The Hell of it All

by Charlie Brooker

  Anyway, outperforming other media is one thing. Widespread affection from the populace is another. And the majority of videogames are still off-puttingly abstruse as far as the average schmoe is concerned. As a lifelong nerd, I often forget this myself, and will excitingly hand over a gamepad to a greenhorn visitor, encouraging them to ‘have a quick go’ on some new release with the promise that it’s ‘easy’ and ‘intuitive’, only to spend the next half-hour trying to explain that ‘you have to press X to open the door … press X … that’s the blue button with an X on it … no, you can’t climb that tree in the background, it’s just a bit of decoration – look, you just can’t, so stop trying – oh … you’ve accessed the inventory now … the inventory, that’s what you’re carrying … no, you’ve gone back to the menu now … oh for Christ’s sake, just give it here. Just get out and leave me alone …’

  But things are changing. The biggest growth area in videogames right now is the ‘casual gaming’ market. For ‘casual’, read ‘mainstream’. Effectively, this means games the average human being can relate to: anyone who’s lived in a house can grasp what The Sims is, for instance; anyone who’s played tennis knows how to swing a Nintendo Wii remote. Grand Theft Auto might not look like a casual game, but it certainly appeals to a wide demographic, namely anyone who’s ever fantasised about going berserk in a city (i.e. 98% of the population).

  There are a million similar fantasies people experience on a daily basis that the games industry is yet to exploit. If it really wants to appeal to the population as a whole, I’d suggest some of the following:

  Magic Agreement Party: This is simply a game in which you sit at a dinner party table espousing your viewpoints on any subject under the sun, while everyone else slowly comes to agree with everything you’re saying. Actually, this gives me an idea for an even better game, which is …

  Super Squabble Champ IV: This game consists of nothing but petty relationship squabbles in which your character is endowed with the mystical ability to zip back in time and record footage of your partner being a massive bloody hypocrite, then zoom back into the present to play it all back on a giant screen in front of their eyes until they quiver and break down and confess that you were 100% right all along. Then you get a million points and it plays a little song.

  Boundless Libertine Plus: Sims-style title in which you build a character that looks exactly like you, living in a house that looks exactly like your own, with a job exactly like yours – basically every detail is as close to your life as possible, except one: there are absolutely no consequences for your actions. So you can walk into the office and have sex with nine co-workers, then go home and eat doughnuts for 200 days without putting on any weight. You can even stamp up and down on your dog’s head if you like, and it won’t so much as bruise. The day this game comes out is the day the phenomenon of workplace massacres ceases for ever.

  Peter Sissons’ Tetris: I’ve included this for my own amusement. It’s basically just Tetris, but as played through the eyes and mind of Peter Sissons as he sits in his dressing room at BBC News 24 waiting to go on air. It’s precisely the same as usual, except occasionally you hear him clearing his throat, or someone saying ‘need you in the studio in 10, Peter’ through an earpiece. And when you clear 100 lines, the viewpoint changes and he stands up in front of the mirror, drops his pants and shows you his bum.

  You get the picture. The list could go on. Enough space operas and chainmail. We want more down-to-earth fantasies, and we want them now.

  The Brown Minister [11 May 2009]

  If real life were a movie, instead of a cruel and horrifying string of random unfolding events, the mortifying slow-motion car crash that is Gordon Brown’s premiership would inspire pity in all but the most stone-hearted audience member. Assailed from all directions, stumbling, bumbling, droning, punch-drunk, hapless, hopeless, and aching with palpable misery, he increasingly resembles a depressed elephant, slowly being felled by a thousand pin-sized arrows fired into his hide by a million tiny natives, still somehow moving forward, trudging wearily toward its allotted graveyard-slot with morose resignation.

  Here is a man apparently allergic to luck. Nothing goes right for the Brown minister. He can’t even pop onto YouTube and attempt a smile without everyone laughing and calling him creepy. And they’re right. The smiles were creepy: they made him look like the long-dead corpse of a gameshow host resurrected by a crazed scientist in some satirical horror movie. It’s Saturday night, live from Television Centre! The theme tune plays on a church organ. Your children shriek when he bounds on to the screen. As he descends the glittering staircase, one decomposing arm drops off at the shoulder socket, hitting the studio floor with a damp thud. Oblivious, he steps over it to approach camera one, gazing down the lens with frozen eyes, intermittently twitching that smile. Your screen cracks. Hot plasma leaks out. This broadcast is over.

  In fact Brown’s extended drubbing has gone far beyond mere eeriness, and now teeters on the verge of harrowing spectacle – a protracted humiliation so total, so crushing, that merely witnessing it feels almost as terrible as being the man on its receiving end. It’s like someone’s dropped an indignity bomb directly on his head, and we’re all caught up in the blast.

  Normally, to experience this sort of shared mutual shame, you would have to stumble unannounced into a room and unexpectedly catch someone doing something acutely embarrassing, such as masturbating or miming to Kaiser Chiefs in front of a mirror. Following 10 crushed aeons of infinite silence, both parties would stare at the ground for a few moments, you’d mutter a dented apology about knocking first next time, inch your way backwards through the door as though quietly observing a religious ceremony, and spend the next half hour standing in the corridor cringing your skin inside out. From then on you’d share your painful-yet-private little circle of grief in silence, the pair of you implicitly understanding that The Incident Must Never Be Referred to Again.

  That’s what would happen on a personal level. This is different. This is national. We’re all witnesses to The Incident. And I don’t know about you, but I’m finding the tension unbearable. I can’t wait for the general election – not because I want to see Prime Minister Wormface Cameron smugging his way into Downing Street, because I don’t – but just because I don’t think I can bear this mishap-strewn landscape a moment longer. It’s like being trapped in a hot room filled with an overpowering fart smell, waiting for someone outside to come along and open the window.

  In the meantime, is there anything Brown can do? On Friday, Simon Jenkins suggested in this paper that a hastily orchestrated overseas war might save the prime minister’s bacon, although, given his track record for bumbling calamity, picking a fight with an entire country seems ridiculously ambitious. Maybe he could declare war on a small town – something the size of Newbury or Ashby de la Zouch. Don’t worry about the motive – just make something up. Claim the inhabitants were illegally stockpiling Tamiflu or something, then pound them for a fortnight using all the murderous technology the Ministry of Defence can muster. Use something exotic. Something you have to drop from a Super Huey.

  Something that whooshes and goes bang and looks cool in widescreen. Dish out a medal each time one of the residents gets a leg shot off. And when everyone’s dead, or at least they’ve stopped twitching, plant a flag in the council offices, pop up some ‘Mission Accomplished’ bunting and plough through the market square in a whopping great tank for a photo opportunity and press conference.

  Failing that, simply bursting into tears on live TV might be a good move. Pay a visit to This Morning for an ostensibly upbeat chat about how this whole government thing’s been working out for you, then suddenly go quiet and well up. Wait till Phillip Schofield puts a hand on your shoulder before letting rip – but when you let rip, really LET RIP. Wail. Howl. Punch the cushions. Quake with sobs. Say you’re sorry for all the mistakes and beg for a chance to put it all right. Make stuff up if necessary.

  Pretend yo
u’ve been a heroin addict or something like that. Weep 16 litres right there on the sofa if you have to.

  Or tell a joke! A bad one! Anything! Do anything! Please – just do something to clear the air. Because the public still has a few pity cells left. Many will forgive you. I’m not sure everyone believes the current mess is entirely your fault. It’s just the tragi-comic misery and embarrassment of it all. It’s too much for our embattled nation to bear. It’s awful. Truly awful.

  On the BNP [18 May 2009]

  I was born in the 70s and grew up in a tiny rural village. There was, I think, only one black kid in my primary school. One day, someone pushed him over and called him ‘blackjack’. The headmaster called an impromptu assembly. It involved the entire school, and took place outdoors. No doubt: this was unusual.

  We stood in military rows in the playground. I must have been about six, so I can’t remember the words he used, but the substance stuck. He spoke with eerie, measured anger. He’d fought in the Second World War, he told us. Our village had a memorial commemorating friends of his who had died. Many were relatives of ours. These villagers gave their lives fighting a regime that looked down on anyone ‘different’, that tried to blame others for any problem they could find; a bullying, racist regime called ‘the Nazis’. Millions of people had died thanks to their bigotry and prejudice. And he told us that anyone who picked on anyone else because they were ‘different’ wasn’t merely insulting the object of their derision, but insulting the headmaster himself, and his dead friends, and our dead relatives, the ones on the war memorial. And if he heard of anyone – anyone – using racist language again, they’d immediately get the slipper.

  Corporal punishment was still alive and well, see. The slipper was his nuclear bomb.

  It was the first time I was explicitly told that racism was unpleasant and it was a lesson served with a side order of patriot fries. Or rather, chips. Our headmaster had fought for his country, and for tolerance, all at once. That’s what I understood it meant to be truly ‘British’: to be polite, and civil and fair of mind. (And to occasionally wallop schoolkids with slippers, admittedly, but we’ll overlook that, OK? We’ve moved on.)

  But according to the BNP, I’m wrong. Being British is actually about feeling aggressed, mistrustful, overlooked, isolated, powerless, and petrified of ‘losing my identity’. Britishness incorporates a propensity to look around me with jealous eyes, fuming over imaginary sums of money being doled out to child-molesting asylum-seekers by corrupt PC politicians who’ve lost touch with the common man – a common man who, coincidentally, happens to be white.

  They’re wrong, obviously. None of these qualities has anything whatsoever to do with being British, but everything to do with ugly nationalist politics. And ugly nationalist politics are popular all over the world. Just like Pringles. Every country has its own tiny enclave of frightened, disenfranchised, misguided souls clinging to their national flag, claiming they’re the REAL patriots, saying everyone’s out to get them. It’s an international weakness. For the BNP to claim to be more British than the other British parties is as nonsensical as your dad suddenly claiming to have invented the beard.

  The other day, the BNP had a political broadcast on the box. I wasn’t in my beloved homeland at the time, but I heard about it, via internet chuckles of derision. Fellow geeky types tweeting about the poor production values. I looked it up on YouTube. Sure enough, it was badly made. No surprise there. Extremist material of any kind always looks gaudy and cheap, like a bad pizza menu. Not because they can’t afford decent computers – these days you can knock up a professional CD cover on a pay-as-you-go mobile – but because anyone who’s good at graphic design is likely to be a thoughtful, inquisitive sort by nature. And thoughtful, inquisitive sorts tend to think fascism is a bit shit, to be honest. If the BNP really were the greatest British party, they’d have the greatest British designer working for them – Jonathan Ive, perhaps, the man who designed the iPod. But they haven’t got Jonathan Ive. They’ve got someone who tries to stab your eyes out with primary colours.

  But there’s more to the advert’s failure than its hideous use of colour schemes. Every aspect of it is bad. The framing is bad. The sound is bad. The script is bad. For all their talk about representing the Great British Worker, when it comes to promotional material, the BNP can’t even represent the most basic British craftsmanship.

  Nick Griffin’s first line is ‘Don’t turn it off!’, which in terms of opening gambits is about as enticing as hearing someone shout ‘Try not to be sick!’ immediately prior to intercourse. He goes on to claim that, ‘We’re all angry about professional politicians with their snouts in the public trough.’ He’s right, we are: so angry we’re prepared to instantly forget all the occasions we’ve fiddled our own expenses, thereby enabling us to add a dash of undeserved self-righteousness to our existing justified anger.

  But by referring to ‘professional politicians’, Griffin is presumably suggesting we should elect amateurs instead. Maybe that’s why the advert’s so amateurish. Maybe that’s why all the BNP representatives in the ad read their lines so clumsily, like DFS employees in a bank holiday sale commercial circa 1986, or recently revived chemical coma patients being forced to recite barcode numbers at gunpoint. It’s deliberate incompetence. Don’t vote for those nasty slick parties. Vote for a shoddy one! Never mind the extremism, feel the ineptitude.

  Here’s a fantasy. We – the decent British majority – spend years toiling in secret, creating a lifesize replica of Britain in the middle of the Pacific. It’s identical down to the tiniest blade of grass, or branch of Gregg’s. And one night, while every member of the BNP is asleep, we whisk them via helicopter to this replica UK, this Backup Britain. Put them in replica beds in replica homes. Then we fly back home to watch the fun on CCTV.

  For several weeks, they walk around, confused, but pleased. The weather’s nice! More importantly, there are no black faces! Then the infrastructure breaks down and they start to starve, and there’s no one to blame but themselves. And then someone with GPS on their phone works out what’s happened, realises they’ve all become immigrants in their own land. Half of them go mad and start attacking each other. The rest desperately apply for asylum in Britain. The real Britain. The decent, tolerant Britain. The country you can be proud of.

  Paranoia island [25 May 2009]

  I’m not really here. That is, I’m not really here in Britain, because I’m on holiday at the moment. In Crete, to be precise, where everything’s considerably warmer and sunnier and more congenial than jolly old London which, from my current perspective, consists almost entirely of looming grey building-shaped objects constructed from bin lids and misery.

  Still, don’t be jealous. It’s not like I’m lolling around in the sun doing nothing. I’m sitting indoors typing this. Then I’m going to loll around in the sun doing nothing. Before you hurl your newspaper across your dingy tube carriage in disgust, remember I’m allowed to do nothing because I’m on holiday – under doctor’s orders to relax, no less – but still, it makes me uncomfortable.

  I guess I’m supposed to lie back and let go, but in the absence of anything to fret about I quickly start to lose all sense of my own identity, like a lumberjack waking up to discover all the trees in the world built a space rocket and left for another galaxy during the night. Worries hold me together. Worries form my exoskeleton. But the sky’s blue, the sea’s clear and the sun’s beating down: worries are hard to find and even harder to hold on to.

  I tried worrying about tanning, for starters. I don’t tan. Different bits of my body react to the sun in different ways, none of them conventionally sexy. My forehead gets vaguely darker, but my arms merely freckle a bit before giving up, and my stomach sizzles itself pink within three minutes. Consequently, I have to apply a dizzyingly high-factor sunscreen, slopping it on like Persil-white emulsion until I out-gleam the sun itself. As you might imagine, I look and feel out of place on a beach, but then again I look an
d feel out of place almost everywhere. I’ve been badly Photoshopped into this world. So there’s no point in worrying about tans. Damn.

  I could worry about stepping on a sea urchin. I was flipping through the guide book on the plane, and apparently sea urchins are (a) everywhere and (b) painful. Tread on one and you’ll need a doctor to tease out the spikes. Never mind that I’m less likely to step on a sea urchin and get a spike in my foot in Crete than trip over a dead neigbour and get a syringe in my eye in London: it’s an exotic new threat, and I’m alert to it. Or rather I was. For the first few days I watched my step, dipping my toe into the surf as though the sea itself might bite me. Now I’ve forgotten all about it.

  Driving. Now I can definitely worry about that. I don’t drive, but throughout my stay I’ve been accompanied by friends who can, so I’ve seen my fair share of Cretan driving at close quarters. And it’s fair to say faith plays an important role in everyday life here. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve watched people overtaking one another on blind cliff-side corners. It’s like a Bond movie. Either Cretan drivers have a far better appreciation of the realities of blind chance I have, or they’re crazy. Thing is, it actually gets quite funny after a while, chuckling over each near miss. So even that doesn’t feel like a real concern.

  Last night I barbecued some freshly caught fish beneath the night sky. Textbook poncy Guardian holiday stuff which ought to be outrageously relaxing, not to mention delicious. Fortunately, I managed to imbue the entire experience with needless anxiety. It was a gas-operated barbecue for one thing, so I kicked off by worrying about the canister suddenly exploding and blasting the entire front of my body off, so I’d spend the rest of my life looking like a surprised, cauterised medical diagram. Then there was the fish itself: an unidentified pointy, sharky sort of creature with accusing eyes and tiny rows of sharpened doll’s teeth. It was so long it wouldn’t fit properly over the coals, which was absolutely brilliant since it meant I got to worry about whether it was properly cooked or not. Maybe I’d end up poisoned, clutching at my throat and trying to explain to a Greek doctor who didn’t speak a word of English that I’d fallen victim to some underdone poisonous barracuda. Sadly, that didn’t happen. Didn’t even choke on any bones. Instead I ate the fish, and the fish was nice. This will never do.