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04/10/2001 Archived Entry: "Games, books and steel"

I finally got around to speed-re-reading Excession by Iain M. Banks and, after a fair amount of flicking back and forth between various parts, I feel like I've really understood the plot threads. And if you think that was bad, then consider how an economics professor I know had to draw a flowchart in order to understand all the relationships within the novel (it'd probably help you understand it better).

The thing is, despite the fact that I didn't really know what was going on for the first few times I read Excession, I enjoyed it hugely. Very strange. It's a slightly anomalous book for Banks; with the notable exception of Use of Weapons, all of his science-fiction (and most of his other books) are relatively straightforward and linear. Not that I have a preference either way.

Everyone is getting very excited over the release of Black and White, a new god-game by Lionhead which has (perhaps justifiably) been hyped for at least the last two years. I'm sure that it is a good game, but I can't seem to summon up the enthusiasm to play it or really any other game that requires a lot of time. The last 'proper' game I played for an appreciable amount of time was The Sims (I also played The Typing of the Dead quite a lot).

And all of this is quite confusing since I'm extremely interested in the state of the game industry; I subscribe to a magazine and check out the news sites daily. If I had to say which game I'd really like to be playing now, it'd probably be some Nintendo 4-player game that involves large amounts of shouting and grudge-production.

I can draw an interesting parallel with this to my attitude towards food and snacks. A few years ago I'd pick some cereal or crisps or biscuits at random (trans.: 'from an advert off TV') and eat that voraciously for up to a month. Then I'd simply stop eating it and move onto something else. As time went by, the intervals between stopping and picking up something new grew longer and longer as I exhausted all possibilities and now you won't see me eating crisps unless I'm in a pub or someone else has bought them for me. Ditto for many other snack foods (apart from the eating in pubs thing). Maybe the neural structures in my brain are too prone to become desensitised to a particular pattern of stimulus from the taste-buds. I don't know.

Naturally, none of this extends to my addiction to Ribena Toothkind (it has to be Toothkind or nothing).

Bit of news about the website: I got rid of the comments option on weblog posts and introduced a link which will take you to the 'Weblog Discussion' area of my forums. I prefer this arrangement because it allows more persistent and viewer-friendly discussions; it doesn't have the immediacy of just clicking on the 'comments' button but it's not that much more difficult to get used to.

And yes, I know you have to register to the forums to post anything, but it only takes half a minute. For the record, I'm against mandatory registration to use services on the Internet for the reason that it puts people off and is invariably a waste of time, and in any case when the upgrade for the forums is released, registration won't be mandatory.