I’ve read a few things lately about cold men. The stories of cold men are that they learn words and behaviors so that they can convince you of human warmth. Their smiles are inviting. Their touch can feel like home. The little, considerate things occur like clockwork.
It is always a bait and switch. Eventually and inevitably, the cold men are unable to keep up the difficult task of warmth. There are long periods of nothing between the smiles. Touch becomes perfunctory, if it is not withdrawn altogether. Their actions are those of a trooper fulfilling his duty. And you realize, at one point or another, that this is the real man. Not good, or bad, but a man of nothing.
The nature of cold is that it drains the warmth around it. The cold men who retain some measure of awareness realize they must keep their smiles and touch light and distant, or risk draining the warmth of someone undeserving of such violence.
Or, sometimes, they risk allowing the warmth into their hearts, which is a peril too dangerous to consider.
I’ve read a few things lately about cold men. The stories of cold men are that they learn words and behaviors so that they can convince you of human warmth. Their smiles are inviting. Their touch can feel like home. The little, considerate things occur like clockwork.
It is always a bait and switch. Eventually and inevitably, the cold men are unable to keep up the difficult task of warmth. There are long periods of nothing between the smiles. Touch becomes perfunctory, if it is not withdrawn altogether. Their actions are those of a trooper fulfilling his duty. And you realize, at one point or another, that this is the real man. Not good, or bad, but a man of nothing.
The nature of cold is that it drains the warmth around it. The cold men who retain some measure of awareness realize they must keep their smiles and touch light and distant, or risk draining the warmth of someone undeserving of such violence.
Or, sometimes, they risk allowing the warmth into their hearts, which is a peril too dangerous to consider.
[Hey! I’m publishing my first book! You should get it!]
Tell someone you’re divorced and they look at you differently. The pity, shame, and sense of failing at something that was only supposed to end in death can be a heavy burden to bear.
But it doesn’t have to be.
This book collects essays written by divorced writers exploring what led them to divorce, how they lived through it, and, perhaps most importantly, who they are now that it’s over. Where often divorce represents loss and a feeling of defeat, these essays provide an alternative: divorce as a catalyst in gaining a new sense of self and the discovery of new ways to define success.
It’s not a how-to guide, but many of the essays provide examples of how life after the end of marriage can still be satisfying despite complications, joyful despite awkwardness, or revelatory despite grief.
Featuring established and emerging writers, the one thing all contributors have in common is they’ve lived through divorce and have offered for this collection moving, challenging, sad, funny, heartbreaking, self-aware reflections of that time in their lives. The writers are from diverse backgrounds and provide essays that are true stories of grief and parenting; of queerness, kink, and compromise; of artistic differences and academic dissonance; of mental health and addiction.
[Hey! I’m publishing my first book! You should get it!]
Tell someone you’re divorced and they look at you differently. The pity, shame, and sense of failing at something that was only supposed to end in death can be a heavy burden to bear.
But it doesn’t have to be.
This book collects essays written by divorced writers exploring what led them to divorce, how they lived through it, and, perhaps most importantly, who they are now that it’s over. Where often divorce represents loss and a feeling of defeat, these essays provide an alternative: divorce as a catalyst in gaining a new sense of self and the discovery of new ways to define success.
It’s not a how-to guide, but many of the essays provide examples of how life after the end of marriage can still be satisfying despite complications, joyful despite awkwardness, or revelatory despite grief.
Featuring established and emerging writers, the one thing all contributors have in common is they’ve lived through divorce and have offered for this collection moving, challenging, sad, funny, heartbreaking, self-aware reflections of that time in their lives. The writers are from diverse backgrounds and provide essays that are true stories of grief and parenting; of queerness, kink, and compromise; of artistic differences and academic dissonance; of mental health and addiction.
It is well known by now that The Last Guardian almost did not get made. It entered development almost ten years ago for Sony’s previous games console, the PS3, but it was only released for its successor the PS4 at the end of 2016. For many years its name was a joke in the games industry.
From a distance, its production difficulties were puzzling. The game did not appear to be doing anything especially unique. It featured highly advanced animation amidst huge environments, but essentially this appeared to be just a sequel to the two games with which director Fumito Ueda had made his name back on the PS2: Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. Here was another wilfully abstract game about clambering through a ruined world with a strange companion; the jokes about killing off your giant cat-bird-dog friend at the end of the game wrote themselves.
Years passed with no news until Sony abruptly announced in 2015 that the game really was coming out this time. This was remarkable enough, but it was further surprising to see that the game shown in the new trailer was essentially the same thing promised back in the original trailers from 2009/2010. It’s not uncommon in the industry for late titles to arrive looking like a totally different game; yet this was simply a bolder, sharper version of the same thing.
Perhaps we only had to wait for technology to catch up with Ueda’s ambition: but when this happens, it’s usually the case that ambition is swiftly curbed by the pragmatic demands of software development. In this case, The Last Guardian as it was released feels to me like exactly the thing we were promised all those years ago. It is, for better and for worse, the realisation of an artistic vision, free from the kinds of compromise that litter the modern video games industry.
You play a nameless boy who wakes up in a strange world. There is a wounded creature next to you. His name is Trico, though I don’t think this is ever specified in the game itself; the boy calls him something like Turico in his language, which is also fictional. It soon becomes clear that establishing trust between yourself and the creature is the only way to proceed. You must pull spears from his back, keep him fed, and show him the way to go; in return, he can fight off the army of animated stone knights that secure this place, and most importantly, he can traverse this world of tremulous scaffolding and vast crumbling towers.
It’s a neat (and entirely deliberate) inversion of Ico, which had the player leading a sort of alien princess by the hand through a series of puzzles and challenges. Even the controls recall the earlier game; one button on the controller is dedicated to focussing the camera on Trico, much like how the player had to hold a button to hold hands with the princess while leading her through that strange castle.
Here, the player is the vulnerable one, but the relationship now feels like something mutual. It isn’t until you actually see Trico in motion for yourself that you understand what this means. It is one thing to say that the animation is beautiful, but it’s quite another thing to experience it yourself, with a controller in hand. Watching a video of someone else play the game is not a comparable; because the creature is entirely responsive to your actions, you feel that when he looks at you, somehow he is really looking at you.
The Last Guardian is dedicated to making the player feel as though they are in control at all times, even when they are essentially just following a course of action that has been planned out in advance. To this end, everything the boy and his companion do occurs not because it’s pre-rendered, but because it’s the product of a series of complex interacting systems.
When Trico’s ears fold back in a certain way when he brushes against a wall, or when he shakes his fur, or when the player flicks their controller in such a way as to send the boy’s fleet sliding across a smooth stone floor — when these things happen, the player is not watching a little clip of a movie, but something that is the product of a million little calculations occurring simultaneously. That some of these movements might feel heavy or awkward compared to other video games only lends them a sense of deliberation. The player is looking at something which only exists for them, in that moment. How different the game would have been if Trico had thin fur instead of feathers, all of which move and drift dynamically in the slightest breeze.
One of my favourite examples of this systemic approach to action comes in a moment that is perhaps halfway through the game. The player has only just come to develop a relationship with this creature when it happens. They are on a rickety wooden bridge between stone columns which stretches above an abyss. It’s much too far for the player to make it alone, but they can tell Trico to jump across. But the shock of his jump is too much for the old bridge to bear, and it immediately starts shaking and crumbling.
I knew that the game had give me only one option to get out of this situation. Why, once I had done it, was I left with the feeling that this was something I had discovered myself? It was partly down to how much character had been invested in every aspect of the animation — from the bridge slowly breaking, to the soulful, uncertain expression of the creature — but it was also that I was in full control the entire time. At any moment, I could have failed in any number of un-cinematic ways.
In the video above, you can see that at one point, the boy turns around on the tip of the broken bridge. This is the moment in which I thought: no, this can’t possibly work, that’s much too far to jump. And that’s the point at which Trico gives a little sort of cry-bark, as if to say: come on, you’ve got to do it. And that was directed not at a hypothetical player but at me, in response to something I had done.
It is difficult to dwell for long on the game’s problems when it so frequently presents me with some of the most extraordinary things I’ve seen or felt in a video game. Its potency lies in the way in which it goes beyond words. The game didn’t need to explain anything about that scene to me, and equally, I’m aware that to explain it in this way feels underwhelming, and perhaps somewhat trite. You had to be there to get it; the context my explanation lacks is the terrible immediacy of the feeling that you could fail at any moment.
(what follows contains significant spoilers for the ending of the game.)
It is well known by now that The Last Guardian almost did not get made. It entered development almost ten years ago for Sony’s previous games console, the PS3, but it was only released for its successor the PS4 at the end of 2016. For many years its name was a joke in the games industry.
From a distance, its production difficulties were puzzling. The game did not appear to be doing anything especially unique. It featured highly advanced animation amidst huge environments, but essentially this appeared to be just a sequel to the two games with which director Fumito Ueda had made his name back on the PS2: Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. Here was another wilfully abstract game about clambering through a ruined world with a strange companion; the jokes about killing off your giant cat-bird-dog friend at the end of the game wrote themselves.
Years passed with no news until Sony abruptly announced in 2015 that the game really was coming out this time. This was remarkable enough, but it was further surprising to see that the game shown in the new trailer was essentially the same thing promised back in the original trailers from 2009/2010. It’s not uncommon in the industry for late titles to arrive looking like a totally different game; yet this was simply a bolder, sharper version of the same thing.
Perhaps we only had to wait for technology to catch up with Ueda’s ambition: but when this happens, it’s usually the case that ambition is swiftly curbed by the pragmatic demands of software development. In this case, The Last Guardian as it was released feels to me like exactly the thing we were promised all those years ago. It is, for better and for worse, the realisation of an artistic vision, free from the kinds of compromise that litter the modern video games industry.
You play a nameless boy who wakes up in a strange world. There is a wounded creature next to you. His name is Trico, though I don’t think this is ever specified in the game itself; the boy calls him something like Turico in his language, which is also fictional. It soon becomes clear that establishing trust between yourself and the creature is the only way to proceed. You must pull spears from his back, keep him fed, and show him the way to go; in return, he can fight off the army of animated stone knights that secure this place, and most importantly, he can traverse this world of tremulous scaffolding and vast crumbling towers.
It’s a neat (and entirely deliberate) inversion of Ico, which had the player leading a sort of alien princess by the hand through a series of puzzles and challenges. Even the controls recall the earlier game; one button on the controller is dedicated to focussing the camera on Trico, much like how the player had to hold a button to hold hands with the princess while leading her through that strange castle.
Here, the player is the vulnerable one, but the relationship now feels like something mutual. It isn’t until you actually see Trico in motion for yourself that you understand what this means. It is one thing to say that the animation is beautiful, but it’s quite another thing to experience it yourself, with a controller in hand. Watching a video of someone else play the game is not a comparable; because the creature is entirely responsive to your actions, you feel that when he looks at you, somehow he is really looking at you.
The Last Guardian is dedicated to making the player feel as though they are in control at all times, even when they are essentially just following a course of action that has been planned out in advance. To this end, everything the boy and his companion do occurs not because it’s pre-rendered, but because it’s the product of a series of complex interacting systems.
When Trico’s ears fold back in a certain way when he brushes against a wall, or when he shakes his fur, or when the player flicks their controller in such a way as to send the boy’s fleet sliding across a smooth stone floor — when these things happen, the player is not watching a little clip of a movie, but something that is the product of a million little calculations occurring simultaneously. That some of these movements might feel heavy or awkward compared to other video games only lends them a sense of deliberation. The player is looking at something which only exists for them, in that moment. How different the game would have been if Trico had thin fur instead of feathers, all of which move and drift dynamically in the slightest breeze.
One of my favourite examples of this systemic approach to action comes in a moment that is perhaps halfway through the game. The player has only just come to develop a relationship with this creature when it happens. They are on a rickety wooden bridge between stone columns which stretches above an abyss. It’s much too far for the player to make it alone, but they can tell Trico to jump across. But the shock of his jump is too much for the old bridge to bear, and it immediately starts shaking and crumbling.
I knew that the game had give me only one option to get out of this situation. Why, once I had done it, was I left with the feeling that this was something I had discovered myself? It was partly down to how much character had been invested in every aspect of the animation — from the bridge slowly breaking, to the soulful, uncertain expression of the creature — but it was also that I was in full control the entire time. At any moment, I could have failed in any number of un-cinematic ways.
In the video above, you can see that at one point, the boy turns around on the tip of the broken bridge. This is the moment in which I thought: no, this can’t possibly work, that’s much too far to jump. And that’s the point at which Trico gives a little sort of cry-bark, as if to say: come on, you’ve got to do it. And that was directed not at a hypothetical player but at me, in response to something I had done.
It is difficult to dwell for long on the game’s problems when it so frequently presents me with some of the most extraordinary things I’ve seen or felt in a video game. Its potency lies in the way in which it goes beyond words. The game didn’t need to explain anything about that scene to me, and equally, I’m aware that to explain it in this way feels underwhelming, and perhaps somewhat trite. You had to be there to get it; the context my explanation lacks is the terrible immediacy of the feeling that you could fail at any moment.
(what follows contains significant spoilers for the ending of the game.)
