Two friends are talking. The first says to the second: “Let’s suppose there is a heaven. I mean, like, one of those heavens you read about in children’s books where good people go when they die and there is no sadness, hurt or danger.”

“Okay…”

“Well, if this place is perfect and humans who end up there have all of their imperfections, shortcomings and sins taken away then, um, isn’t it the most boring of places? Doesn’t everyone just look like everybody else? Where’s the fun in that?”

The second friend pauses for a moment, then answers: “Well, that very much depends on if people are defined by their imperfections…”

It was Plato who first put words to the Theory of Forms. He posited that reality consists of two realms: the physical world – that which we encounter with our senses – and the existential world, which made of eternal, perfect ‘forms’ or ‘ideas’ that we encounter in our imagination.

His point was that any item in this world is an imperfect variant of the eternal, perfect item.

For example, there exists in the world of ideas a perfect chair. This is the ideal chair, the chair of which all chairs in our world are dilutions, imperfect variants, and lesser shades of. This is the chair which embodies absolute chairness; it is the reference chair.

Likewise, a horse you might see in a stable is really an imperfect representation of some ideal horse that exists somewhere else.

Reviewers of any product, from videogames to books to digital cameras, should be aware of Plato’s philosophy on this point. After all, no matter how many times you explain that, in your publication, scoring a game 10/10 does not mean that you believe this is the perfect videogame, a considerable slice of your readership will unwittingly apply Plato’s theory of forms anyway. In doing so they will presume that, at long last, the perfect realisation of a first person shooter or puzzle game or whatever has slipped from the abstract referential dimension into our own.

[tangent] I’ve been thinking how the theory of forms is super interesting when applied to something like videogame AI. The questioning character in the story at the top of this post thinks like an AI programmer. As anyone who writes code to replicate human behaviour in games will tell you, it’s the imperfections and shortcomings of their design that make for believable opponents. A videogame world in which all AI opponents behaved in perfect ways would be both boring and, as games are played by imperfect, fallible humans, unremittingly frustrating.

Besides, it’s far easier to program a rival AI controlled car to race around a track at the fastest possible speed, taking the best possible lines, breaking and accelerating in perfect synch with the created world’s physics than it is to create a fallible racing car driver who makes mistakes, puts two tyres onto the grass occasionally or brakes too late into a corner and spins out.

This is the real challenge, this is what makes your game interesting and believable.

It is weakness and error held in tension with skill and competition that makes for a good videogame opponent. A game’s AI competitors should all be shades, shadows and imperfections of the perfect opponent himself, the one who usually sits at the end of the game patiently awaiting your arrival as the final boss. I think it’s interesting that in the world of videogames, where it’s entirely possible to create the ‘ideal’ opponent, creating a broken, imperfect one is often preferable.[/tangent]

Back to the point: I disagree with the first character in the story. Take away all of our imperfections and you’re not left with an identikit human race. The variety, character and breadth of humanity is born from more than just its members’ various shortcomings. remove these and you’d still have a gloriously diverse human race. It is possible to try to follow the path of an ‘ideal’ human and still be your own person, indeed, it’s impossible not to. In the same way Tetris and Puzzle Bobble are both perfect expressions of the puzzle genre but both look and play very differently to each other, there are, in this sense, no perfect tens.

All of which is a long, convoluted, messy and overtired but hopefully interesting way of saying that my first son, Huey Eliot Parkin, was born yesterday morning. He weighed 8lb 9ozs and cries only when he needs to.

My prayer is that his imperfections will be less than my own, that he might be at least one step closer to that ideal of a human than I’ll ever be. I hope that he’ll make quiet but good and enduring history, that he might treat others as he would want to be treated and, most importantly, that he would never be better than his father at videogames.

Now, to bed.

This video tries to demonstrate how competent the Crytech engine is at recreating reality.

But, teapots or no teapots, in their misguided boast I find only vindication.

(Although, in the comments over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun (where I first saw the video posted) it made me smile when one commentator answered the question, “Wait, so the rubber balls ad wasn’t done with CG?” with the reply: “No it was real – there was this whole phase where lots of firms made impressive stunt adverts… however two years on we now assume every advert is a clever stunt, when really they’ve just gone back to knocking them out with CGI…”)

Last July the New York Times published an article that claimed top-rated videogames sell more copies than poorly-rated ones.

The piece was based on the findings of a 8-page UBS Investment Research document called “Q-Series: Video Game Quality Rankings” by Benjamin Schachter.

Schachter and his team reviewed data for more than 1,500 games released from 2002 to 2005, looking for correlations between sales and the games’ scores on Gamerankings.com, a site that aggregates all of the review scores for a single film, album, book or videogame to determine its average ’score’.

The research revealed a direct statistical correlation between ratings and sales for games.

At a glance it hardly seems a discovery worthy of mention. After all, good things will always sell better than bad things, right? Not so says the NYT piece, pointing out that the top-rated movies and music from the same time period sold relatively poorly and that all of the top-rated films and albums failed to make any impact on the sales charts.

For example in 2006, of Metacritic’s 10 best-reviewed films of the year — including art-house favorites like Pan’s Labyrinth and L’Enfant — not one was among the box-office leaders. By contrast the Top 10-selling games of 2006 — including titles like Gears of War and Guitar Hero 2 —had an average Metacritic score of 87.5 with only one of the top-selling games scoring less than 80.

The reasons behind this unique correlation are unclear. Perhaps game reviewers are more in step with consumers’ taste (often because they are players first and writers second) or maybe it’s just that videogames, with their interactive mechanics, are more easily rated on empirical factors: a character either controls in a good and pleasing way or they don’t, there’s a lot less room to quibble subjectively there.

The piece is 6-months-old so why the interest today? Last week Reuters reported on how EA boss John Riccitiello has expressed concern that the average score of his company’s titles has dropped by around 5 per cent from the previous year.

“There is nothing acceptable about that,” he said, referencing the average review score drop from 77 to 72. “Our core game titles are accurately measured and summarised by these assessments, and that is a very big deal…we need to recover here.”

It seems as though the original NYT piece (and the research it was based on) has been making quite an impact on the investment community. The message is clear: review scores are a valuable metric for indicating how much money will be made made. QED review scores must increase to bolster profits.

So EA’s executives want to make better games rather than just selling more of them. Even if the two things are now interchangeable (so he’s just saying ‘we want to make more profits’ in a consumer-friendly way), it’s at least a step in the right direction.

In a sense, it’s nothing new. I remember talking to a Square-Enix PR after I scored one of their titles poorly. He sighed and said: “I’ll need to bring my yearly score average up now”. Scores have always mattered, it’s just interesting to see why they matter these days.

But the response from many game reviewers has been one of suspicion and indignation. “It’s silly to go by these Internet aggregators,” said one commentator in a discussion on the Quarter to Three forum. “If they want to talk about raising quality and have a metric for that, then pull together only those sites and magazines that matter.”

But while pulling together the stats of those few sites and outlets that ‘matter’ (however one might decide that) might seem like the sensible thing to do, somehow the wisdom of critical crowds seems to work in a supremely effective way when it comes to videogames and one can’t argue with the statistics.

One discrepancy in all of this is the success of casual Wii software (a slice of the market which wasn’t around when the research was carried out) that does not show such a direct correlation between scores and sales. Games like Nintendo’s Mario Party 8 and Take-Two’s Carnival Games scored badly with reviewers but sold extremely well.

However, that fact is of little relevance to EA on this issue. They principally make games for dedicated hobbyist gamers and so those are the only stats/ correlations they’d be particularly interested in.

At this moment in time, the uncanny correlation between the affections of the narrow game reviewer demographic and actual sales is a super useful metric which companies like EA, Activision and Ubisoft must be quite happy with. After all, they can chase profits without alienating their creative staff by doing so. Indeed, while games like MySims are evidence that EA are well aware of the emerging casual market and are putting recourses into it, Riccitiello is talking to his staff today. These are staff who, in the main, work on big hobbyist franchises like Madden, Fifa and Need For Speed, series whose sales are closely following Gameranking/ Metacritic trends. In that context his arguments make sense.

Of course, any ‘power’ that game journalists wield is arguably illusionary. If sales correlate to, but are ultimately unrelated to scores (in other words the two things happen to be instep but neither particularly influences the other) then game reviewers are irrelevant in this context. But if scores do govern sales and reviewers really are opinion formers and indirect salespeople, then the implications are severe. Either way, the current research doesn’t go anywhere far enough to tell.

Typical. The week I publish a post urging readers to listen to This American Life is the week I read that such a recommendation places me in the centre of a young (-ish) white, affluent, middle class stereotype.

Stuff White People Like is a blog that has been going for just over one month but that has already accrued over three million hits. It’s the first anything I’ve seen that satirises my generation/ culture in such a relentlessly precise manner.

Each post cites a thing that “white people like” and then explains the reasons why they like it with a series of cross-references to other posts. Some posts are about ideas and concepts such as how white people like Knowing What’s Best for Poor People, Gentrification or Recycling while others are specifics : Arrested Development, Michel Gondry, Hayao Miyazaki, The Daily Show, How Stereogum is better then Pitchfork and so on.

The site ignores the good in these things in favour of recognising the bandwagon and attempting to explain why it’s rolling so fast, pointing fun at the herd mentality of a selection of people who pride themselves on the pursuit of alternative culture and individualism.

The specifics are often related to the concepts. For example, the blog argues that Arrested Development is popular because it’s a show that was canceled before it ‘jumped the shark’ (a joke the show even made itself) and which received terrible ratings thus ensuring it was never ‘mainstream’. This, in their words, “makes white people love it unilaterally”.

While clearly aimed at an American audience it still pegs the tastes and outlook of many of my British friends, contemporaries and colleagues and, while not all of the items are relevant (going out instead of playing videogames?!) enough of them are applicable enough to make for uncomfortable, if humourous, reading.

My immediate reaction was to think: well, it’s a bit of a misnomer. Most white people aren’t like this and don’t like these things, right? Which is another way of saying, “Hey! That’s not fair!”

In one comment on the site this feeling is echoed: “This blog is very good,” the writer says, “but should be more narrowly titled ‘things affluent or upper middle-class educated white people from liberal backgrounds like’.”

To which someone else replied: “I don’t think you understand how racial humor works. Having probably never been on the receiving end of it, you’re probably confused as hell right now.”

And I guess that’s the writer’s point. Obviously there are loads more white people who don’t look like this than there are who do – and anyone over a certain age will be lost by many of the references – but it is representative of a great many 20s and 30s white graduate professionals, a group that’s never been satirised with any kind of meaningful accuracy since the term Yuppie carried any meaning.

Of course, the level of detail and knowledge displayed in the blog posts on the subject matter (as well as the way in which each is written) makes it quite clear that it takes one to know one, as it were.

Nevertheless, stereotyping always stings when you’re the subject because it says that your tastes, passions and beliefs aren’t unique or chosen but are instead the product of circumstance (upbringing, environment, education, vocation and income) and peer pressure. Nobody wants to be reduced to impersonal predictability, especially in a culture like ours which marries almost endless choice and variety with fierce individualism.

Many of those leaving comments accuse the blog of racism, pointing out that its generalisations would be unacceptable if applied to a (Western) ethnic minority. But I think the joke is that this section of emerging society prides itself on having unpredictable, eclectic and unusual tastes and beliefs. That these writers have demonstrated these tastes and beliefs are quite mainstream and predictable in 2008, before amplifying the point by labeling them under the ludicrously wide banner of ’stuff white people like’ is, in a sometimes awkward way, quite delicious.

This Tex Avery animated short from 1953 sees the cartoon genius presenting how the television might change people’s lives and the features the technology might, in time, come to include.

It’s a fascinating piece of speculative entertainment not least because Avery investigates the ways in which people might interact with their sets rather than just view them as passive objects. This is, of course, the fundamental concept behind TV-based consoles and the fact that Avery manages to predict ( in addition to the idea of widescreen TVs and boxes that can edit out programmed advertising) at least three specific videogame releases of the future, at a time when there was no such things as a computer game, is nothing short of extraordinary.

In particular, at 5:20 we see a businessman so busy at work that he has to pick up a TV-connected rod in order to engage in some fishing from the comfort of his office. This is the exact premise of 1999’s Dreamcast game ‘Get Bass/ Sega Bass Fishing, which famously came bundled with a plastic rod peripheral.

Also note the scene in which a group of card players are joined by a competitor playing from the TV screen – a familiar experience to anyone who has played Uno or Texas Hold ‘Em over Xbox Live.

The cartoon reminds me a little of Nintendo’s current advertising campaigns for the Wii console in that they are all shot from the perspective of the TV set looking out at the players and their various interactions and reactions. Avery’s prophetic vision here is in realising that people get most excited about new, innovative and possibly gimmicky ways in which they can interact with technology – perhaps even moreso than the mere escapism aspect to videogaming.

While many of the ideas in the cartoon are plain silly, presented simply to service a particular joke, I’m sure there are other scenes herein still yet to be replicated in gaming. A hairdressing sim for the Wii, perhaps?

The current buzz surrounding Goldeneye’s will-they won’t-they appearance on Xbox 360’s Live Arcade platform has got gamers keenly debating whether such a re-release would actually be a good thing.

Widely regarded as the finest console-based first person shooter of the 1990s, the unexpectedly good Bond movie tie-in holds a special place in the hearts of gamers-of-a-certain-age. But time’s been unkind to 3D games of the 32/ 64-bit era, especially those first person shooters released before dual stick control was a common feature in game controllers. As a result there are fears that revisiting Severnaya et al will break hearts rather than warm them, no matter how well developer Rare manages to refit the content for a contemporary gaming landscape.

The port has definitely been in production – that much is certain – but rumours abound of a royalty split dispute between Microsoft, Nintendo and Rare that has put the project on hold. However, the game’s memorable theme music was played prior to Microsoft’s GDC keynote two days ago, so, even though there’s no sign of the game on Partnernet, perhaps it is on the way after all.

All this reminiscing about the game reminded me of a talk the game’s producer and director Martin Hollis gave at the 2004 European Developer’s Forum in 2004. In it he examined the reasons behind the unprecedented success of the game (it went on to be the best selling N64 game, dwarfing sales of both Super Mario 64 and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time).

“It would be fair to say that critical expectations were very low. It would also be fair to say that we, the GoldenEye team, didn’t realize this, mercifully. To quote one reviewer: “Everyone was dubious about the prospect of a video game version of a rather ropey Bond movie. The fact that it was going to be a first person shooter on a home console made it all the more likely that this game was going to be poor.” Accordingly, no-one who played it at the show seemed terribly impressed. Worse, most people just walked by without playing.

To date, GoldenEye has sold more than 8 million units. In the US it is the best selling N64 game ever. Ahead of Mario Kart in second place. Ahead of Super Mario 64 in third place. Ahead of Ocarina of Time in fourth place. I consider Mario 64 and Ocarina to be vastly superior to GoldenEye. And both have a better franchise for gaming. People expect Mario and Zelda games to be good. They expect movie licenses to be rubbish. Why did GoldenEye sell better? Why did it sell better than Ocarina? Why did it sell better than Perfect Dark? Why did it sell better than all those other Bond games? Why did it sell better than Doom? And Quake?

A transcript of the talk can be viewed here, on the website of Hollis’s current company, Zoonami, and it really is an essential read.

In particular, this paragraph stands out as an interesting regarding the tension between realism and ‘unrealism’ in crafting enjoyable game mechanics:

It so happens that enemies in GoldenEye can’t see through many windows in the game. The player can see through, and shoot through, but the enemies just won’t see through. The window is opaque to them. This might seem like a bug. It is certainly unrealistic. It is an example of unrealistic gameplay. And, as it happens, it is pretty good gameplay. It means you can spy on people more easily. Which makes sense for a Bond game. And that is fun. Realism isn’t relevant to good gameplay. Only verisimilitude matters.

The art is in knowing what you can get away with. Sometimes as a designer you are surprised how much players don’t object to, for example enemies that can’t see through most windows. Other times, players are very sensitive to unrealism, for example if you shoot someone and somebody else nearby doesn’t react.

Once a week I listen to the latest This American Life podcast and once a week my life becomes a little bit brighter and a little bit better.

A product of Chicago Public Radio, each week the show chooses a theme and tells a variety of stories on that theme. It’s mostly true stories of everyday people, though not always.

In synopsis, the framework sounds a little like Reader’s Digest or something, but in reality the themes are awkward and interesting enough and the stories authentic and nuanced enough to keep well away from any heavy-handed identikit moralising.

It’s a tricky one to sell to friends, especially as most of mine aren’t American and who, thanks to the show’s name, presume that they’re at least 3, 500 miles wide of the target demographic. But people’s stories, underneath the details, are usually universal in theme and, because these ones are so brilliantly presented and told, the podcast should be at the very top of your weekly listening line-up wherever you’re from.

Every episode has something I want to share: the story of the terminally-ill man and his investment in a bench-pressing snowman; the deeply affecting story of the US soldier who joined his university’s Muslim society in an effort to exorcise the demons that terrorised him post a tour of duty in Iraq; the girl caught in the 7/7 London tube bomb who took on the conspiracy theorists who claim the event and her very existence are fraud; the young girl who wrote to the mayor of New York twenty years ago because she wanted to know why her parents were splitting up and she didn’t know who else to turn to.

Find the podcast on iTunes or go here to download the back catalogue. If you enjoy this website and like some of the things I like, you will not be disappointed.

For a teaser, here’s a story from last week’s podcast. It’s a talk Malcom Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, gave about his tenure as a journalist at The Washington Post. Desperately out of his depth and stationed on the Business desk, he explains how a simple mistake he made in his first published story – whereby he read the profits posted by a multinational as a loss – caused a significance dip in their share value on the stock market.

Rather than learning to be more diligent from this incident, Gladwell instead began to understand the power a journalist could wield in making the news by twisting its reporting. It’s a great and funny monologue (if a little atypical of TAL’s usual style) and you can listen to it below.

“…the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

Ecclesiastes offers its melancholy perspective on the outcome of the next-generation video format war following this morning’s announcement from Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation, that the company is to cease production of HD-DVD.

Recently, Ste Curran and I scoured Brighton’s charity shops in search of musical toys suitable for circuit bending.

The upstairs of one pound-store we visited was filled with plastic pirate swords that were triggering their swishing sound effects at random. As we’d pick one off the rack to check that the trigger button wasn’t stuck, another would fire off on the next shelf.

Soon there was a cacophony of metallic clangs and swishes. We just stood there laughing, partly because it was ridiculous, partly because misfiring technology is always a bit unsettling.

Still, in terms of terrifying, crazy sound-effect making toys, even that episode falls far short of Japanese circuit-bender Kaseo’s Pikachu orchestra. If music can trigger epileptic fits, sufferers should definitely stay away.

You can see more of Kaseo’s circuit-devilry here.

After the muted explosion its long white neck held fast, a single red badge of blood the only interruption on an otherwise pure sheet of feathers.

If this was Looney Toons the goose would have staggered like a drunk, it’s head swerving with drama before one upturned webbed foot swung 180 degrees around and the bird landed on its back, two x marks for eyes.

But this was real-life death which is altogether slower and sadder. There was a staggering but only after what seemed an eternity of pause. Eventually, perhaps aware of the rifle pellet now lodged in its brain, the goose took three or four faltering steps forward, bowed its sore head to the ground and sank without pomp into an eternal sitting position, free at last of its disease-racked body.

Everybody remembers the first animal they saw die. Actually, that might not be true but for me, at that moment, everybody remembers the first animal they saw die.

I was eleven and helping out on a farm owned by friends of my grandparents. A working farm, it was additionally an educational institution open to the public for eight months of the year. While I wasn’t paid and the work was hard, it came with the sizable benefit of getting to feel far superior to the other eleven-year-olds around who were mere visitors. I’d make myself busy in the animal pens, moving straw or brushing coats while a much older employee next to me addressed the assembled crowd to explain how long shire horses live for or why badgers matter.

Then came a different and heavier kind of responsibility. One of the older boys took me to one side, revealed that there was an ill goose that needed shooting, and asked if I’d wanted to accompany him down to the bottom of the hill for the impromptu execution. He had an air-rifle and the daring semi-sneer of an older teenager, the most irresistible of persuasive tools to any boy teetering on the edge of puberty.

On the long walk down my imagination sketched gross and vivid pictures of supreme violence: the deafening bang of a crimson firework, a fountain of blood repainting the grass. In reality the shot was fired from point blank range with barely a pfft: an anticlimactic Downfall to my preconceived Die Hard.

Minutes later the boy handed over a now heavy dustbin liner, pointed to a spade and nodded at a nearby field before wandering back up towards the farm leaving me to work out the details of the subdued aftermath. This was my first funeral and my heart was as heavy for this animal as any heart yet to be truly broken by a death would be. I chose the spot carefully: far enough down the hill that no eleven-year-old visitors would be upset by the grisly spectacle, but near enough within running distance should it transpire the goose was still alive.

Then questions. Does one bury the bird in the plastic bag, to act as a kind of extreme-budget coffin, or out, where it can more easily be digested by the local bugs and maggots? And how to mark the grave of a goose? A lone feather monument stood proud in the ground or a webbed-footprint imprinted in the top-soil? Desperate to get things right, as only a kid brought up in the urban shelter of London could be desperate to get the burial of an diseased goose right, I plumped for the former: out of bag and, having patted down the soil on top of the cadaver, a white feather to mark the spot.

Crosslegged and sweaty next to the grave, I breathed in a deep sense of mortality, doubly proud at having witnessed and then cleaned up after death. And there I sat quiet, an inch closer to manhood, ten thousand miles short of true mourning.