ve got to turn to yourself and ask, ‘hang on, what do I want to do?’ You should give your response to this question more weight than anybody else’s opinion: your parents, your teachers, your friends, your mentors. You are the best authority on you. Even if you’re going to go make a mistake or put yourself in danger, you might just need to do that to learn something valuable, or to grow into the version of yourself that you want to be.

When I was in year twelve, I walked into my career counsellors office. She drew a line through my first two preferences for studying at university: arts, and sweetly suggested I apply myself to areas that will ensure a more stable living. It seems comical that at the highest levels of education we’re contradicting a message that we’re taught from kindergarten: the things that you have don’t make you happy. The money that you earn isn’t a reflection of who you are. It’s a powerful illusion to think otherwise, and one that can leave you bereft of joy, meaning, and growth.

Do it. Today.

(Yep, this is a sign.)

30 days ago Short URL Comments

personal/spirituality

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21

Apr

April Playlist – Comfort Tunes

I have, as predicted, succumbed to the will of the great white ear bud menace once again. I write to you on a plane from Cairns to Brisbane, my phone playing tunes (and an audiobook) to keep me buoyant through the trip.
I won’t lie, I’m a little worse for wear. It’ll be at least three weeks before I see my wife again, and I’m in need of comfort listening.
I don’t understand people who pump their ears with Top 40 junk food. I quickly take on the persona of a grumpy pensioner when I hear the dull thud-thud and orgasmic moans of the latest reality TV flash in the pan leaking out of someone’s ear phones near me on public transport. They all sound the same to me…
My taste is hopefully eclectic, but it’s always leaned to the gentler side. A folk singer with a guitar is the musical equivalent of chicken soup: homey, comforting, good. It’s the music of my father, who worships at the altar of a particular breed of 70′s virtuoso, and I, in turn, am destined to pay homage to their 21st century equivalent.
My brief playlist for a journey home:

Weather of a Killing Kind
Tallest Man on Earth
I’ll designate a whole post to Tallest Man on Earth (no, seriously, I will), but this song is like a polo fleece onesie: the kind of intimate comfort that you long for. The first riff shows off his sublime fingerpicking, and his vocals and lyrics are, in my humble opinion, very comparable to Dylan. Irritatingly, this song isn’t on any album, but was a single release with a magazine a couple of years ago.

The Boxer
Mumford and Sons
Covering one of those 70′s virtuoso’s I spoke about, this version comes close to producing the emotion of the Simon and Garfunkel original. Highlights include a dobro solo, Marcus Mumford’s brutal lead vocals, the production on the epic harmonies, and, of course, that final verse:

I am leaving, I am leaving, but the fighter still remains.

Born and Raised
John Mayer
I know, I know, but I really like him, and his latest record is one long Neil Young ode. This ballad is the kind of loping simple tune you don’t hear that often anymore, because music producers aren’t satisfied to let anything sit. And somehow it’s simultaneously sad and uplifting.

Laura
Bat for Lashes
Somewhere between Elton John and David Bowie is this little piano ballad. I haven’t listened to any other songs from Bat For Lashes, but this one caught my attention when it landed on Triple J’s Hottest 100 this year gone. Type of thing you want to sing in the car at a God-awful volume. And the video is nice too.

Far Away
Jose Gonzalez
Remember when Jose Gonzalez was huge thanks to an ad for Sony televisions? The intimate sound of self-recorded folk against corporate gleam was bizarre, but it worked. This tune was similar: it’s to be found on the soundtrack for Red Dead Redemption, one of my favourite video games. When it turns up in the game it’s a deeply meaningful moment, but the song has stuck with me and outgrown it’s roots. A shame it’s not better known.

31 days ago Short URL Comments

music/personal

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18

Apr

Off the buds

None of the futurists, as far as I know, ever imagined white strings suspended from our ears. Not Orwell, nor Bradbury or Huxley. The idea of paper-thin pads that displayed reams of electronic information was popular throughout most twentieth century science-fiction. It seems commonplace. So much so that we’ve ceased to be even slightly amazed at the wonder of it anymore. Orwell and company could clearly imagine our sight being taken from us by such machines, but didn’t dare to imagine ear buds. Bradbury’s vision of a home cinema: with blaring sound and light from every walled surface covering your lounge room, is sinister, but not nearly as troubling as the subtle mundanity of two harmless white wires, tucked securely and humbly into your ear.

In recent years I’ve listened to my iPhone every chance I have. Any task that is mundane, any trip that is longer than thirty seconds, any time, any where, I stick my headphones in my ears. My argument was productivity. I don’t listen to that much music. I mostly listen to podcasts and audiobooks, rich with information and ‘helpful’ knowledge. A chance to keep learning on my ‘down time’. What else is there for me to listen to while I’m grocery shopping/walking to my meeting/washing up/driving?

Turns out a lot. By pure accident my wife took our entire collection of headphones with her on a recent trip and I’ve been left without customised artificial sound for the first time in years. I’ve had ample opportunity to buy some more but haven’t, because I’ve actually enjoyed the thinking time. My brain has stretched. I’ve listened in on conversations on public transport, a past time I had long forgotten the value of. I’ve ended up reading more, but only by a tad. Mostly I’ve just been thinking, getting used to my brain again. In recent times it feels as though we’ve become strangers.

I don’t feel like I’ve ever put myself in danger by adorning headphones, but it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t shut you off from the rest of the world. It not only takes your ears but your brain as well. Even I, headphone addict that I was, couldn’t manage to go through a transaction while still having headphones in my ears. The idea seemed too rude. It’s another way of not interacting with the world, or with yourself.

So let this obnoxious reminder of the superiority of the ‘unplugged’ life drive you to a few days off the buds. Before, ultimately, I find myself attached to them once more, arguing that I need to listen to this podcast on neuroscience and/or video games. Because, of course, they have us, the future is here, we gave it to ourselves, and our children will be born wrapped in white wire.

34 days ago Short URL 1 Comment

personal/spirituality

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17

Apr

Shooting People and Art: Video games for a new century

So a few months ago I found the solution to my relatively expensive gaming fix: game rentals. I’ve been signed up to getgaming.com.au for a couple of months and get the games I want at an affordable price. And that was the main reason why I went for rentals – the price. If you’re a gamer, it’s difficult to get a broad taste of everything simply because every new release can cost you almost a hundred bucks a pop.

But what has this broad taste wielded me? Well, I’m still slurping off the remains of the 2012 Christmas releases. So far, Dishonoured, Hitman: Absolution, Assassin’s Creed 3 and Tomb Raider. And listen, I know this is a first-world whine and everything but…I haven’t enjoyed them nearly as much as I thought I would.

They’re fun, for a little while, but I’m thinking of calling it a day. The AAA gaming titles that are coming out all look as though they come from the same studio doing the same stuff. There’s an undercurrent of sexism within each of them (take the gun-toting nuns in Hitman: Absolution) and plenty of violence without consequence. What’s more, titles like Assassin’s Creed 3 are riding off the success of the title’s predecessors. It was, fundamentally, not a terrifically enjoyable game. It hurts my gaming heart to see them pumping out Assassin’s Creed 4 within 12 months of the previous release.

Creativity is low in AAA titles. It’s rare now to see something innovative in the console market. Maybe the release of the impending PS4 or Xbox 720 will change the field, but it’s a creative change that needs to happen, not a hardware one. Bioshock: Inifnite, which I have sadly not played, is the only AAA titles I can see that is breaking from the mould.

Meanwhile, on iOS and downloadable games, all sorts of crazy stuff is happening. The games I’ve most loved in the last twelve months have all been from smaller studios. Telltale’s The Walking Dead was masterful. I spend hours on simple, seemingly inane but bizarrely addictive games like Angry Birds: Star Wars, Temple Run 2, Ridiculous Fishing, or Pocket Planes. I finally got round to playing Journey as an Xbox 360 download and loved the entire experience.

AAA studios, turn to look at your lowly mobile brethren for inspiration. You can’t afford not to anymore. The video game industry is in danger of falling into the same trap film is (I blogged about that a while ago), and producing bankable pieces of fluff without innovation or risk –  a model that is ultimately unsustainable, especially when you compare price points. Mobile gaming has made gamers out of even the most beige of muggles and is currently leading the industry. If AAA studios are brave enough to follow, then we’ll be in a golden age of gaming.

35 days ago Short URL Comments

video games

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16

Apr

#prayforboston – balancing despair and hope

There’s something to be said for those stark moments in life when tragedy strikes somewhere far away, or, awfully, disturbingly close to you. It’s the price of the modern age, both the blessing and the curse of the news cycle, that we are informed immediately of the world’s most awful actions, and too often slide past the world’s most beautiful. Re-connecting the moment where I heard about Boston today to the moment I heard about the Connecticut school shootings or the 9/11 attacks serves two purposes. Firstly, it means that my memories surrounding these tragedies are strengthened and remembered. Secondly, perhaps the most oddly, they carve shards of light into pieces of my life that I would’ve otherwise forgotten were it not for the illumination of tragedy.

  • September 12th, 2001. I’m in year nine. 14 years old. I’m watching Third Rock From The Sun on cable television. It’s morning. I always wake up around six and watch at least two sitcoms before I go to school. Third Rock From The Sun is my regular choice at the moment. A banner scrolls across the bottom of the page. Two buildings I’ve never heard of have been attacked in New York. A word I don’t fully understand, terrorism, is mentioned. I turn to channel nine and see the two buildings in flames. There’s been a second explosion, I’m told. I run to my father, who is shaving in the bathroom, and tell him. He doesn’t believe me. Soon my parents and I are round the television. It takes us an hour or so to figure out that it’s not missiles or a bomb inside the building. It’s planes. I go to school and it’s all anyone talks about. The television doesn’t play anything but American news for days afterwards. I’m quite taken with it all, and confused at my own internal reaction. Fascination. Horror. An attempt to become a political expert. I remember a piece of footage from someone on the ground floor, and the tremendous thud it recorded of a human body hitting the ground. People jumped because they couldn’t escape the flames.
  • December 14th, 2012. It’s the morning, again, and I turn on ABC News 24 to hear about the school shooting. My wife isn’t awake when I start to hear the numbers. Twenty children dead. Six staff members. I don’t listen to the details because I don’t really want to know. The image of Obama wiping away a tear is enough. We sit with it for the morning before we shake it off and resume the Summer cleaning of our entire house.
  • April 16th, 2013. Morning. Home alone. Turn on the radio as I’m getting ready for work. I hear a few sparse details in headline news, but the situations barely developed. When I get to work I find myself looking at pictures online. It took me that minute, that time when you’re trying to work out what has happened, to realise that people had actually died. Charitable citizens. Then I went back to work. We all muttered sympathetic noises at the office. What else can we do? (It’s also worth mentioning that 31 people have died in Iraq in the last few days due to a series of car explosions. I won’t remember that three months from now.)

I could make all kinds of political inferences here about terrorism and violence. There’s something about the fact that all three of these incidents are American. I’ve also left out others – the 2006 tsunami, not nearly as clear in my mind. Or the 2011 floods, which take up a separate part of my brain because I was inevitably a part of it all.

Instead, I think it pays to remember that there are other moments that happened today, ones that you don’t hear about:

  • People gave to charity today. A lot of people. Billions of dollars are given every year by all kinds of people all over the world to help each other out.
  • Somewhere, not too far away, are acts of mundane noble courage that are the essence of  life. A son or daughter cares for their elderly parent. A sibling or friend stops their mate driving home drunk. Someone who used to be afraid of themselves stands on a set of scales and beams with pride. These things happen all of the time.
  • I don’t understand why there’s no statistics for it, but a certain number of people urinated because they laughed so hard today. And they do everyday.
  • Friends were reconciled today.
  • Someone found out they beat cancer today.
  • A kid opened up a book for the first time today.
  • You had fun today. Somewhere, somehow – admit it.

I hope we hold on to those moments as much as we hold onto the tragic.

36 days ago Short URL 1 Comment

personal/political

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15

Apr

No Turning Back – Entry into Dungeons and Dragons

A couple of years ago we were above it. We admired nerd culture from our superior positions atop the popular culture wheel. Like parents sitting on the park bench at the playground. ‘Oh no,’ we’d say, ‘you go on, it’s not appropriate for us to play.’

Cut to yesterday where I sat down with my buddy and we plotted out her new Dungeons and Dragons character with such a heavy weight you would think we were deciding the future of our organs. Questions such as ‘am I better off having the ability to summon stars out of the sky or to cast flames from my fingertips?’ were treated with complete un-ironic seriousness.

Before my foray into D&D I would’ve happily called myself a nerd but would’ve shied away from taking on the title with the full vigour of a true disciple that so many other incredibly smart, socially awkward, loyal, cashed-up consumers do. But acceptance into the D & D universe means something serious. It’s the pop culture equivalent of deciding to be married. It’s a commitment. It means that hours will be given up rolling dice, building stories, and pretending to be a dwarf/elf/dragon. And not just over one session. Not every so often like a game of Monopoly. No, the proper D&D experience requires regular meetings of your group to improve your characters and keep them travelling together, sometimes for years.

I blame, mostly, the D&D episode of Community. I challenge anyone not to watch that episode and to not feel an inkling towards wanting to play. (Also, if you haven’t seen the first three seasons of Community yet, what are you doing? I know I’m like the fifth person to say this to you, but you really would enjoy it.)

I also blame the skinny pale-faced young man who asked my nerd friend and I whether we wanted to learn how to play Magic: The Gathering at the last Brisbane SupaNova. We went home with a deck of cards each and a whole new world to play in. With the enthusiastic purchase of way more cards than we sensibly needed, it seemed we were teetering on the edge of a beautiful cultural cliff. D&D awaited at the bottom of the fall.

It’s hard to describe what makes D&D so fantastic without making muggles roll their eyes. Maybe it’s the perfect combination of math and creativity that lies at the heart of the game’s mechanics. Maybe it’s the ability to create private art that feels down-right theatrical. Maybe it’s the appeal to our inner-child to play with imaginary friends (but with dice and formula so it feels grown-up).

Whatever it is, I’m proud to be a ring-bearing, card-carrying, orc-slaying, old-fashioned nerd. I shall tell you the tales of our groups adventures as we travel forth.

37 days ago Short URL Comments

reasons i love

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