Wings Over Scotland

We need a new word for videogames. The term was coined back in the 1970s to describe something that at the time was a completely new and revolutionary artform (it must be barely conceivable to today’s gamers that there was a time in living memory when such things as games played on a TV screen simply didn’t exist), and the image it conjured up was a straightforward one of Asteroids, Pac-Man and Space Invaders – that is, an abstract, magical, ultra-modern type of entertainment, born in technology and totally unrelated to any kind of leisure pursuit that had ever gone before it.

The very word “videogame” inherently depicted something that was exciting, glamorous and – because most games were located in arcades, places where under-18s weren’t allowed – slightly forbidden and dangerous too.

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You may have seen David Cameron on the news today, anointing himself head of the "New Moral Army", promising a "fightback" against rioters, and praising (at 0.53) "the million people on Facebook who've signed up to support the police". The group in question was created, and is run, by this lovely chap:

That doesn't seem quite the sort of "morality" the Prime Minister should be getting behind, does it? But there are more rib-ticklers where that came from.

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Quickly rounding up some of the more interesting reflections on (and in some cases, prescient predictions of) recent events. By all means send any you've spotted that I've missed and I'll add them.

Riots: the underclass lash out (Daily Telegraph)

"Meanwhile, the view is gaining ground that social democracy, with its safety nets, its costly education and health care for all, is unsustainable in the bleak times ahead. The reality is that it is the only solution."

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I don't know, because I'm not going to count them. But if the latest opinion poll is correct (and it's a big "if"), the electoral map of the Scottish Parliament is going to look rather different in two weeks' time:

65 seats are needed for a majority in the Parliament, and the Greens support an independence referendum, so if these figures are accurate the possibility of Scotland seceding from the UK will suddenly get an awful lot more real. And a Tory-led government in Westminster has already seen support for independence surge by almost 50%, to level pegging with those opposed to it.

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Readers of a spiritual or elderly bent may be aware of the parable of the Deck Of Cards. (You can listen to a splendidly reverby take of Wink Martindale’s definitive version by clicking this convenient link here.)

But you don’t have to go back to the 1950s for a similarly instructive metaphor for the contemporary age. Because the iOS game Coin Dozer serves, if you don’t want to carry around a bulky copy of Das Kapital, as a bible of the modern capitalist world. Shut up, it’s not bollocks.

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I was out and about today, and finally saw a 3DS in action for the first time. As billed, the 3D effect is absolutely gobsmacking, but even after just a few minutes I was finding it quite tiring on my eyes and I imagine the novelty will largely wear off after a couple of days, leaving you with a very pricey way to play Ridge Racer and Super Monkey Ball again. But not quite THIS pricey:

What in the name of Canaan Banana is going on here?

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Aged viewers will recall this reporter's once-burning love for the Nintendo DS. But it wasn't just the appearance on the scene of the younger, slimmer, all-touching-all-the-time iThings that caused the flame to die.

This week, with the Western launch of the 3DS just a few days away, I went back to the old stager for one last hurrah, to see what I'd missed in what's now almost two years of iOS-focused gaming and also to see how it felt to use a so-called "real" handheld console again. I found out some things, and have written them down here because I'm old and I forget stuff.

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It's one of the most-observed truths of videogame reviewing that the entire concept of scoring is, as practised almost universally in all forms of current print, broadcast and online media, fundamentally broken.

Everyone knows that the marks awarded in game reviews – whether out of five stars, ten points or 100% – are not in fact sequential numbers as we were taught them in arithmetic lessons, but abstract ciphers whose true value is heavily encoded. In videogame reviewing, 4 isn't any bigger than 2, 6=7, and 10 is more than twice as many as 9.

And therefore – since the sole and entire point of scoring is to attach an instantly comprehensible numerical summary of the reviewer's opinion to the text – videogame review scores are functionally almost meaningless.

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