my BBC website photo

http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/outdoors/galleries/gallery044/03/#title

educating new gamers

It was nice to get out and back into networking again.  Hanna invited me to be one of a roundtable at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival (it may have had another similar name; it certainly had a few more; names of corporations and events are sooo confusing nowadays.)  My colleague Daniel planned to attend all four days, but I was just in for the Tuesday afternoon event on Games Education.

What struck me about the event was the lack of knowledge about games education spouted by the speakers, despite being profs.  This is worrying as it shows a lack of cohesion in games education.  if people can stand up at conferences and say things which are frankly incorrect, then there is a lot of non-knowledge out there, potentially.

One speaker said, 'a games company is more likely to take someone with a poor 2nd from UCL over someone with a first from Abertay.'  This is simply wrong.  But, allow me to explain the speaker's thinking as well as the real situation.  UCL is the key.  University College London (one of the semi-independant University of London Colleges) has a great reputation in 3D graphics dating back to the great Mel Slater's work.  In my old virtual reality days I once spent 30 minutes watching this man being unable to work a projector at a conference at UCL.  That convinced me of his greatness as the projector was clearly so far below his level of thinking (no sarcasm, a quite true observation.)  His team did great things.

SO, the 'UCL is much better than Abertay' thinking goes along this line: UCL does much, much better 3D graphics programming training than Abertay so its graduates are much much better for the games industry and the games industry knows it.

The first point is true.  UCL students are much much better 3D graphics programmers.  The other two are nonsense.  Why?  Because writing games is about a potent mix of being talented, knowledgeable and creative.  Given a bucket of graduateness, even if the UCL graduate has a bigger bucket being smarter and better educated (perhaps), you cannot get games knowledge, a sense of 'fun' and console knowledge into the UCL bucket as it is already full of 3D grapchis programming.

In short, the UCL graduate doesn't know what a game IS and so is unable to create a game.  Employers know this.  They don't want an employee who can write amazing code to make clouds move in real-time if these coulds ar superfluous to the game or - worse still - boring.

The top-flight Abertay (West, Bolton, Teeside, John Moores, Derby, etc.) graduate knows his skills and knows what they are for.  So, in the real world it is the games programming graduate who is employed over he mere graphics programming graduate.

This is, to the elitist world of universities, non-sensical.  But it is exactly what is happening.  For example, to bring it home, many of our honours (before they are classified as 1st, 2nd, etc.) graduates get jobs before they complete their course.  AT this time we have two of this year's graduates without jobs and one of the companies who took one graduate have asked us for everyone we have left to offer them jobs too.  Without even interviewing them.  Why?  Because it is the clear and relevant skills that these graduates have which puts them ahead of the pack.

West's BSc CGT degree is possibly unique as being the only one where all the honours graduates get jobs before the start of the next academic year.  This is a simple fact, and I doubt whether it is true of UCL's computing graduates.

The second, related, shibboleth mentioned was that new universities only train while old universities educate.  This isn't true & certainly isn't true in my experience at West (and some other new universities.)  The reason it isn't true is related, I suspect, to the fact that the academics at the new universities came through the old universities some time ago.  As one education academic put it to me: academics are downwardly mobile!

So, in my case I got my first degree at Glasgow University (founded 1451) where I studied Mathematical and Computer Sciences, then, after some time as a consultant I read for a research degree in Computational Science at St Andrews (founded 1413) and am plodding my through a doctorate in education at Edinburgh (founded 1582) in the very building where the Act of Union between Scotland and England was signed back in 1707.  Ohhhh.  Sooooo ooooooolllllldddd.  Prof Connolly has a 1st in Maths from Glasgow, writes the definitive book on databases. 

You see, we teach education because we were taught education.  However, I'm not hugely interested in what stuff I can get into my students' brains.  I want to know what they can do with it and what it means to them.  This is the trend in modern education - medicine, teaching, etc. - to get educated and practicable graduates over the mere I-can-spout-Ovid and the I-can-fix-that-washer schools of teaching.

So, a good university teaches facts, the application of facts, and the udnerstanding of the meaning of the application of fact.  That creates a graduate who can do, understand what he is doing, and choose what to do next.  As such, there is probably not much difference between a new and an old university in what is taught and how it is taught.  They are more like overlapping venn diagrams.

The final one was over the need to interface with industry.  I'v already talked of this before following Sony's brickbats at us.  The people from the old universities just could not understand what we meant when we said Sony et al simply weren't helping us enough.

I think the reason is that our aims and foci are quite different.  An old uni academic has his own aims.  We have ours in the new universities.  These personal aims are quite, quite different.  The old uni prof creates work for publication, peer review, pushing the field forward using a budget he gains from research and other bodies.  His aim is to push forward the boundaries of knowledge through in-depth investigation.  He is, at core, a researcher.

The new university academic is obsessed with educating his students well.  We simply do not have money for any real research, so we concentrate upon creating the best graduates we can.  This is also because, yes, our students do tend to be more B's and C's than the new university's A's and B's students.  Their students come from better backgrounds of parental support and high school level education; more likely to be confident upper middle class - sociologically B1's and B2's- than our mix of lower middle class and aspiring working class - B3's and C1's.

So we need to create commercially relevant graduates.  In this, yes, we are training people (but so are academic medics, engineers, teachers, etc.)  To do this we need the right equipment and knowledge.  And it is Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo (and Apple, Sun, etc.) who hold this knowledge.  And it is they who simply will not impart any of it the the universities.

Yes, it is nice when Sony or Microsoft give some bit of kit to a research team at Edinburgh to play some research on.  But, we need 20 Wii dev kits and the same number of PS3, iPhone, iPod, etc. kits would be great.  Plus short courses for our staff to go on get quickly around the creating of games for these devices.

Ask Nintendo fo help?  Got a set of t-shirts on that one.  No joy.  Ask Sony for help?  Once upon a time they gave us Yaroze boxes for PS1 programming.  Pretty poor clunkware, and easily cloned by students, but it was a real breakthrough.  Ask Microsoft for help with games development and they go very surprisingly quiet and closed.  Frankly, I have had more help from Apple than Microsoft, but then Apple drop Java and go for the ancient objective C (I'm-Steve-Jobs-and-I-once-had-a-computer-called-nextwhich-ran-this-programming-language-which-bombed).  Apple is a country run by a dictator.

We need help from the games industry in the same way as medical education needs help from hospitals and education colleges need help from schools.  Without this we are making bricks without straw.  it can be done - and is being done.  We are doing it, as are quite a few others.  But it is this more than anything else which explains why so many universities are producing unemployable games graduates.

You see, it IS all Sony's fault.  I hope their brick hits a plate glass window and rebounds back on them.  In fairness, it should.

So, back to the conference.  Was it a waste of time.  In some ways, yes.  It was poorly attended, poorly advertised.  There was a lack of kids and students there.  And the big games companies had voted with their feet no to attend.  I only met two other games academic at the 'games education' event.  One works in the floor above me in Paisley and the other was a music/games psychologist researcher from Glasgow Cale.

So, poorly attended and lots of rubbish talked.  (I even talked some rubbish too about Skillset, but was corrected by a useful chap in the small audience!)

But we made some good new connections with new people in games.  So, it was worth it.  But, please, everyone who went there, forget (almost) everything you heard from the podium ...

explosions

I got two invitations yesterday to video games events.  One was from the inexhaustible Brian Baglow who is organising a four-day event in Edinburgh.  The other was from a person wanting me to attend a similar event in Nottingham.  I also got invited to a one-day event at The Lighthouse to do with educating people in the arts (in which I, and they, include video games).  And on Tuesday I am speaking at a roundtable event at another Scottish Government organised event on video games training.  Oh, and I also got an email from an old buddy, Sheila Robinson for a meet-up and a chat (Sheila got me to to go to Canada twice to speak on video games at the Baddeck conference.)

In the back of my head, I also need to talk with Allan Gauld of BT, Andy of Specialmove, Frank at Govan High, my colleagues at West, and a Biblical host of others about video games.  While avoiding collisions with ex-colleagues with whom I remain persona non grata at best.

I have given up attending Baddeck, VSMM events, and others.  I haven't even got round to attending E3, GDC or others.

Explosions.  Way back in 1996 when I was first asked to do something about the state of education for the games industry by old buddy former student Dave Jones (of GTA, Lemmings and other fames), the games industry was compact and simple.  The Sony Playstation had happened and everyone was turning and staring at us.  At the launch party for the first named degree in games something extraordinary happened: the press turned up.  There followed weeks of radio, television and press interviews until I called a halt and stopped talking to them.

You're probably aware of the Big Bang Theory.  You know, the universe popped out of nothing in a humungous explosion that created time, space, matter and politics.  Well, I sometimes feel that I have been in a Slightly Smaller Bang.

In 1996 there was some stuff going on, obviously, but easily enough to keep up with.  In 2008 I live in awe of Frank Kermode who can and does watch every movie made, apparently.  In video games you would need a set of parallel lives to play every game ever written, plus a back-up staff of scores to hunt down and set up each of the games.

The now-gone, veteran broadcaster, Alistair Cook, in one of his weekly Letter from America broadcasts on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday mornings, talked about a similar problem in just trying to watch TV in the USA.  The listings come in something like a telephone book.  If the entire book was read, digested, reflected upon and then decisions made on which programmes to watch, half the time would be lost that the book covers.  Also, there are hundreds of TV channels all broadcasting simultaneously.

Alistair's question was: how do you get on top of all this stuff.  You see, Frank Kermode can watch (almost) every movie made as: they are transferred onto media that still work today, they are relatively short.  My doubts with Frank is that he can't see every movie on the Heisenberg Principle: as he can't know about every mode ever made, some get lost, what is a movie (is that accidental capturing of my feet walking on my mobile phone a movie, or is a movie not a movie until it is published publicly?)

What Alistair said about US TV, which was part of his life as a broadcaster/watcher of US life, was that you pick what you can, how you can, and report on what you have seen.  Frank may not be actively doing this, but somehow his universe is selecting what he sees.

So, as a games academic, what can I learn about keeping up with the games industry?  Well, certain things are givens, like those unmovable blocks of pre-allocated time in a Gantt chart.  My givens are: teaching (15 hours pw, 24 weeks per annum), teaching preparation/marking/students-support (about 2/3 of the above), R&R (7 weeks per annum, 2 hours per day average), sleep (8 hours per diem).  Realistically that leaves about 2-3 hours per day in working time for everything else.

I use time on trains to work, that gives me back 1-2 hours per day.  I must make visits to partners in schools, colleges, government, acadaemia, etc.  All said and done, that leaves NO time to visit games companies and games shows.  And very little time to play games.

Of course, I could R&R on video games, but that isn't R&R, that's work, if you take my drift.  One of my fave R&Rs these days is going to the gym.  Lost 2st (30lbs, 60kg) in the past couple of years and enjoy the relaxation after in the sauna.  That's R&R.

And, talking around fellow academics I find a similar tale: no time to keep up with the games industry as life, work and family take up all the available time.  This is a real problem.  At the validation of the new Games Development degree we were instructed to spend more time visiting games companies, perhaps being seconded.  But, there are very few real games academics out there, and the few of us there are are too thinly spread to do this.  Keeping up with the now tens of billions of dollars/pounds/euros of the games industry with its household names, is just too hard for the few academics working in the UK's universities and colleges today.

I used to say to students that in Computing we could overturn every principle of Physics.  Every one except time.  Time beats us every, well, time.  I remember generating animations for a game.  After a couple of hours, with a week to go, I knew we didn't have enough time as the frame generation rate was too slow, even with the farm running 24/7.  It was a real feeling of despair that with one week to go we needed one and a half weeks.

I have ten years of teaching left in acadaemia (unless they farm me off as an old fart before then.)  Unless we make changes to how we work the UK games academics will become ever more detached from their subject.  Because the subject is exploding in complexity, content and age, while we are standing still, at best, and letting it get out of our limited grasp.

This requires changes to how we work as academics and to how the games industry works with us.  

Which brings me back to my event schedule over the next few days.  The roundtable in Edinburgh is about Sony's criticisms of UK games teaching.  They have called for centres of excellence to be set up.  I have a couple of problems with this.  First, what Sony know about UK acadaemia can be written on the back of a fag packet (if such a thing can still be found today!)  'Cos Sony never come into universities and see what we do, any more than we go to them, yada, yada.

Now, the Sony's and Microsoft's are huge corps.  I am also small beer in a megacorp that is the new West of Scotland uni.  And UWS is a very small part of the Scottish Government's education spend.  I can achieve very little in terms of change (that too would take time I aint got), but Sony, West and the Scots Government do have that scope and option.

If UK acadaemia is to catch up with the games industry and truly become a centre of excellence in games teaching then those who have the power, funding, time and resources to get this fixed must act.  I am a positive-minded chap, it isn't too late, and there is a lot of positive mindset about this.  Nobody buys that 'centre of excellence' PC cr*p.  Quality is real, not in the packaging.

Sony may have done us a favour in opening up the debate.  I for one will be entirely honest, because its only in facing problems we can get them fixed (its the old engineer and scientist in me!)  I reckon this is an issue worth returning to every year and seeing what progress we are making.

on the importance of uncertainty

There is a creed doing the rounds today that some things are really, really true and everything else is not.  You'd reckon it was an uber-religious thing heading off from the wackier corners of the worlds of belief - scientology, Islamism, etc. - but you'd be wrong.  And, as a scientist, it worries me that we, the scientists, are now wanting to be seen as The High Priests Of All That Is True.

We are such complex things, human beings.  My own little corner of the world is 'playing games', and I love how you cannot get your head around how complex all of this is.  As a Computer Scientist I like to think we have an advantage over the Natural Scientists (like Biologists, Chemists, Physicists, etc.)  Actually, a set of advantages.

One is that we are still in a nascent era of our technology.  Computing only goes back, really, to the 1950's.  Video games only to the 1970's, and to the 1980's as a recognised marketplace.  That is all within my own lifetime.  If we ask the question: where will Comp Sci and Video Games be in 10, 20 or 30 years time, we frankly don't have  scoobie.  We can guess, pontificate, argue and discuss; but we don't and can't know.

The future, you see, ain't yet writ.  Heisenberg kinda said that we can never know more than 50% of the causes of anything.  Now, if we can't know 50%++ of what is going on, we can't make a reasoned guess as to where it is all going.  It's a bit like hitting a ball with 99.9% accuracy.  After 10m it may be +/-5cm from target.  After 100m it is +/-50cm of target.  After 1km it is +/-1m off target.  After 100km it is +/- 100m off target.  And, this to a 95% accuracy (i.e. there is a 5% chance we are more than .1% out.)

Guessing the future is for fortune tellers, not for scientists.  As Computer Scientists we can be ever so 'umble on this one.  Will computers ever 'think'?  No idea.  Will we have direct brain->computer comms?  No idea.  Will my wristwatch be as powerful as a Cray in 20 years time?  On past guesswork, mebbes, but I really don't have a scoobie on this one either.  Nor does anyone else.

It's nice to be in an area of amazing flux.  Video games have rapidly gone from annoying little things that play on pathetic boxes, up to today's astounding graphics and music explosions that last for hours on a box a million times more powerful than the one that took men to the moon.  But, where will we be in 10, 20 or 30 years time?  Not a clue.

When I started in Computing, back in 1976, I could see even ten years later that it was a far more exciting place to be than, say, Law, Banking or even the Biology I originally decided upon studying.  Why pick on Biology?  because it has got too big for its tiny little boots and is making unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable claims to absolute truth.  And this just isn't the place of any science which is, by definition, a study of knowledge, not theosophical pontification.

Computing Science does have its nuttier ends.  There's a chap in Cambridge (the town, not the Uni) who thinks people are machines and can, using replacement surgery, live forever.  We are, you see, just like computers and everything can be replaced, in a kinda blood'n'guts/cum/PC World kinda way.  He forgets the uncertainty of our knowledge on humans, medicine, pain, psychology, sociology, surgery, etc.

Claiming certainty is something we must never do, IMHO.  the problem with this claim is that it is, ipso facto, a certainty.  kinda like 'I disagree with everything you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'  These are both contradictory statements.  But, they are, nonetheless right.

Computers are slaves.  You program them; they jump.  The link is amazing when you consider just how impossibly complex the high level language code, the operating systems code and the hardware wiring of a video game system is; more complex than anyone can ever understand.  But, these are just wires and electrons, nothing more.  And we know this because we were there when they were created, we designed them, we upgrade and replace them.  Sorry, Will Smith, it is You Robot, never Thou Robot, or, I Robot.

Not everything else in the universe is not humanly created.  Allow me to rephrase that: much else in the universe is humanly created.  Our societies have grown from small villages of families to today's mega-metropolises.  Back in Roman times the population of Britain was around 1m, today it is 60m.  Greater London is now effectively 30m people of all races, faiths, languages, moralities, diseases, social statuses, etc.  Greater London is effectively a mcrocosm of The World.

This is a human creation, by design, accident, population growth and immigration (some legal, some not).  So, the Tory Mayor Boris Johnson is happy to be seen dancing at the Gay Pride festival; incongruous.  Can anyone understand Greater London?  Can anyone understand Britain, Europe, the USA, Canada, Russia, Japan?  Can anyone understand Upper Skelmorlie (where I live!) or the University of The West of Scotland (where I work)?  No.

So, we have here humanly created institutions that are impossibly complex and incomprehensible as totalities.  This is called, of course, Sociology.  But, to beat another bat, this early C20th creation has a long way to go to even begin to make a start in understanding what people are doing with other people.  Anthropologists help a bit.  As do Psychologists.

My father was a Civil Engineer.  He built roads.  He was part of the teams who built the M8 through Glasgow.  An utterly brilliant road which goes straight through the city, with branches off, allowing access to any part of the city within 20 minutes of the M8.  Brilliant.  Back at the ranch in 2008, we have a road that clogs utterly for 2-3 hours a day every day.  Traffic travels so slowly that you can walk across the busiest city road bridge in Europe in perfect safety.

If we ask the question: is the M8 a disaster?, we cannot even begin, however, to answer the question.  Like the Hitch Hiker's Guide to The Galaxy's search for the ultimate question and answer, we don't understand what is happening, and can't relate it to what we want to understand.  'Is the M8 a disaster?' is simply not a question that has any validity in terms of ever being able to find any useful answer.  We can philosophise and explore the question, which may prove helpful in planning a future M8 strategy, but the M8 simply is.  The M8 is.  It is as open to question as the moon, the stars and the sea.

This is called 'metaphysics', posing and trying to answer stupid questions.  Great mental fun, but totally pointless in terms of anything useful being produced in terms of an answer.

In Computing Science we have our own: will computers think?  will PS3 be a success?  will Nintendo abandon games and go for sports training machines?  will Microsoft drop the XBox financial disaster and go all out for MS Office?  There are a host of unanswerables, perhaps even imponderables in every science, and we have ours.

So, back to the Biology bat.  I studied Biology and Zoology as part of my 1st degree at Glasgow University.  It is a subject often called science-for-girls as it lacks much depth and complexity.  No need to get your head round n-dimensional sub-atomic backwards-in-time-facing forces and particles here.  No need to handle probability states of matter in solutions and increasingly dodgy models of the universe (my Chemist son gives the Atomic Table a few decades more, but that is all; he has 3 Chemistry degrees, BTW.)

So, just why do some Biologists now find themselves getting us all a bad name, peddling certainties we aren't equipped to push?  As they are part of the human domain, I have no certain answers.  It could be a childhood phobia, a feeling of inadequacy bundled up as megalomania, an idleness caused by a dull field, a lack of understanding of field boundaries; whatever.

What I do know is that uncertainty is part and parcel of human understanding and the world we live in.  I don't know really how we got here in Comp Sci, despite my three degrees, 30 years and some not insignificant work in the field with some amazing people.  Nor do i know where we will be in the future.  But, that doesn't bother me as the nature of Science is to explore the unknown and seek to rational explanations that are supported by the data available.

It is not the role of Science to go beyond our boundaries and to risk bringing ridicule, eventually, upon the wider scientific community as some have become ever so keen to do.

on peace and quiet

Just back from four days in Barra.  Where?  Its the most southerly inhabited island in the outer hebrides off the Atlantic coast of Scotland.  Its a wee gem of an island with lots of unique features.  I know, this is always said and regularly an exaggeration, but Barra is unique.  The island is ten miles round it by road, beautiful white beaches of silica-calcium sand which are mediterranean blue in the sun, the world's only airport that is a beach, a growing population of locals and young returners, a strong Gaelic language and unbroken Catholic heritage since St Barr brought the faith to the island, prosperous, clean, friendly and welcoming.

I had thought of telling no-one as it is too precious a gem to share, but that would have been selfish; probably.  

These were four days of sun, spectacular views, sitting still, standing around, drawing, photography, chatting, eating, drinking and sleeping.  A wee bit of heaven on earth.

Now, I hear you say, "John - isn't this a video games blog?"  Aye. you're right, it is.  So, what do four days of r&r have to say about the world of video gaming.  Well, a few things.  Way back when I started video gaming, sitting in pubs at Space Invaders table-tops, pushing orange/red buttons as the audio went haerk-haerk then haerk-haerk-haerk  beneath the spilt beer, I seemed to like fast games.  Tank Attack was weird, but fast'n'fun.  PONG! was, frankly, fast but dull.  

Anyhoo, at some time I couldn't do the fast games any more.  All that rapid reaction wrist'n'thumb-flicking stuff set my nerves a-jangle.  Was it old age?  Was it been-it-seen-it mode?  Whatever it was I found myself more into engrossing entertainment rather than quick-fix stuff.  But, very few video games did this at all, despite well.

Wolfenstein, DOOM and Quake were reminiscent of studies in the barf zone in my virtual reality research work.  Everything went too quick.  Army of Two has this also, with men running up mountain paths at ridiculous speeds and breathfully running on to complete another killing assignment, accompanied by more uses of the f-word than a drunked Glasgow ned on a Saturday night out.  It just aint right; people don't move that fast.

Yep.  YMMV 'n' all that.  Lots and lots of gamers love the fast-paced, quick action/reaction games.  But, many of us do not any more.  We want it reflective, reflexive, pondered upon, considered.  And by 'it' I mean our escapism from the horrors of reality.  Give me a couple of hours with a shoot'em'up and then I am likely immediately to go out and shoot up the next Min&Henry doing 25mph on the open road in their little Suzuki from Pearson's of Largs!

You see, fast action games don't do it for everyone.  I sometimes wondered about asking these people what they do do to relax.  But, I haven't, so I only have my own experiences: draw, walk, run, listen to music, read, fish, etc.  I do lots of things, but fast action games aren't one of them.

Do games have to be fast action?  No.  It is often said that the most popular video games of all time are Solitaire and Minesweeper on the Microsoft OS platforms.  Everyone plays them.  Why?  Well, Solitaire is deeply dull, but is loaded to allow you to win around 10 times more than in a real Solitaire card game.  So, 1: you win relatively easily, so a sense of achievement and calm is gainen from playing the game.  Also, when you win the card roll down, one at a time, in a beautiful cascade.  So, 2:it ends in an asthaetically pleasing way.  You feel good because the game says to you: you are a winner, and because it is artistic.

Minesweeper is quite the opposite.  The play-board is dull, the play is loaded against winning (unless you go for the 5 mines on a 100x100 board option!), and you lose with an ouch!  It is a frustrating game.  You play because it annoys you.  When you do, accidentally usually, win, you win with a dull oh! sound in your head.  It is such a stupid game, akin, IMHO, to surfing TV channels in the forlorn hope that there is something worth watching in the numbing crudness that is TV hell.

Solitaire creates a sense of calm, often after just one play of the game.  Minesweeper is an addiction that creates tension and disappointment.  And here we have two sides - perhaps the two sides of game playing: tension and satisfaction.  The one drives up the body adrenalin, the other calms the spirit.

To draw a parallel, when stuck behind someone so old that they are almost invisible behind the wheel of their 07 or 08 registered tiny car, doing either 35mph on the open road or, annoyingly, 40mph in 30mph zones (let's not even consider how they slow down to 20mph whenever the road turns more than 5 degrees, or how they - aarrgghh!! - speed up as you overtake them) - where was I? - breathe in - breathe out.  Ah, yes, Mins&Henrys annoying the heck out of other drivers.

Well, you can either get so far up their back bumper you can count read the speed on their dash, shout, weave out, just miss a bloody great truck that unexpectedly came round the bend, peep your horn (waste of time; they're deaf too), gnash your teeth, etc. until you can road past them satisfactorily either to find another Min&Henry, a bus, a traffic jam, or see the telltale flash-flash as you hit 50mph in the 30mph zone.

Result: arrive at home/work, ready to kill.  Not the right thing at all. 

Or, you can pull into a lay-by, put on some Neil Young Unplugged (YMMV), and be be-calmed for a few minutes until the annoying Suzuki is gone away, away, away ...  Result: arrive at work five minutes later than planned calm, pleasant and deeply saintly.

Video games?  Reminds me of the only game that has ever had this effect: MYST.  The game was slow, thoughtful, rich, engrossing and deeply, deeply satisfying, like a Belgian chocolate drink at a cafe by a canal in central Gent on a July Sunday afternoon. Ahh ... I'm there ...

I well remember a friend playing it in a lab of an evening.  The lab was dark now and all was quiet.  he had headphones on.  We dropped in and he didn't see us.  The other researcher with me said, 'Lets creep up and tap him on the shoulder'.  I said, 'No.  He'd crap himself in shock.'  So, we left him alone, floating in the calm virtual world that was the puzzles of MYST.

There were more Myst's and a Riven, but they never captured the essence of the original.  The developers thought it was a game and made the puzzles so fiendish that only cheat sites could get you through the levels.  Which broke the charm of Myst, which was in the being there.  Even when puzzles were apparently insoluble, you stayed to think and try until you broke through.  And the failing and the breaking through were soooo calming and forehead-crumpling and pleasing.

Which is probably why I spend more time these days in the real world than the virtual ones of video games.  In the movie, Amadeus, the ArchDuke says to Mozert on hearing the Overture to The Marriage to Figaro, 'Too many notes, my dear Mozert.  Too many notes.'  On the other hand, Salieri reads the very few notes of the Laudate Dominum and drops it on the ground, lost in the beauty of the far-too-few notes.

Where and when will we get games that take us apart to a quiet place, to renew, refresh, re-calm and rehumanise.  To return to our work as little Bruce Almighty's bearing the odour of sanctity.  We might even wave nicely to Min&Henry as they hold us up for ten minutes on the drive home.

On the importance of violence

Video games are violent, so they say.  From Wolfenstein through Quake to Army of Two, video games can be very, very violent.  On the other hand, Wii Sports is fairly tame, as is sodoku on your phone.  But, then again, failing to get that crossword puzzle done can cause you to throw that newspaper violently across the room.  And if you accidentally hit someone with your nunchuk, it hurts, to say nothing of sweaty hands sending controllers flying into expensive plasma screens - violence visible - causing immense despair as your dad threatens you with real violence over the lost £1,500 TV screen.

Violence is ever there with people so it seems.  Has there ever been a time when people were less violent?  Apart from the Eden folk in Star Trek TOS.  But, heck they learnt that even nicey-nice plants can kill, didn't they?

The century past, 20th if you haven't been counting, was the most violent of all history and prehistory.  (How do we know it was more violent than prehistory?  Because more people were killed violently in the 20th century than existed on earth before history 'began' with Julius Caesar.)  From The Somme, through Hitler, onto Stalin and into Pol Pot and Chairman Mao, uncounted hundreds of millions of people died at the hands of other violent people.

What were these killers like?  Were they all utter nutters out of the scripts of James Bond, Arnie Schwarzenegger or suchlike movies?  Willing to die a horrible death as they horribly killed others?  The record says: not so.  They were fairly ordinary, mainly men, who obeyed orders and killed Jews, intellectuals, dissidents and other wrong-thinkers at the drop of a hat.  Ordinary bakers, train guards, office clerks and farmers.

Now, we could blame the true madmen - Hitler et al - but that would be to miss the point.  It is said that in Scottish courts there are three main pleas from the accused: guilty, not guilty, and, it wisnae me a big boy did it and ran away.  And of these three, the last one is the most common plea made.  We cannot simply blame an obvious scapegoat like Hitler, or his Austrian nation, or his Jewish grandmother, or post-WW1 reparations to the French.

So, to today.  In a US school a boy makes a video on his iPhone, posts it on Youtube, takes his father's gun collection and goes to school to kill his classmates.  Do we blame Apple, Youtube, the gun lobby, the school board, etc.?  As someone once said: to every difficult problem there is an easy answer, and it's wrong.  Why a boy goes to school to kill his classmates is a question to be pondered, and, I would propose, one that we should never attempt to find the answer to.  For, to do so would belittle the entire complexity of frail human life and the societies and world we inhabit.

History tells us that men are violent, risk-takers, competitive and short-lived.  Historically males tended to die at a very young age, few lived on till later life, and most tended to marry in later life.  The Dickensian tale of the forty-year old marrying the 14-year-old girl isn't perversion, it was the natural order.  The Arab habit of marrying up to four women also reflects the male:female imbalance (albeit it non-mathematically) in marriageable males and females.

Who fights our official wars?  Generally and historically young men.  Who dies in historical wars?  Generally young men.  Why do young males so willing go to war to risk death, pain and disfigurement?  Again, a complex question with no simple answer.  But, one I ask whenever I see the Army recruitment stand in Paisley, Dundee or another poor city area attracting in post-pubescent kids with the promise of excitement.  And every ordinary mum with a son in the Army is so proud to see her wee boy come home bronzed, fit and looking like a man; a man in uniform, of course.

Did you catch that word up there?  Excitement.  Try saying to an ordinary girl: how do you fancy going to Iraq, shooting and being shot at, drilling until you sweat and hurt, building up strength and a stronger capacity to swear, wearing khaki drill, driving a tank, etc.  Most girls will be hard to convince.  But, just show a big green gun to a kid in County Square and he needs to convince himself that he doesn't want to join up.

I think we have a problem today.  And the problem is that we have broken the rule of Thomas Kuhn, the great (perhaps greatest) sociological philosopher.  He said we must use our social models to explain the world, not to remodel the world to fit our preferred model.  We have a model in the West today that says: violence is bad, boys should not be violent.  To me this is too like trying to teach your cat to stop chasing songbirds.  Or, to try and get men to stop looking at women.  Or to try and persuade young women away from the easy delights of pregnancy.  As they say in Scotland: disnae work.

The problem is the way we wish our world to be and how we wish it to be viewed.  We want to have a violent army that crushes our enemies.  We want to have a Police that will take violent action against those who would be violent against us.  But, we also don't want there to be any violence.  This is a classic late 20th century post-modern packaging fix: keep the contents the same, but try and change the wrapping.

You are as likely to remove violence from males as you are sexiness from females.  Yes, in a few small cases these can be done.  Nothing new here.  But in the bulk of maleness the tendency to act like a drunken lout when out with the lads will remain.  And for females the risk of bitchiness and the need to predate upon males until they get their own one (yes, they do that) will also remain.

Political Correctness is a nonsense; that is, it makes no sense.  You are as likely to change the way males think as you are to make my petrol car run on diesel (I put petrol in my wife's diesel car once; don't do it!)  Males and violence go together like love+marriage, peaches+cream, politicians+lies, porn+PCs, and guns+violence.

You see, its not video games, or guns, or hormones, or institutionalisation, or nationalism, or any other 'thing' that makes males take part in and enjoy the excitement of real or proxy violence.  Its just being male.

(Question to self: is that why girls don't play or develop video games as much as boys?  Answer to self: like I know - I'm just a guy!)