Picnic Where Possible

We've got ALUMINIUM FOIL, therefore it is THE FUTURE

“Hey, Kez, why the hell do you never write anything for your blog anymore?”

Well, kind enquirer, the short answer to that is: because I lead at least three entirely separate lives, and none of them have much writing time. I am Keza MacDonald, final-year languages student, with a full fourth-year Masters student’s load of dissertation reading and fascinating but time-consuming courses on Third Reich literature, dislocation and Jewish identity, and fin-de-siecle Austrian novellas. I am Keza MacDonald, freelance journalist, buried under exciting deadlines and frantically upping my workload to keep myself busy after May, trying to remember my honorific Japanese to write nice letters to game developers who might say interesting things for my articles. And I am Keza MacDonald, reliable friend/girlfriend/daughter, travelling from one end of the country to the other every week or so trying to keep everybody in my life happy at once.

(This is not counting Keza MacDonald, endearingly incompetent world-adventurer and obsessive language-collector, who has been on holiday since I got back from Berlin. She’ll be back when I head to China in July.)

I am not complaining! Don’t get me wrong, brother. I said just down there, back in July, that having an unmanageable life is the only thing that makes the very concept of living manageable for me, and if things were any other way I’d probably be bored and decide to move to Argentina to learn Spanish. Actually I’d DEFINITELY be putting plans in place to do that if I wasn’t still sick, after nearly a year of doctors shrugging their shoulders at me and claiming I’ll get better at some point in the next half-decade.

2010 is here, people. My generation mourns. The decade of our youth is over. This time next decade we’re all going to be decrepit, if we haven’t all died in a suffocating cloud of our own smug thanks to the increasing pervasiveness of things like Twitter. I refuse to give in, but I will be giving Picnic Where Possible a bit of a makeover when I have a bit of time, now that it’s not a travel blog anymore. People are already calling it the website reinvention of the decade!

It’s a natural fact of being human that we perceive time as linear. The way we see life, things start and end, and progress along a certain path, and we do things that enable us to prepare for other things that result in yet more things down the line. I surely can’t be alone in finding this the most terrifying thing about existing- admitting that there is a future, and that it will turn up unbidden. I see a lot of the things that normal, functioning adult human beings do as concessions to the linearity of time - procreating, especially - and their bravery is beyond me. When is anyone ever ready to admit that the future exists? That’s admitting we won’t be around someday, and Christ, who in the hell is ever ready for that.

Keep doing things that trip up your narrative, that would confuse the hell out of your biographer, that create lacunae for literary critics to puzzle over - if life absolutely *has* to be a novel, with a beginning and an end, make it a postmodernist headfuck with a metanarrative and interlocking plot threads and no fixed setting. God damn it, people, we have to be interesting. Having an unmanageable life is the only thing that makes the very concept of living manageable. Make no concessions to the linearity of time, and it’s got to be possible to break its power in some small way, even if we can never break death. Who knows. Maybe one day we will.

Well! Here we are again, back in Berlin. It’s like I’ve just stepped back in time to last summer; my feelings for the city haven’t changed, nor has the feeling of perpetual excitement I enjoy just wandering around it. Japan, now that it’s Over, feels like it might never have happened - like it was a nine-month LSD trip, and I’ve been lying in a  clean white room for the best part of a year babbling to myself about shukudai and purikura, only to be redeposited onto familiar streets about two stone lighter and with short white-blonde hair.

I look at some of these images that I’ve stuck all over my laptop and *seriously* wonder whether any of it was real.

9/4. That wasn't even two months ago.

Giving myself time to be introspective, or write introspectively, is dangerous for my mental wellbeing at the moment, so I’m going to have to leave y’all hanging for now and venture out in search of a dinnertime currywurst and some bedsheets. My flat is FUCKING AWESOME. It’s round the corner from Oranienburger Strasse, which is the middle of everything. Let me know if you want to come visit, I’ve appropriated a stray mattress for my room for people to pass out on.

“Nestled amongst the established Beatmania, Pop’n Music, DanceDance, GuitarFreaks and DrumMania machines in the Konami rhythm-action corner of Japanese arcades, you can now find newcomer to the beatmatching scene in the form of jubeat - or Ubeat, as it will be called in the US and Europe to avoid any uncomfortable ambiguity as to the pronunciation - a gorgeous machine that looks like something out of a seventies vision of The Future, and offers a purer rhythm-action thrill than any of its competitors.”

Have a read, especially if you like your rhythm-action. I’m going miss jubeat. And everything else in the arcades.

T minus ONE WEEK until I leave this neon clusterfuck of a country. Expect me. I will be coming to squeeze pints and interesting stories from you over the next few months.

This was a real labour of love. Few games have captured me so utterly. Demon’s Souls is the best thing I’ve played all year by far.

“Demon’s Souls is absolutely compelling; dark, detailed, unforgiving, creatively cruel. It gets under your skin and becomes a personal obsession, daring you to probe further into its worlds, fall for more of its traps and overcome more of its impossible challenges; it slaps you in the face with your own incompetence and dares you to overcome it. It’s stoic, uncompromising, difficult to get to know, but also deep, intriguingly disturbed and perversely rewarding. You can learn to love Demon’s Souls like few other games in the world. But only if you’re prepared to give yourself over to it.”

Another one for Eurogamer. Wonderful that I’m suddenly getting a tonne of import commissions four weeks before I leave!

Inbetween playing Demon’s Souls, playing Demon’s Souls, not eating, and playing Demon’s Souls, I have found the time to write a preview of Final Fantasy XIII. Lord only knows how I keep up this hectic lifestyle.

“Playing the Japanese demo of Final Fantasy XIII - released in Japan today as part of Advent Children Complete - you’re struck by something: this is the first Final Fantasy universe to be created with years’ worth of titles in mind rather than just one or two. It shows in the scope and detail of the world. It’s a gorgeous, colourful and imaginative science-fiction fantasy; what Star Wars might have looked like if it had been designed by the Japanese, seeping polish and style from every pore. The character design might be vaguely familiar from previous entries in the series, but the world, with its enormous, shining biomechs and fighter spacecraft, emphatically is not.”

Now: DEMON’S SOULS

Ever have one of those moods where you just wonder what in the hell you are doing with your life? I’ve done more with mine than any 20-year-old I know - hell, most *people* I know - and yet here I am, predictable as sin, wondering if any of it is worth it, or what it’s all leading towards.

People give themselves simple aims. They want to be happy, or comfortable, or rich, architects, engineers, mothers. The only thing I ever wanted to be was a writer, and that doesn’t feel like an aim to me – it’s a compulsion. It’s not something you can work towards, it’s something that spills out from within you at random, something you can’t even control half the time, and you just have to hope that what comes out of you is good enough or useful enough to fashion into something that some publisher might want to sell.

I’ve been looking around now at other professional outlets for it than videogames journalism, and it’s depressing me. Journalists can be fucking awful writers. Most newspapers I read aren’t worth much more than the chip-paper they’re printed on, and the articles within are so throwaway it pains me – bloated opinions and misconstrued facts pumped into a 2,000 word puff piece about the latest thing that idiots care about, discarded after the cursory five-minute glance it gets from subscribers taking their morning shits.

I’m beginning to think that the only world I could function in long-term would have to be as idiot-free as I could make it, and find myself called more and more towards academia as a result – despite the fact that there more blustering, self-important idiots in the academic world than in most other fields you could care to name. It’s at least counterbalanced by that higher average intelligence, and the sort of competitive atmosphere that I would really take to.

The fact that I’m going to be leaving Japan in eight weeks and graduating this time next year is making me uncomfortably obsessed with the future. I’m devoid, currently, of any concrete thing that I want from the immediate future, anything definite to be working towards, and so I’m finding myself fixated on the things I know I don’t want – well-paid, boring job, kids, a life that’s too expensive to maintain, the same old shit that few people claim to want and everybody seems to end up with – and how to avoid ending up stuck in that same rut. Couldn’t be more pathetically predictable if I tried, here, could I? I think there must have been more emo than usual in my morning sake.

I forgot what the word ‘opine’ means today. Had to look it up. The more you busy yourself with foreign languages, the more your brain begins to feel like swiss cheese . You lose vital pieces of information or memory, and don’t realise you’ve done so until you reach for it one day and find that it’s no longer on the shelf.

People who know nothing about languages - especially maths or science students with a superiority complex, in my experience - seem to think of the undertaking as basically a memory exercise. You have a big list of words, and once you’ve memorised all those words, hey, you can speak the language. This is the misinformed notion that sells those Learn Spanish In Ten Hours tapes you see in the back of bookshops or on the advertisement pages of the Daily Mail, because anybody who had ever tried to learn a language before would know that the most you can do in ten hours is memorise a bunch of words. Learning a language is about understanding the framework of grammar and communication that those words fit into, building up those edifices from the foundations in your own mind. The actual words, the vocabulary, that’s like furniture. If you don’t have a strong building to arrange them in, all you have is a some stuff in a pile on the street.

With European languages, once you’ve built one structure, you can use the same materials for another. Build up an understanding of French and you can start building Spanish with the same scaffolding; same goes for German and Swedish or Danish. Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian and other notoriously difficult languages use a completely different blueprint. You have to go back to the foundations again, and it’s demoralising and irritating and makes you feel stupid and incapable every single day. But once that framework is built up in your mind, you never lose it. It gets dusty and unkempt, and the furniture within gets broken or stolen or lost, but you can always get it back - that’s what dictionaries are for. The fundamental grammar of a language, once you’ve learned it, never leaves you. Give me a dictionary and I can still translate Latin, despite the fact I’ve barely looked at it in five years. The framework is still there in my mind, even though I’ve forgotten most of the vocabulary.

This all gets a bit annoying when you start misplacing bits of your English furniture. Part of the reason I’ve found it hard to write things here lately is that it takes far more effort to find the words I’m looking for.

I reviewed Noby Noby Boy for IGN. It was the second review on the Whole Internet when it was published on Thursday, and it seems most people are still to get around to trying to condense its appeal into words.

“Noby Noby Boy is going to provoke arguments for months between people who claim to Get It and people who don’t, which is ridiculous because - in truth - there is nothing to get. Once you’ve accepted that, Noby Noby Boy becomes one of the most soothing, effortlessly playable things you’ve ever likely had the pleasure to experience. It’s a surreal and simple sandbox with no hidden subtleties or complex underlying system of progress and reward, no contrived meaning. Its appeal purely lies with its gentle, happy-go-lucky lunacy, and that’s what makes it so bafflingly absorbing.”

Noby Noby was a difficult one. It took a good long while to click, but once it did there was no looking back; it absolutely captivated me. Playing it now is like taking time to get in touch with my inner child. It soothes me like no game other than Guitar Hero usually does.

See, I do write things sometimes. Just, er, not here, at the moment. My review of White Knight Chronicles is up over at Eurogamer. It’s not half bad, y’know. The game, that is, although hopefully the review’s not half bad either.

“Despite being marketed as The Ultimate Next-Gen RPG in Japan, plastered all over billboards and convenience stores for months leading up to release, White Knight Chronicles turns out to be unexpectedly lighthearted. It’s a game with birds that can inexplicably project holographs from their eyes, drunken midget furries lying around on farms, airships, princesses and ridiculous giant-robot transformation sequences, replete with awesomely wailing J-Rock guitars. Thank f*** for a game with a sense of humour in place of misplaced pomposity.”

Coming soon: adventures in a Kyoto game bar!