Morning
Greetings earth people. This post comes from Townsville in tropical Queensland, where a computer game forum is about to take place. I’m here due to my small book called Make Your Own Games that reached out of the remainder bin and into the heart of a local curator. It’s an example where hack journalism has triumphed over expertise, although I must admit actually having spent the last few weeks researching and putting together a pretty good run-through of game sound design for the locals.
Like any good field anthropologist I can spin a short visit into a lifetime of knowledge. Spend a month in deepest darkest Africa and you could at one time write the definitive cultural guide. Spend a couple of nights in Townsville and I am that mythical ‘outsider on the inside’ that powers the entire bullshit of sociology. Here’s some field notes.
Firstly it’s Townsville. Not Villestown. Certainly not Towntown or Villesville, which shows that this is not an aboriginal name like Wagga Wagga. The main business appears to be alcohol, leaving high school, and vomit. I may be biased in this: the row of businesses in which my hotel is positioned includes Mary O’Reilly’s Irish Pub, Cactus Jack’s Texan Bar, Chin Wag’s Chinese Opium Den and other Its A Small World venues. They look fortified for that time once a year when school is out and the law is in trouble.
During the morning it’s a bit like Las Vegas. I was the only person walking. Fool.
Just to the east of Townsville is Magnetic Island, which proves that Townsville is not made of metal. Nevertheless mining is a big part of the local industry, so it becomes curious what they are digging out of the ground. I think it may be the ingredients of Fourex, something I investigated in more detail later in the evening.
I would have swum out to Magnetic Island but for the signs that showed a picture of a person swimming with a pictogram of something that had the general appearance of Cthulhu. I think that meant The Elder Gods Do Not Allow Swimming, and I am always one to respect local culture. On the beach are containers of vinegar on posts. Perhaps Cthulhu will drink that instead of coming inland.
Afternoon
Townsville has deceived me. What seemed to be the city is only the tip of myriad interconnected shopping malls that extends thousands of kilometres inland: Sleeping Giant, Big W, Home Depot… apparently this rolls across the planet and joins up with Los Angeles on the other side. We didn’t drive that far.
The gallery is part of an 11km long complex built around an artificial lagoon in Thuringowa township. Next to our gallery was Hippo™ the world’s largest inflatable water slide. Gallery owners wise up! If you want that Picasso to sell, place it in view of Hippo™. Hippo™ sells up to 5 times the modern masters of inferior water slides.
Some Macintosh wrangling and off we went. Dr. Nicola Bidwell from JCU fired off first with questions about real space and game space. That ‘reality’ as defined by impressive graphics missed out on many parts of reality, intricate in meaning. She had set up subjects with a head mounted camera rig and microphone, telling stories about the landscape being traversed. One significant study was about gamers navigating a ‘landscape’, taking photographs of the terrain as they went to help them find their way back to base. That they got lost was partly due to an unconscious habit – glancing down at your feet. People do this often in reality, but forget to do it in game.
I went off in the usual bluster: about game sound. Short history and then through Foley managed to get syncresis demonstrated, pointed out the gap between movie sound and vision, related that to windowless monads (pretension masterstroke) and then got everybody interested in state machines. That lead into how to use state machines to provide an interactive soundtrack. I’d spent days practising my chops in FMOD Designer but only ended up having five minutes left to explain what the hell so I just used a car engine example that comes with the package. Damn.
Jason Nelson from Griffith Uni talked us through his e-poetry games. These are – I don’t think he’d complain – crapware that engages in game design while at the same time mocking it mercilessly. The gameplay is torn out of other flash titles, the graphics are hand drawn on bits of paper and so on. He has that mix of seriousness and self abuse that seems to be part of the Australian art identity, which is odd seeing as he’s American. The games are very popular to play but he proudly pointed out 85% of players thought the last one was crap. There’s much poetry involved but I couldn’t read it from where I was sitting. Was I supposed to?
My main wonder (a wonder is not a coherent question) about crapware, including this, somethingawful, ytmnd and so on… whether it is building up to some point where we can springboard into the future or whether it is content to spit in our hand each time try to shake. The best thing that happened to dadaism is that is stopped if you know what I mean.
Evening
Once I got back to Sydney I immediately went searching for cherry brandy essence. You put a small splash in a glass of Coke and get Cherry Coke (which is rare thing in this country). My artistic sensibilities have been opened.
