It is depressing that I failed, of course. Failure is always miserable. Failing to finish FFX, though: that particular feeling of depression pales into insignificance when compared to the sheer morbidity involved in contemplating even looking at those terrible terrible characters with their terrible terrible whiny voices for even another minute. I just couldn’t do it any more. It had become too horrible a prospect. I survived maybe thirty hours; and every single shred of hope for some tiny glimmer of fun to be had with this monumentally bad game was systematically stripped away over those thirty gruelling hours. No more. I just couldn’t take it. It broke me.

Just fuck off and die already

It gets worse, though. Incredibly. Not only was this game an unmitigated disaster and a relentlessly awful experience, I think it has actually made me feel even more jaded about gaming in general than I did before. And I was already feeling pretty jaded about things, too. Another little piece of me has died, and the sense of empty futility when I ponder the creative mire that games find themselves in has grown just a little bit more.

Finally, the general sense of despondency is compounded by the effect this has had on the way I view a lot of people. In the same way it’s so very sad to encounter someone that seems friendly and likeable, only to find that they hold extreme right-wing views and are holocaust denialists, it’s disappointing to find so many people that inexplicably like this godawful game. It’s perplexing. I honestly cannot comprehend why people would enjoy something this lamentable.

I don’t expect to agree with people on everything. It doesn’t really matter to me that people hold opinions that I might not agree with, unless they are particularly extreme opinions. Usually, though, the people that I choose to relate to and choose to be friendly with are the people that, even though I might disagree with them on a number of points, I can still understand where they are coming from; I can still empathise enough to understand why they feel the way they do about things, even if I don’t share the feeling myself. Not so with Final Fantasy X: a game entirely without merit or redeeming features. Not only do I fail to understand why people have wasted hours of life on this low-grade shit, I even find that my opinion of them is diminished by the knowledge that they like it. This vexes me. Before anyone thinks I’m being overly dramatic, I should emphasise that this isn’t some major dealbreaker here. It’s just one of those things that can put a small dent in your view of the world, like discovering that someone you thought was entirely reasonable and a decent human being likes Strictly Come Dancing or Big Brother. That’s probably the better comparison, come to think of it, having already played that holocaust denialist card a few sentences back. ^^ Erm. Yeah.

The title of this final chapter of my Final Fantasy adventure is Failure and Resolve. I have talked about the failure, and have neglected to mention the resolve thus far. Well here it is. I resolve to add Square Enix to that growing list of developers and publishers to be extremely wary of, and possibly avoid altogether. After this appalling experience, I don’t think I’d trust them to develop a bout of diarrhoea, let alone anything resembling an entertaining game.

Somehow, I didn’t expect it to be so much worse than I had anticipated. Final Fantasy X is terrible. Awful. Lamentable.

It really is.

By the time I got to the first save point (ugh) – some 35 minutes into the game – I had almost fallen asleep. This is a terrible start by any measure.

An arse, yesterday

Graphically, it looks fairly poor to me. However, I won’t dwell on that too much given that the game is knocking on a bit now, and at this distance, I can’t tell how well it stood up to its contemporaries. I often find it hard to distinguish between static background objects, people, critters, and (rare) interactive objects like chests, and this seems to me to be a fairly hefty failing.

Controls are woeful. The camera flips around spastically; reversing the directional controls, and often leaving your character hidden from view while you try and guess which direction you need to go in. In my view, the game would have been improved if they just made the mini map full-screen, dispensing with the 3D graphics altogether, so you could direct the yellow arrow towards the red arrow, which is all I seem to do anyway. Just to add to the frustrations, fit, healthy young people in the shape of the characters you (allegedly) control, are unable to negotiate one inch steps; and small rocks present insurmountable obstacles. You frequently have to figure out why something practically invisible is making you character run on the spot and go round whatever it is that blocks your path. There are invisible walls everywhere. Lame.

Battles are the saving grace in that at least you get to do something other than passively snooze through a cutscene or run into an invisible wall, but this is probably the poorest representation of combat I have seen. In random battles, enemies are just dropped out of a clear blue sky and plonked down in front of you. It looks ridiculous. Unforgivably bad.

I don’t mind turn-based combat when there’s an illusion of an actual battle taking place and you get to pause it and decide your next actions. That’s fine. In Final Fantasy X, it’s like they’ve sat down and figured out the best way of making battles as unrealistic and immersion-breaking as possible. It makes the gun battles in The A Team look like gritty and realistic portrayals of violence. Characters stand around waiting for monsters to hit them one at a time. Then the monsters stand around waiting for the characters in your party to run up, hit them, and run back to where they were standing before. Terrible.

One of the (usually, somewhat) enjoyable aspects of an RPG is that you get to customise and develop your character or characters. This is often achieved through an unsatisfying levelling up process where you gain experience and allocate points to various skills and stats as you require. It’s a pretty tired RPG convention, but for all that it is unsatisfactory, at least this is something that is usually presented in a clear and unambiguous way with the complexity and interest lying in the variety of ways you can build your character. Not so in FFX, where they have elected to labour over something called the Sphere Grid. This is a catastrophically bad piece of interface design that attempts to make character development as fiddly and irritating as possible. Assuming that the goal was to annoy the player as much is humanly possible, Squaresoft have succeeded entirely with this piece of incredible design.

Maybe it is almost unfair to focus on such trivial things as gameplay mechanics and graphics when Final Fantasy games are all about the story. Everyone says. For reasons which are entirely unfathomable to me, people seem to really enjoy lengthy derivative tales presented via the medium of long-winded, poorly-executed cutscenes that you can’t skip. I have played through about 25 hours so far, and I suspect that a minimum of 23 hours of that time has been spent waiting for yet another cutscene to finish. On any number of occasions, I have sat through over five minutes of dull cutscene before having control handed back to me. Then, having walked no more than three steps, another series of cutscenes are triggered. Walking three steps is gameplay? Walking three steps is fun?

It’s possible that this would be bearable if the cutscenes themselves weren’t so turgid. The voice acting varies between almost average to stick-to-the-job-waiting-tables-bad. The lines are normally fine representations of how not to write interesting dialogue, and they are delivered in the most unnatural and stilted way possible. I suspect that there is a deeply cynical attempt to pad out the game here (and give the impression of value) by adding long pregnant pauses after every character says anything. In 40 hours of game time, there could easily be a cumulative 5 hours of dumb silence where characters do no more than look gormless after delivering their sub par bit of dialogue. It goes without saying that the characters themselves are irritating and uninteresting from the outset.

Redeeming features are few and far between. Precisely two redeeming features thus far in fact. Redeeming feature one: Rikku’s arse, that somehow inexplicably dominates the screen for extended periods early on in the game. It’s a good collection of pixels. And the other redeeming feature? The music ain’t bad.

As I pause at what I hope is at least the halfway point in the game and reflect on the many joyless hours invested so far, I can’t help but think: is this even a game? Isn’t it actually just a massively bloated, self-indulgent, masturbatory, animated B movie with some token interactive bits thrown in? Certainly, as a game it fails utterly if you accept it as such. As a movie, it ranks as some of the worst pieces of ‘entertainment’ I have ever seen. Awful.

I am striving to tackle this fine piece of entertainment with something approaching an open mind, but I have certain expectations and preconceptions that stand in my way. There are hurdles to overcome. The title of this post should give you a clue to what the final hurdle to overcome is exactly: I hate fantasy. When you are setting out to invest a not inconsiderable amount of time into playing a game called Final Fantasy, the general loathing of all things fantasy could well be a major stumbling block. Another one. Perhaps, though, I can shed these burdens that I carry. Perhaps I shall lighten my load and float serenely and happily through this delightful console JRPG. Perhaps.

For your safety and convenience, I link the previous posts on this so you can catch up with what is going on:

I Fantasise About This Being Over Part One: The Challenge

I Fantasise About This Being Over Part Two: Why I Hate Consoles

I Fantasise About This Being Over Part Three: Storytelling In Games

So, fantasy then. It’s terrible isn’t it? No? OK, then. My title is something of a misnomer, actually. I don’t really hate fantasy per se. I have an active imagination — always have had — and I have always loved to daydream and fantasise about things. Not playing Final Fantasy any more, for example. I also love the act of creating a world: of creating myths and legends and geography from scratch. There’s a purity to creating your own world in its entirety that few other genres can manage, rooted as they are in the real word or some version of it. I celebrate imagination and creation, then.

Nah, what it I really have a gripe with is the fantasy genre as a whole. Yes, this is a broad, sweeping statement. Other genres have their fair share of trash, but they have their gems too. Science Fiction has a long history of churning out pulp, but it also has its masterpieces. It has literary novels and it has culturally important novels: works that hold a mirror up to modern society or reflect on the choices ahead of us. Fantasy is largely a bit Mills & Boon, really. It’s workaday genre fiction with no pretensions. I suspect that’s why a lot of people like it: simple escapism. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a bit of escapism, but there’s everything wrong with endlessly recycled ideas and plots and that’s what disappoints me so.

Oh hai! I’m a fantasy trope! I hope you feel as liberated as I do!

I love The Lord of the Rings and it saddens me to see how it has been the progenitor of such an uninteresting and unimaginative genre. For a genre that goes by the name of fantasy, unimaginative seems to me to be the worst crime of all. I am thoroughly sick of elves, dwarves and orcs. I am sick of heroes on EPIC quests that decide the fate of the very world itself. There’s only so many times you can stomach reading about a collection of archetypes behaving in a stereotypical and two dimensional way in a cookie-cutter generic world. If the books aren’t bad enough, and they often are, then they are as nothing compared to gaming. Games have always loved to lean heavily on stereotypes, and man, do they love to lean heavily on the fantasy tropes. For all the potential to explore new worlds, and for all that there is the glittering prospect of pushing at the boundaries of what is possible, we mostly bear witness to a breathtaking lack of originality as yet more pointy-eared elves take aim with their bows at yet more orcs.

The Elder Scrolls games became quite a disappointment to me. It was a series I’d entirely ignored until I played Morrowind by chance. The game had been bundled with a graphics card and I had glanced at it, shrugged, and tossed it to one side. Months later, recovering from an appendectomy, I found myself bored and with lots of time to fill in suitably gentle ways. I gave Morrowind a shot. I never finished the game, and never really figured out what was going on, but I was quite impressed with the interesting and apparently quite original setting with its alien landscape that seemed to be populated with either entirely new creations of subversions of the familiar fantasy critters. It was all very promising. I could feel something approaching a restoration of faith in the entire genre coming on. Buying Oblivion was a no-brainer after that…and it turned out that this world was just another generic fantasy setting. Gah! Morrowind was simply an aberration in the scheme of things.

Ultimately, when it comes down to it, I just find the fantasy genre faintly embarrassing. I hate it when bookshops have a fantasy/sci fi section. Like they’re the same thing. Tarred with the same brush. I wouldn’t be seen dead reading a fantasy book in public: there’s a reason why the Harry Potter books were sold with alternate ‘adult’ covers. Fantasy is trash. It’s by-the-numbers romance without the sex. I approach the sci fi section with a certain degree of furtiveness and hope that no one I know sees me and supposes I’m looking for some more geeky escapist nonsense to read. A bookshelf full of fantasy novels says, “I like easy books that don’t challenge me.”

So, having the name Final Fantasy is hardly likely to endear me to a game. Unless it really was the final fantasy: a solemn pledge for it all to be over at last. They make the game and, from then on, no more fantasy titles are produced in any format. Fantasy hack writers and tired developers with the imaginations of accountants publicly state that their days of flogging this particular deceased equine beastie are over, ushering in a new golden age of creativity and progress. I could get behind that. I really could. I can dream, can’t I?

No, fantasy in this case is worn like a badge of honour and I instinctively hated it before I even knew what it was.

Still, I really think I can see a ray of hope poking through the clouds here. See, so far as I can tell, Final Fantasy does at least appear to be set in an original setting. No doubt it will still be stuffed full of the usual fantasy tropes, but maybe, just maybe, there won’t be any elves or orcs in there, and that will be a positive thing.

It all looks pretty stacked up against Final Fantasy then, doesn’t it? Next time I post, it will be to report on progress with playing the game itself. Maybe I will overcome the hurdles and prejudices that I have enumerated so far. Maybe I will find some love in my heart for this game. Maybe I will have some fun.

Or maybe it will be hour after hour, day after day of relentless, grinding misery that will end in some kind of minor tragedy. Wish me luck! I think I’ll need it.

In the 36 years I have been on this planet, it’s fair to say that I have read a fair bit. I have steamed through much of the canon of English literature and I have read plenty more fiction of various genres besides. I also like to write too. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to claim, then, that I have a fair idea of what works in writing and what doesn’t, even if I fail in my own writing. I have a fairly clear idea of what constitutes good storytelling when I see it, and in broad terms, there’s a consensus on this kind of thing. A consensus that sees certain formulae work time and time again when you look at successful novels, plays and films. This isn’t to say that good work has to be formulaic: far from it. More that you are likely to be impressed by great imagination or a flight of startling ideas when presented within a movie that fits the traditional three act structure than one that consists of a rambling unstructured monologue intercut with random images.

Gaming is a medium that rests heavily on its storytelling. It wasn’t always this way, but almost anything beyond an arcade-style platformer is underpinned by some kind of narrative, setting and character. Storytelling is important; and historically it has been a weakness.

What works in games is an open question: it’s still the new kid on the block after all. Still, it is interactive entertainment, and it seems reasonable to me that the kinds of storytelling that will be effective in gaming will be the kinds that take that interactivity as a starting point. In written fiction, the mantra is usually show, don’t tell. In games, that mantra could well be: reveal through play, don’t show. Essentially, if you wanted to sit back and watch the plot unfold without any involvement, you’d choose to go watch TV rather than play a game.

The power of games is the power of immersion. Although you can become immersed in a good TV drama or a decent film, the personal involvement in a game takes it to another level. You’re not watching some actors fight for survival in a mall, you are fighting for survival. This is incredibly important in terms of how you tell the story, how you develop character and how you handle exposition of off-screen events.

Now, historically, games have hardly been at the forefront of storytelling. Great art they ain’t. Plots have been perfunctory and full of holes. Every stereotype and cliché you care to think of has been brought to bear. Even some of the best games we’ve had to date have leaned pretty heavily on some desperately unoriginal ideas. We come to games with low expectations, then, but what is exciting is the potential for greatness we see there. A potential that has largely been squandered to date, but one day…

I’m telling you: Final Fantasy is terrible!

Still, even with the clichés and the stereotypes and the low expectations, I do love storytelling in games. Somehow, we get something special despite the shortcomings.  As it happens, some of the best storytelling I have encountered has been in games that don’t have any overarching plot or story at all in the traditional sense. I’m talking about the stories I have created just through my actions and the circumstances of the game, along with a dash of imagination and use of the tools provided. Games like Civ have charted historical epics and science fiction future. The Sims has been host to everyday drama, tragedy and comedy. Even games like Championship Manager have played out stories far superior to the generic Asshole Hero and Archetype Friends Go On a Quest formula that so many games rely on.

The story in Half Life was an interesting one. A game where the main character never spoke, other characters spoke little and the underlying story was mostly revealed in the tiniest incidental details has been some of the strongest and most innovative storytelling the genre has seen to date. There’s a reason that Half Life has become a colossus among games franchises beyond being a decent shooter, and I’d argue that a large part of that success is due to the realisation of plot and character in ways that play to the strengths of the medium rather than wresting control away from you and making you sit through a second-rate TV show every few minutes.

So here’s the crux of the matter. Cutscenes are a failure in gaming. This isn’t a hate thing. I don’t have a problem with brief cutscenes at the most critical plot points to make it clear what is going on: sometimes you can be so busy playing a game that you miss out on the bigger picture. Fine. There are better ways to tell your story, but, if you must, go ahead and give us a 5 second cutscene to wrap up an act or a level. It has to be rare, though, and it has to be necessary. It also has to be skipable. Less is more here.

It’s my expectation that Final Fantasy X will be a series of lengthy cutscenes where lots of people I dislike talk a lot about things I don’t care about. These cutscenes will be interspersed with spells of tedious moving about and awkward, unlikeable combat. That is my expectation and if that expectation is met, it will annoy the hell out of me because it misses the point of an interactive medium so completely. If I wanted to sit through a bunch of badly written and poorly acted dialogue, I could watch a daytime soap. I don’t like daytime soaps either. It is an abject failure in game design that is unlikely to be redeemed by fabulous acting or brilliant writing. Indeed, the daytime soaps have better writers than games developers.

So, Final Fantasy, will you meet my expectations or confound them?

Next up: I hate fantasy

Console games were pieces of mindless fluff for the most part. They were arcade ports or arcade copies. Nothing wrong with that. If you want a quick burst of fun or to pass the controller around with mates while drinking beers and having a laugh, then the console was the platform of choice. There were no time commitments: you played until you got bored or you ran out of lives or you beat your high score. Then, next time you fired up a game, you started over from the beginning and it was fine. The console is built for living room casual play, and that’s where it should have stayed.

Metaphorically, console games were the unskilled shopfloor labour of the gaming world. If you wanted management and strategy, you looked elsewhere.

Then, with fifth gen consoles, the platform started to get ideas above its station. You started to get games that aped what was going on with the superior PC platform. Mostly, as I recall, without much success. If that failure had resulted in a recognition of what the console is good at, and a withdrawal from genres where the console tends to fail, all would be well. The publishers never gave up, though, and this is where I started to have a problem.

Fast forward to today and we have an environment where games development is expensive and games publishers have to play it safe. So, we have an era of cross-platform development to maximise profits. We have always had cross-platform development: in the era of 8 bit and 16 bit home computers, games would be made or ported over to multiple home computer systems. The difference was that conceptually, they were the same type of platform: home computers with keyboards. The crucial difference today is that an Xbox is a fundamentally different idea to a PC, regardless of components and compatibility.

Where’s The Any Key?

The problem I have is that The Dumb has infected the superior PC platform. PC Games have been dumbed-down to be playable on their inferior cousins. Or rather, console games are fairly dumb and no one adds any clever bits that would make it worthwhile for people that actually enjoy thinking occasionally.

If you develop for a console, you have to assume that a game is played using one of those terrible controllers for people with only thumbs. Immediately, this is applying a set of restrictions to gameplay. Fine for a console-specific game: no problem at all. It hamstrings and limits a game for the PC, however, which doesn’t have these limitations.

It goes beyond control methods though. Hardware limitations and assumptions mean that there is often reduced choice in almost every area of game development: less of everything. The console is always last year’s tech at best, and your games will never be pushing at the bleeding edge of what can be achieved. Still, this is often a minor bone of contention compared to certain console conventions that should have died out with the invention of the hard disk: things like checkpoints rather than save slots and quick save, or an over-reliance on terrible menus and navigation through repeated key presses instead of something quickly and easily navigated by mouse or keyboard shortcut.

Worse than physical limitations or outdated and annoying conventions, however, is the general stagnation that has taken place in mainstream gaming. There’s still plenty of interesting stuff happening in the realms of indie game development, but I think it’s telling that much-lauded and much-loved titles like Deus Ex, System Shock 2, or the Thief series still represent pinnacles of innovation in gaming. You’d reasonably expect these successes to have been built on, but they really haven’t. Most games are no further forward than 1999 in most respects. You could reasonably point a finger at the obsession with graphics and the graphics card arms race as part of the problem. I think there’s a lot of mileage in that argument. An awful lot of time has been spent on fluff at the expense of actual content. At the same time, though, the need to play safe and to maximise ROI by developing for all platforms has led to us treading water at best. Most games occupying the mainstream have numbers after their names; most games are prettier retreads of games from a decade ago. It’s not a healthy state of affairs.

Bottom line is this: if we weren’t developing every title to be played by a slackjawed couch-dwelling idiot, I’d probably be playing Sim City 6 by now. I hate consoles.

Next time: Storytelling In Games

I have never played any of the bloated and contemptible Final Fantasy cash cow franchise. I hate them all anyway. I simply know that I loathe them. I know that they represent the nadir of gaming. It’s this sort of thing that makes the playing of games embarrassing: the mere association with filthy products like Final Fantasy is enough to evoke shame.

Wikipedia says:

A terrible game, years ago

“Final Fantasy X​ (ファイナルファンタジーX, Fainaru Fantajī Ten?) is a console role-playing game developed and published by Square (now Square Enix) as the tenth title in the Final Fantasy series. It was released in 2001 for Sony’s PlayStation 2.[1] The game marks the Final Fantasy series’ transition from entirely pre-rendered backdrops to fully three-dimensional areas, and is also the first in the series to feature voice acting. Final Fantasy X replaces the Active Time Battle (ATB) system with a new Conditional Turn-Based Battle (CTB) system, and uses a new levelling system called the “Sphere Grid”.

“Set in the fantasy world of Spira, the game’s story centers around a group of adventurers and their quest to defeat a rampaging monster known as “Sin”. The player character is Tidus, a blitzball star who finds himself in Spira after his home city of Zanarkand is destroyed by Sin. During the game, Tidus, along with several others, aids the summoner Yuna on her pilgrimage to destroy Sin.”

So, it’s old. No doubt it will look terrible. It’s a console RPG. Words that should never appear in any kind of conjunction. It’s set in a fantasy world. Just what we need, eh? More fantasy worlds. We don’t have enough of those, after all. We have a a guy whose city is destroyed by Big Bad who teams up with some other (no doubt annoying) archetypes to go on a quest to destroy the aforementioned Big Bad. Well, at least they managed to avoid a clichéd plot then… :/

For all sorts of reasons, which I shall go into in further detail in later posts, this is a set up for unadulterated loathing. My blood will be replaced with a mixture of hatred and venom. I shall be sustained on a diet of bitter pills and bile.

The real challenge then, aside from resisting the urge to smash the game disk into tiny silvery shards and ordering hits on everyone concerned with the making of the game, is to attempt to approach this experience with a degree of equanimity and objectivity. I have to try and set aside the preloaded contempt and irritation with the mere existence of this tripe and see if I can actually experience some semblance of pleasure. Wish me luck!

Next time: Why I Despise Consoles

Faith / Mirror’s Edge

Mirror’s Edge is a breathtaking failure of a game that gets so much right, then agonisingly dumps you on the street, battered and wondering what has gone wrong. There’s so much to love here, too. I immediately loved the central character, Faith. Faith does not check any of those gaming stereotype boxes and it’s refreshing. We have female lead that isn’t white and doesn’t have preposterously proportioned breasts. The developers haven’t whored themselves to some notion of selling sex to shift units. Faith is a runner, and she looks like a runner. Ethnicity is never mentioned — is irrelevant to the game’s story — but I’d say Eurasian is an apt description. All of which I tend to think of as Being A Good Thing. Why? Because clichés are a given in gaming; and stereotypes are so rife that it’s remarkable when something does pop up with the tiniest shred of originality.

So, we have a refreshingly athletic, flat-chested and non-white character. For that alone, the developers and, indeed, the publishers (the notoriously risk-averse great Satan of the games industry, EA) deserve some kudos. Then, there’s the setting. The city is unnamed as far as I can tell. It could be anywhere. Except an anywhere that’s cleaner. And sunnier. The city is starkly beautiful with its shining high rise buildings, its gleaming corporate art and its rooftop playgrounds where much of the gameplay takes place. This isn’t generic fantasy world #78943. There are no orcs, dwarves, or elves. No dragons, either. This isn’t contemporary urban decay. Brown does not exist in the colour palette. Nor is it near-future grime or post-apocalyptic devastation. All those tired clichés of gaming have been discarded. What we have is an apparent utopian vision of the very near future. A clean city where the streets are safe and the traffic isn’t too bad on the way to work. It is gorgeous and it is refreshing.

Of course, appearances are deceptive. The game sets out its stall from the beginning: this apparent utopia has been achieved by sacrificing liberties for safety and freedom for control. This is the third thing to love about this game: it has something to say about our world as it is now. It is unashamedly political. It has set out to do what the best science fiction always does and that is to shine a light on the world we may wake up to tomorrow. With minimal dialogue and a few brief (marvellously cel-shaded) cutscenes, this game has said more than just about any game that I can think of. Bravo.

Then, it is easy to love the basic premise of the gameplay itself. You are Faith. She’s a runner. A free runner. She runs. A lot. She also jumps and rolls and vaults and generally does dangerously impressive stuff. You would think that such a physical game would demand third person perspective, but instead they have opted to go with first person, and amazingly, it works. It lends such a breathtaking immediacy to proceedings, and your heart is frequently in your mouth as you leap from the roof of a tall building to the next, catching a glimpse of the tiny cars moving in the streets far below. The free running is incredible as you run, jump, roll, and slide your way across the urban landscape.

There’s much to love about Mirror’s Edge. It’s a shame, then, that it is such an utter failure as a game.

If it was just the running, it would be OK I think. You would screw something up, die, and go back to a checkpoint and try again. It’s not so hard that you would ragequit in frustration as you try to repeat the right sequence of moves over and over. The action is well-balanced and just challenging enough to provide its own thrills. The problem is the combat. The police appear all over the place and they are armed. They have choppers. You have a pair of trainers and that is it. The combat is clunky and nine times out of ten, a frustrating failure. Each failure results in starting over from the last checkpoint. Disarming an armed man seems to often be a matter of chance. Worse, despite running on a high-end machine, the game suffers from devastating slowdowns when facing off against multiple enemies. You are always facing off against multiple enemies. The fighting elements are just an unwelcome intrusion. The fun comes crashing to halt as soon as some fighting is in prospect. Almost every single combat event has seen me quitting in disgust and it’s likely that I’ll never finish the game as a result.

The catastrophic combat would probably be just about tolerable if there was at least a quick save function. Repeatedly replaying the same 5 minutes over and over is NOT FUN. I know this has its roots on inferior consoles, but there is simply no excuse for not being able to save your progress on a PC with terabytes of disk space available.

Still, we can hope for the future. It’s likely that there will be a Mirror’s Edge 2, and fingers crossed that some lessons will be learned. There’s an opportunity for something important to happen in the world of gaming; let’s hope DICE manage to grab it next time.

It’s a marginalisation that remains, too. In the UK, only 17.2% of IT professionals are women. [1] On a more personal note, only 6% of the IT Department that I work in are female, and back when I was at university, I can only recall a handful of girls on my CS course. I’m not some rabid feminist; I’d just like to see a bit more of a balance here. I’d like to work in a less male-dominated environment. Is that too much to ask? We can’t do anything about history, but we can at least aim for a brighter future.

So, in seeking out role models, I initially drew a blank. I eventually went right back to the beginnings of computing before I found my inspiration. I remembered visiting Bletchley Park one fine summer’s day last year, and I remembered an elderly lady who had shown up for a visit. She was one of the many women that had worked at Bletchley Park during World War II. As we toured the site and looked at the reconstructed machines that gave birth to the modern era, the guide noted that the majority of the personnel at Bletchley had been women. Of the 12,000 people that worked at Bletchley during the war, more than 80% were female. [2] It was women that were breaking the codes and women that were operating these huge early computers.

Bletchley features unsung heroes aplenty. The work there was carried out under conditions of utmost secrecy and everyone involved took this very seriously. The people that worked there didn’t talk about what they did. It has only been comparatively recently that the full disclosure of the work carried out at Bletchley has taken place. Some people took their secrets to the grave. As well as giving birth to the age of the computer, the code-breaking and resulting intelligence probably shortened WW2 by more than a year and undoubtedly saved many lives as a result. We rightly remember Alan Turing, but we have somehow forgotten the pre-eminence of women at the dawn of computing: pioneering forebears of today’s programmers, analysts, and administrators.

I’d always thought that the great tragedy of Bletchley had been that Britain squandered its early lead in computing, effectively leaving the field open for IBM to dominate. It also seems that as well as wasting that technical lead, we also missed an opportunity to take advantage of all that accumulated experience and an opportunity for sustained equality in this emerging field. So, let’s remember the women of Bletchley Park and look towards a more equitable future.

Read more about Ada Lovelace Day here.

Visit Bletchley Park.

References:

1. http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/witsend/2009/04/how-many-women-work-in-it-in-the-uk.html

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bletchley_Park

First, some more simplification:

Courtesy of xkcd.

I think the comic neatly illustrates what might be happening. In the interests of full disclosure, I shall state for the record that I am terrible at maths. I always have been. More accurately, I am awful at mental arithmetic. I struggle to hold on to numbers in my mind long enough to complete a calculation and I’m very easily distracted from the task. Does this make me a girl?

I also never managed to learn my multiplication tables. Rote learning has always been a dead end for me: I tend to learn by a variety of means that allow me to understand things and link them with other areas. This has always meant that, as long as I’ve applied myself during classes or lectures and invested thought into what I’m doing at the time, I’ve never had to worry about exams or revision. I can learn quickly and I can succeed at exams with relatively little effort, which is marvellous.  This has never been helpful in the slightest with mathematics, however.

The problem with having a long history of sucking at mental arithmetic is that it undermines a lot of other things. I never trust my own results. Being put on the spot makes me stop functioning entirely. Back in school, maths lessons were long drawn-out exercises in terror as I prayed that I wouldn’t be asked a question. Indeed, a recent study has demonstrated the effect of such anxiety on the ability to do basic maths:

“Math anxiety, ‘the feeling of fear and dread of performing mathematical calculations,’ can negatively affect mathematical tasks much simpler and more basic than previously thought. In the study, participants were asked to count black squares on a white screen. The number of squares shown ranged from one to nine and participants were given as much time as they wanted before answering. When the number of squares was in the subitizing range (one to four), both math-anxious and non-math-anxious participants performed equally well, but when the number of squares was in the counting range (five to nine), the math-anxious group took longer and were less accurate.” [1]

This is certainly something I can personally relate to. Confidence being the nebulous thing that it is, it’s not hard to imagine that a degree of cultural bias towards your entire gender playing a role in eroding that confidence. It might not be as bald as the cartoon above; it could be very subtle in terms of attitude from teachers, parents, other role models, and peers.

Once you have established that belief that you cannot do maths, it’s very hard to overcome it. We start off with basic arithmetic as the foundation for maths. You can’t dispute that it is a necessary and worthwhile thing to have. Competence in arithmetic, or the lack thereof, does not necessarily correlate with ability at the more advanced mathematics, however. You can be completely useless at multiplication in your head, but perfectly able to solve more complex problems. It’s more likely to be the lack of self-belief that hinders you: you’ve already decided that you’re poor at maths, therefore you are poor at maths. I couldn’t tell you what 7 x 8 is, but I took Maths GCSE a year early and I got a B, so I’m perhaps not as bad as I think I am. Equally, if I hadn’t been taught in small groups and if I hadn’t been generally academically confident due to success in other subjects, it could so easily have gone the other way. I’d be willing to bet it does go the other way for a lot of people.

I don’t believe that there is any functional or biological reason why girls would be outperformed by boys in mathematics or any other science discipline, despite some of the more persistent myths here. I can accept that simple biology coupled with gender roles might lead to other disparities between genders on average: career earnings, for example, will inevitably be affected by the decision to have children. What I don’t accept is that there might be a functional difference in mental capacity for the sort of thinking required for the sciences. I don’t think that women are irrational and incapable of logical thought, even if I laugh at the many jokes based on this very notion. Broadly, I think the differences between the sexes amount to little. We have more in common as gender groups than not. Let’s look at maths test scores and a nice bell curve to support that:

Some girls are very good at maths and so are some boys. Some boys are bad at maths and so are some girls. The overlap is much larger than the difference. [2]

Historically, there was a perception that boys were better at maths than girls. I suspect that a lot of people still believed that when I was at school in the Eighties, including many teachers. I probably believed it myself, not knowing any better. In the early Nineties, research indicated that girls actually performed better than boys at maths at an early age. Once things progressed to the more complex maths, girls’ performance declined significantly versus boys:

“…Measurable differences existed for complex problem-solving beginning in the high school years (d = +0.29 favoring males), which might forecast the under-representation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers.” [3]

Why would that have been? Could it be that confidence was undermined by the faulty assumptions of their teachers: that common wisdom that girls suck at maths? There are an array of myths to contend with that persist to the present day. “Girls are qualitative; boys are quantitative.” “You’re too pretty to study maths.” Both are untrue, but say it enough and some people will start to believe it.

There is a belief in a “maths gene” that is gender-related. Similarly, there is a dismissive attitude towards hormones and hormonal behaviour that is endemic in our society. This can lead to a marginalisation of girls in the scientific disciplines, and even in an enlightened educational environment, there are still the beliefs of parents and peer groups to contend with. What’s the net result if parents have lower expectations of their daughters when it comes to the science fields?

Role models are an important factor for girls. OK, so positive role models are important for all children and young adults, but a 2006 study found that role models are more of a factor for females than males, and significantly, females need role models of the same gender. This doesn’t mean that maths and science teachers need to be women to reach girls, but that awareness of successful women in the field can serve as inspiration. Which leads us back to the Ada Lovelace Day…

It seems like there is much to be done, but it also seems that much has already been achieved:

“Our analysis shows that, for grades 2 to 11, the general population no longer shows a gender difference in math skills, consistent with the gender similarities hypothesis. […] Gender differences in math performance, even among high scorers, are insufficient to explain lopsided gender patterns in participation in some STEM fields.“[3]

In conclusion, there are no functional differences between the genders when it comes to maths and science disciplines. In terms of demonstrated ability, females look to have caught up with their male counterparts over the last twenty years, but in terms of numbers, they remain a minority in the related fields. We need to continue dispelling the old myths that are dismissive of girls’ abilities and we need to overcome traditional gender barriers by providing inspirational examples of success.

1. Mathematics Anxiety Affects Counting But Not Subitizing During Visual Enumeration — Erin Maloney, Jonathan Fugelsang, Evan Risko, Daniel Ansari

2. Girls Are… Boys Are… : Myths, Stereotypes & Gender Differences — Patricia B. Campbell, Jennifer N. Storo

3. Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance — Janet S. Hyde, Sara M. Lindberg, Marcia C.  Linn, Amy B. Ellis, Caroline C. Williams

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. The idea is to write something about a woman in technology or science that you admire.

Marvellous! This is something I can get behind. Having worked in IT for over a decade now, I can say from my own experience that it’s a field that remains heavily populated by the male gender, with women a distinct minority. I also work for a large manufacturing company, and have witnessed the scarcity of women in the engineering disciplines. It seems to me that we need to be encouraging more women to join these professions. Sign me up.

So, who to write about then? Ah. Hmm. I racked my brains for a few minutes. I was drawing a blank. After a while, I managed Marie Curie. That was it. It was a pretty effective illustration of just how marginalised women have been in the fields of science and technology. It’s clear why this might be when you look at the last few centuries of history. Fine: not much that can be done about that. Now though, after decades of feminism and the battle for equality appears to have been won, we still have this huge disparity between the genders in some fields. It seems to me that it is largely a question of culture. Girls tend to outperform boys in school when it comes to mathematics, so what gives? It has to be a question of attitude, doesn’t it? Hopefully the publicity surrounding events like Ada Lovelace Day will help to change those attitudes in some small way.

Incidentally, I eventually did think of something to write about. It was more of a struggle than it should have been.

If you wish to join in, this is where you need to go: http://findingada.com/

About Ada Lovelace Day

The first Ada Lovelace Day was held on 24th march 2009 and was a huge success. It attracted nearly 2000 signatories to the pledge and 2000 more people who signed up on Facebook. Over 1200 people added their post URL to the Ada Lovelace Day 2009 mash-up. The day itself was covered by BBC News Channel, BBC.co.uk, Radio 5 Live, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Metro, Computer Weekly, and VNUnet, as well as hundreds of blogs worldwide.

In 2010 Ada Lovelace Day will again be held on 24th March and the target is to get 3072 people to sign the pledge and blog about their tech heroine.

Ada Lovelace Day is organised by Suw Charman-Anderson, with design and development support from TechnoPhobia and hosting from UKHost4U.

About Ada Lovelace

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was born on 10th December 1815, the only child of Lord Byron and his wife, Annabella. Born Augusta Ada Byron, but now known simply as Ada Lovelace, she wrote the world’s first computer programmes for the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose machine that Charles Babbage had invented.

Ada had been taught mathematics from a very young age by her mother and met Babbage in 1833. Ten years later she translated Luigi Menabrea’s memoir on Babbage’s Analytical Engine, appending notes that included a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the machine – the first computer programme. The calculations were never carried out, as the machine was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

Understanding that computers could do a lot more than just crunch numbers, Ada suggested that the Analytical Engine “might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” She never had the chance to fully explore the possibilities of either Babbage’s inventions or her own understanding of computing. She died, aged only 36, on 27th November 1852, of cancer and bloodletting by her physicians.