All entries for August 2009

Quick catch up

A couple of reviews I’ve done for 4ortherecord.com

Gavin Osborn’s Meeting Your Heroes

Jim Bob’s Goffam

And if you’re bemoaning the lack of any Edinburgh coverage this year, well I wasn’t there so in short: yay for Peter Buckley Hill finally getting that Spirit of the Fringe award for the Free Fringe, I have no clue about the rest of the winners, I’ve only ever seen one person on the short-list. I can only presume Tim Key is much better live than on Screenwipe – hopefully a tour will be forthcoming later in the year so I can see for myself.

For other stuff, go read Anna who has loads of reviews, video blogs and all sorts. Next year dammit!

Dean Love : 29 Aug 2009 23:15 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

On Sexton Blake, Jonathan Nash, and 90s Videogames Magazines

I’ve recently been telling anyone that will listen to check out the new BBC Radio 2 comedy series The Adventures Of Sexton Blake. Sexton Blake is a fictional detective once described as the missing link between Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, that’s been around for over a hundred years and written for by over two hundred different writers. Each writer tends to put their own spin on Blake, with no regard for continuity or past stories. Some tales are serious, some are funny, most involve a good punch-up at some point. The latest BBC version is very much on the humorous side, fusing a old-fashioned radio drama style with a very modern approach to comedy, and it’s one of the best things BBC Radio have done in years.

So with all this eulogising, I have something of a confession to make. I’d never heard of Sexton Blake until around a month ago. And I still haven’t heard, seen, or read anything outside of this new series. See, what got my attention wasn’t the name Sexton Blake, but the names Mil Millington and Jonathan Nash. You might have heard of the first one: there was a rather successful book and Guardian column called Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About that you might have heard of. Millington is very good, hence my mentioning him here as I’m about to completely ignore him in favour of talking about Jonathan Nash.

Firstly, no, he’s not the mathematician that Russell Crowe played in A Beautiful Mind. There’s a small chance you might be aware of his work (with Millington) on The Weekly , a short-lived website best summed-up as the British version of The Onion. And when I say ‘British’ I mean quintessentially British in a hugely stereo-typical way, and a great example of the sort of hugely stylised work that Nash does best.

But for me, I first encountered his work when I was about ten. I owned a Sinclair Spectrum computer, and I liked to read. So my parents bought me a subscription to Your Sinclair magazine, which in its later years was edited by Nash. After the magazine closed I finally threw out the Spectrum and bought an Amiga computer, and this time the magazine was the games-focused Amiga Power. It was here, in my teens, that the first few written voices really started to stand out for me. Amongst all the hugely competent but straight-forward games reviews, I started to notice the names of a couple of writers that did something more. First was Stuart Campbell, who’s bile-filled dismemberments of any game that dared to be mediocre also managed to be hugely funny. Secondly there was a writer who was equally funny but in a far more subtle way. Jonathan Nash’s reviews would always give you something different. He practically invented the notion of the concept review in video-gaming. To give you some examples, here’s space shooty game Alien Breed reviewed as a movie pitch, this is top-down adventure Dreamweb reviewed mostly with the words “Oh dear”, a review of vampire adventure Bloodnet where he uses the phrase “it looks like a row of spikes on a tachycardiac sugar-fiend’s electrocardiograph machine”.

The point being, it was the first time I’d ever encountered genuinely stylised writing. It introduced me to the idea that words could be entertaining through form as well as a function. Many aspiring writers of my generation talk about their passion stemming from reading their favourite NME writers in their teens, or discovering Hunter S Thomson at the local library. But for a small sub-section of us, the most nerdy of the nerds, our inspiration lay in the words of Messers Nash, Campbell, Farragher, Winstanley, Davis, et al. And of those, Nash’s voice was always the most distinct. I haven’t even touched on the non-game related features he worked on the later days of both Amiga Power and Your Sinclair. Or the fact that he was so unhappy that the page count of the latter magazine started to shrink to nothing in its final years that he started writing pages and pages of extra copy to put on the cover tape to be viewed teletext style on your Spectrum.

One of the strangest things of all is that he’s almost impossible to track down. Finding those examples of his work took an age. His own website, The House of Nash, used to host a bunch of stuff, but was taken down almost as soon as the internet started to get popular, and is strangely inaccessible on Archive.org. He’s left all the publicity for Sexton Blake to his co-writer, Mr Millington, who despite working with him on a number of projects, has never met him in the real world, and claims he doesn’t ever want to. Millington also calls him the “funniest living Britain”, and while I’m not sure I agree with him, it’s certainly a claim worth considering.

Dean Love : 29 Aug 2009 23:08 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Booth Babes, Lust and The Online Ultra–Gent

Or: Tim Minchin Said It Best (And He Normally Does)

Well, this entry may well get me labelled as misogynist, but hey, I’m already a racist and a heathen so why not go for the set? Besides, I haven’t blogged for nearly a month so some controversy will get the hit count back up.

So the other week there was this thing called Comic Con, a big geek-o-palaza, the mecca for fans of comics, video games, TV and movies. At these sort of conventions, companies will often employ “booth babes”: hot women dressed in skimpy costumes designed to draw the attention of the masses to whatever product they’re promoting. To do this, some times the “babes” are dressed as characters from the anime show or comic, and other times they’re just wearing small bikinis because it’s mostly a male audience and if one thing will get a man’s attention, it’s boobs.

The use of booth babes (sorry, I’m going to stop putting it in quote marks – I know it’s a derogatory description but I have to use it another ten times or so and it’ll just get messy otherwise) is most common in the promotion of video games, and they’ve been used at video games industry shows like E3 for years. So it’s no surprise that the following flyer came from Electronic Arts to promote a game called Dante’s Inferno (no, really, but that’s an entire other blog entry).

Let’s get one thing clear. The wording on the flyer is unfortunate. Specifically the phrase: “commit acts of lust”. But it’s fairly clear if you take more than a cursory glance at said flyer that this phrase is just a section heading, and the “act of lust” it refers to is taking a photo of yourself with a booth babe. This is something that happens all the time anyway, and is part of what these women are employed to do.

The online media went nuts, and said that in fact what the flyer was doing was encourage attendees to grope the models in an attempt to win prises. Now, okay, I can see how you could possibly misinterpret the meaning of the flyer, but would you not think twice and maybe look again? Who would think, upon reading and misinterpreting it “Oh, look, we just sexually assault a few women and we can win a prize, lets go!” Okay maybe some Comic Con attendees would. Bad example. But the vast majority of well adjusted people would realise that it wasn’t an open invitation to grope booth babes.

Like I said, the wording was unfortunate, but I haven’t seen one confirmed (or even alleged) case of a girl being touched up because “the flyer said it was okay”. I have seen reports of women, both booth babes and just regular convention attendees, being groped at Comic Con. It’s not okay, but it happens every year, and is a result of the lack of understanding of basic social decency possessed by a sizeable majority of Comic Con attendees. Likely the same ones that protested the coverage of Twilight at the convention, on the basis it attracted too many teenage girls. Because girls smell, natch. And when I say protested, I mean that literally. Something should be done about this, but I’m not sure what exactly. My point is only that I somehow doubt a badly-worded flyer would be the catalyst in turning someone who wouldn’t ever grope a girl in a crowded public place in to someone who would.

So that’s the background. Mass online media hysteria ensues, but it’s in the comments threads of posts like this that things get really interesting. Because there’s a whole host of people, generally men, decrying the whole idea of booth babes altogether, and saying they should be banned entirely. Again, let’s put aside the fact that, at Comic Con, they may have a point. It’d be sad if everyone else had to suffer because of the socially retarded, but until we can figure out a way of filtering them out it might help matters. Instead let’s stick with considering booth babes where they’re most often used: games industry trade shows. Because these commentators want them banned everywhere. They feel that they objectify women, that the women involved won’t enjoy being gawped at, and that it puts off women from getting involved in gaming.

We’ll take those in reverse order. There’s a point to the latter one: gaming is a hugely male-dominated hobby, and the industry itself is even more gender-biased. But there’s a chicken and egg situation here. Is the industry male-dominated because booth babes put off women? Or are booth babes such an effective marketing technique because the industry is so male-dominated? Honestly, there probably is a small causal relationship, but there are far more compelling reasons that the industry is so male-focused: it’s origins in the early computer scene, the fact that it’s easier to make games where you go around killing stuff than interesting narrative-driven pieces, and so on. It’s another thing I could write an entire blog on. Suffice to say, if you did a study to find the top fifty reasons there aren’t many women in the games industry, I doubt “booth babes at conventions” would even make the list.

The next point is my favourite. That while some of the booth babes might be models who enjoy the attention and the chance to improve their portfolio, in an attempt to break into the serious modelling business, others are just hot college girls trying to earn a bit of money. These girls, we’re told, will hate having to spend the day in tight fitting bikinis so men can gawp at their boobs. My response to this is clear and considered: boo-fucking-hoo. So they hate their job? Who doesn’t? And for a pretty college girl, it’s not like standing on a convention floor for the day is the only way to earn a bit of money. Yes, there are issues at higher levels with businesses taking pretty girls less seriously making it hard to get ahead. But at this level? At the “I just need a bit of cash for tuition fees / text books / beer” level? The pretty people have the advantage. Bar work, waitressing, even working the tills at Tesco – sure, they all require some simple skills to do, but beyond that an employer is more likely to employee the prettier person, because most of this part-time stop-gap work is customer facing, and customers prefer to be served by a pretty guy or girl. Employers know this, and act accordingly. In fact, bar work is almost identical to being a booth babe: both jobs involve being charming, chatty and appropriately flirtatious towards customers you might not be able to stand the sight of. The difference is bar work means getting to wear a lot more clothes and getting paid a lot less money. And pulling pints.

See, the booth babe that hates being ogled at a convention will equally hate spending days scanning barcodes at Tescos, and she’s smart enough to figure out that if she’s going to be doing something she hates, it may as well be one day in a bikini than twenty sat the supermarket tills, since they’ll pay the same. Other girls will decide that showing off their body isn’t worth it and go for the waitressing job instead. Which is fine, but let’s not delude ourselves in to thinking that booth babes are booth babes because they have no other options. Booth babes are booth babes because they’d rather do that than the alternative. The alternative being what the vast majority of us who don’t have stunning good looks and massive boobs have to do anyway.

So to the final point, it objectifies women. Well yes, it does. Though let us also remember that, while less common, there are also booth hunks, dressed up as Conan or whatever. And they are there to be objectified. In that context, at that point in time, they’ve basically entered in to a contract for their bodies to be exhibits of art. And they’re very pleasant to look at, and I’ll enjoy the view. I won’t act inappropriately but to be frank, nor will I try and connect with them on a human level. Because for every creepy guy that goes up there and just asks them out, makes a filthy comment or propositions them, there’s another creepier guy that goes up to them and makes a light-hearted joke like “don’t you get cold?” because that way they think they’ll come across as sympathetic and nice and not a slobbering oaf and so might get to fuck them. It’s two sides of the same coin. There’s probably one or two genuine people there that really are just trying to be nice, but there’s no way the girl can tell them apart and so no booth babe is ever going to end up making friends with a convention attendee. It’s far too much of a mine-field; given the vast majority of men talking to them will just want to get in to their pants. Especially the ones acting like they don’t.

The nicest thing we can do is objectify them. That’s what they’re there for. That’s their job. Be polite, be courteous, treat them the same way you would anyone else, and enjoy the view. They’re wearing that skimpy bikini because they want to attract your eyes: first to their boobs, then hopefully to the product. This crazy idea espoused by some that we shouldn’t enjoy what’s being shown to us, and that they will avert their eyes in the face of cleavage, I find frankly unbelievable. I like looking at boobs. So does every other straight male on the planet. I don’t apologise for this, and when presented with a situation were boobs, legs, and pretty faces are all being presented to catch my attention, with a clear invitation to view, I’ll have a good look. So will everyone else. Even if it doesn’t work in getting us to look at a product we’d have otherwise passed by.

This is what annoys me the most about these male internet feminists that have cropped up in all these comments threads. All men like looking at attractive women. They all like it more when said woman is wearing skimpy clothing. That’s not objectifying women, that’s normal. The aesthetics of it make us smile and the sexy element turns us on just enough to be pleasant but not embarrassing. It’s if we start judging women only on those looks, outside of this very limited context, that makes it objectification. The vast majority of us can tell the difference.

It worries me that some men seemingly find it necessary to emasculate themselves, to refuse to look at booth babes, to argue that they should be covered up. To me, that sounds more like misogyny – to deny a woman from profiting from the fact that she’s hot. I wonder if they’re the equivalent of the guy that pretends to be nice and friendly to pull the booth babe. But it’s an internet comments thread on a gaming blog; I doubt any booth babes are reading.

I like to see myself as something of a feminist. There are clear issues, even in the western world, with male-female equality. In less developed countries it’s far worse. We should draw attention to this and do something about it. But if being a feminist means cutting of my penis and pretending I don’t enjoy looking at hot girls in skimpy clothes then I have to pass, as I can’t bring myself to be that much of a hypocrite.

Minchin said it best
Dean thought this was a lot of text, but felt that putting up a bunch of booth babe photos to break it up would undermine his point somewhat

Dean Love : 16 Aug 2009 19:47 |  Tags: Comedy Games Politics |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem