DIGITISER
  • MAIN PAGE
  • Features
  • Videos
  • Game Reviews
  • FAQ

MR BIFFO PINES FOR GAMING'S LOST BRITAIN

27/6/2019

34 Comments

 
Picture
Something I miss in the current era of games is having my world reflected. I don't mean the world in a global sense, but my first-hand experience of it. I miss seeing what's familiar to me put into game form.

What I'm talking about, I suppose, is games set in a Britain that I recognise. I'm excited, tentatively, that the next Watch Dogs game will take place in a semi-familiar London, but everything about the trailer released at E3 suggests it'll be a London that's filtered to appeal to as broad an international audience as possible.

In short: one that isn't necessarily tailored to people who actually live there. For all intents and purposes, it looks like it'll be a sweary EPCOT.

I enjoyed Assassin's Creed: Syndicate's interpretation of Industrial Revolution-era London, but it was still removed from my fundamental day-to-day experience. I miss those games I played growing up where I felt I was being spoken to by the designers. 

"This is for you, kid!"

I'm talking about little details, such as the gym climbing bars in Skool Daze - we had those at my school! Or the Post Office logo in Everyone's A Wally - it looked like a real Post Office sign! Or the none-more-Beano antics of Jack The Nipper - look: a British high street!

Furtherrmore, what those games had, aside from the minutiae of British life, was a sensibility that was uniquely British. Put the two things together and it felt like a warm embrace. I felt - and this is going to sound ridiculous, but it's true - less alone. 
Picture
ENGLAND FOR THE ENGLISH!
These days, it's a dangerous thing to say you're proud of your country. Get too patriotic, and it risks coming across a bit Yaxley-Lennon.

In part, you can thank Morrissey for that.

Remember when he waved a Union Jack on stage at Madstock in 1992, and wrote a song called Bengali In Platforms in which he implied that Asians didn't belong in Britain, and a song called National Front Disco, where he sang "England for the English", and everyone was all "Is... is Morrissey a racist now?", and his defenders insisted that he wasn't, and Morrissey said that if you called somebody a racist then it was because you'd already lost the argument, and sued the NME for libel when they wondered if he was racist, and then years later it turned out that he probably was a racist, even though he continued to deny it despite saying stuff like "Everyone prefers their own race"?

Morrissey? More like Gaslighty - amirite?!?!!!!!!!

Can you blame people for treading softly around the notion of being proud of being British when you've got so many racists saying racist things, while denying they're racists? Can you blame anyone for being a bit embarrassed to wave a Union Jack?

I mean, these days there doesn't seem a great deal to be proud about anyway. We're staring down the barrel of Brexit, we've got a racist, power-hungry, liar on the cusp of becoming our Prime Minister. The country is fractured geographically and politically.

It's horrible, and I just hope that somewhere down the line we'll spring back the other way, in much the same way as the current climate is a reaction to decades of "They're taking away our bent bananas!" and "They're cancelling Easter!"-type headlines that painted political correctness as some sort of mental illness.

Nonetheless, living in Britain is what I'm familiar with, it's my bedrock, for better or worse, and it's what I connect with. Heck, it's what connects us all, whether we're Remain or Leave, Tory or Labour, black or white, straight or gay. All of us who live here have that shared experience of living here.

And, especially given the size of our games industry, it's a shame we don't see that depicted in games more. 
Picture
DAZED AND CONFUSED
Don't get me wrong; I enjoy games which punt me into a black hole, or have me slicing the chins off of zombies. I love all that. I love universal themes. I love escapism. But sometimes I also want to feel a connection that's more tangible and focused-in. 

​I've talked a few times about wanted a modern interpretation of Skool Daze, and whenever I do somebody will chime in and say "Durrr - they did that. It's called Bully". No they didn't, you point-missing buffoon. 

Bully doesn't represent what I loved about Skool Daze. I played Bully, and it was fine, but it was set in an American academy that I'm only familiar with from films and TV shows. Yeah, sure, there were elements that we can all relate to a bit, but only in the same way as we can relate to, I dunno, Tomb Raider, because we all know what a woman is. 

To be completely honest, Skool Daze is not a great game. At least, not in purely gameplay terms. The controls - as with so many ZX Spectrum games - are laid out in a bizarre way, there are a dozen different keys, it's slow, it's frustrating. And yet, it remains probably my favourite ZX Spectrum game, purely due to the wish-fulfilment of being able to go off-piste in an environment, and within a daily structure, that was so recognisable.

That was why it appealed; I could break the rules, and it was delicious. Its starting point wasn't some fantastical world, where I was playing a gangster or a bloke with a sword on the end of a chain. I was me - just a kid - with a peashooter and a catapult, trying to avoid getting picked on. It was pure wish fulfilment for a bullied, disempowered, 13 year-old. 

Bully never resonated with me in the same way, despite having so many of the same elements, because its setting wasn't one I'd ever been a part of. To be honest, I'm not even sure a new Skool Daze would chime - given that it has been 30-odd years since I last went to school, and they have interactive wipe boards now, whatever they are (and I doubt anybody is about to release a parents evening simulator). 

Nevertheless, Skool Daze continues to represent something that is missing for me. In amid all the escapism, I just wish there were more games set in my country, and fewer games set in America. I'm looking forward to how closely Watch Dogs Legion achieves its version of London, but given the cringe-inducing voiceovers on the trailer, I'm not hopeful.

I want a game with fewer machine gun-wielding Dick Van Dykes, and more park bench drunks drinking Zywiec from the Polski sklep on the corner. I want to see buses full of rowdy, multiracial, school kids. I want clip board wankers to intercept me while I'm walking down the street, and Iceland home delivery trucks, and constant roadworks, and weird little shit shops that sell knock-off toys from China and poorly-translated hair treatments that contravene trading standards. 

I want games that are set here, as it really is; not as it might be, not as it was, and not as imagined by some Canadian whose first-hand experience of Britain extends as far as a Google Images mood board.
Picture
34 Comments
Grembot
27/6/2019 10:17:42 am

Racist.

Reply
Ste Pickford
27/6/2019 10:20:32 am

The next game we release will be set in Stockport. (Not a joke.)

Reply
Dan Whitehead
27/6/2019 11:18:14 am

takemymoney.gif

Reply
Jabberwoc
27/6/2019 10:24:38 am

I agree.

I loved Elite because I grew up in a rotating Space Station with a letterbox for a front door too!

Can I smell weevils? Who are you?

BYE.

Reply
Barrie link
27/6/2019 10:31:07 am

Yes, it's a shame. Perhaps when games get cheaper to make.

There's Everybody's Gone to the Rapture I can think of off the top of my head. Love that game, but it's more the nature side of it that I relate to.

People sometimes lazily point at the lack of diversity in games, and the problem being too many "white males"... And yet the last character in a video game I felt that I had anything much in common with was Sonic the Hedgehog because he runs fast (and I used to be able to run fast). Oh, and that I'm blue.

I like the Bob Marley one tribe thinking... but it's still nice to have something that feels like home, I agree.

Reply
RichardM
27/6/2019 10:52:39 am

I’d certainly like to see more UK setting games: one set in Belfast would be great (although the obvious material for the setting might not be PR friendly...). I think it’s just a question of marketing, though: no money in making a game with an authentic modern British setting as only the relatively small number of British gamers will be interested.

Vaguely related: I remember setting out to make my school as a Duke Nukem 3D map many years ago, as an academic exercise rather than because I wanted to shoot all my teachers. It ended in failure because stairs are hard in DukeEdit. That sort of thing would get you in deep shit nowadays.

Reply
Garreth Hirons link
27/6/2019 10:56:28 am

Hear hear. I loved "Target: Renegade" for that; I was only single figures in age when it was released and playing it on a Spectrum, but the moral panics (biker gangs, Beastie Boys fans, cartoonish punks with massive mohawks) and locales (drab high street, dank multi-storey car park) were instantly recognisable as the world I lived in - a real taste of Thatcher's mid-eighties Britain. Bonus points for the last level being fights against bouncers in a rough, inner-city flat roof pub. It can't be that hard to do something similar today, you would think.

Reply
Wapojif
27/6/2019 10:56:52 am

The country is in a total mess. And it's very obviously the Tories who've done it through a mixture of callous arrogance, greed, and incompetence - the only thing they've done since 2010 is provide rich people with amazing tax cuts, whilst dumping all the problems on the poor and disadvantaged.

Philip Alston is, this very day, talking in Genova announcing his findings to the UN about extreme poverty in the UK after a decade of austerity and an appalling housing crisis.

I was never patriotic to begin with, but the last three years have made me realise England represents what the future holds for other developer nations unless greater equality is promoted and we stop greedy capitalists hoarding wealth.

Can we turn that into a video game?

Reply
RichardM
27/6/2019 11:08:35 am

Well, indeed. I think Brexit is probably the best thing that ever happened to the Conservative party: they’re absolutely ruined, destroyed forever. And yet Labour can’t mount a coherent response! Everyone failed entirely by the political class.

It would be a fun game to mess about with - like Sim City, you know, having disasters for a bit of fun? Let’s have prorogue Parliament and have riots in the streets! Let’s have a run on the pound! Let’s make model buses out of cardboard boxes, and shit this ruined place down the toilet forever.

Reply
Wapojif
27/6/2019 02:12:53 pm

It's amusing that Cameron's attempts to solidify his position as PM has led to, surely, the dismal failure of the Tories in the next general election.

I do hope they're destroyed forever, but they have a habit of coming back - in a decade, peoples' memories will fade. I had a Daily Mail reading colleague recently who happily claimed Thatcher is our best ever PM and that the main problem in this country is those lazy people who don't work.

Labour should be all over them like a nasty rash ready to dominate, but Corbyn is ineffective. My concern now is we have GE and that halfwit Farage bustles in with his Brexit demagogue.

Dungeon Keeper meets Sim City meets Papers, Please would be an interesting take on it. There aren't many political games I can think of, really. A new genre!??!

Bored
27/6/2019 06:57:11 pm

The tories give tax cuts to the rich and hammer the poor. That is one of the most tedious statements to read. Do you honestly think a political party would still continue to be in power if that was the case. Boring.

Reply
Wapojif
28/6/2019 08:52:10 am

"Do you honestly think a political party would still continue to be in power if that was the case"

Yes. Obviously, as the Tories have done this for a decade straight. A mixture of propaganda and the right wing tabloids spinning lies keeps many people voting for the very thing making their lives so miserable.

Plus, the right detest the left to such an extent they wouldn't use their brans to vote Labour/Lib Dem no matter the circumstances. It's taken the collapse of Brexit to make people abandon the party - the Tories are vile.

Read the Philip Alston's UN report on extreme poverty in the UK to educate yourself.

Wapojif
28/6/2019 08:54:37 am

Frankly, the only tedious thing here is the continued denial the Tories have commited appalling human rights breaches. Austerity alone is apparently responsible for 100,000+ deaths. There's a homelessness crisis. Food bank usage has gone through the roof. Child poverty rates are unprecedented. The cost of housing is three times what it should be. Wage stagantion. Wage regression. Endless crippling budget cuts etc. etc.

And you're seriously trying to say this is tedious for me to point out? Your boredom on the matter is due to your stupidity, dear.

Bored
29/6/2019 11:43:38 am

Austerity caused 100,000 deaths! What absolute tosh dear. I couldn’t care less for the left or right. Tell me one country that doesn’t suffer poverty. Do you honestly believe it is all down to the government, utter stupidity. Your left wing anger Fuels your need to blame someone or a party. Clearly under labour we were all living in a utopia. Punch and Judy politics. Chill.

hayesmaker link
27/6/2019 11:09:21 am

Watch Dogs: Legion's London actually looks very authentic... I could point out at least 2 places I've worked at just from what was shown in the trailer at E3... Also, can't wait for that game, because you can play anyone,,, even a Bionic Granny!

Reply
Lord Farty Pants link
27/6/2019 12:14:48 pm

We need a new Trashman game, picking up the plastic from the beaches, rivers and seas, also a sweary trashman game where he gets drunk in a wetherspoons, throws up in an Ambulance, punches a copper and ends up on community service picking up arse bricks from Bojo when he becomes PM.

Reply
MENTALIST
27/6/2019 12:15:50 pm

You should have a look at Supermarket Shriek - which I had a go of recently on Game Pass. It gave me an odd thrill of familiarity in the awful, but recognisable high street it presented me with.

It was made in Belfast, apparently:

http://press.billygoat.tv/supermarket_shriek/images/Screenshot8.png


(unfortunately, I didn't like the gameplay very much - and the party mode, which I wanted it for seems to be locked behind some degree of story mode progress).

Reply
Geebs
27/6/2019 12:42:30 pm

“only in the same way as we can relate to, I dunno, Tomb Raider, because we all know what a woman is.”

I dunno if I’d go that far, this is the Internet after all.

The problem with British video games is the same as the problem with Canadian crime dramas: we’re basically too boring. In the same way that procedurals about the mean streets of Toronto, of all places (the most threatening thing about Toronto being that the teenagers genuinely seem to be happy, which is admittedly pretty unnerving) just seem a bit silly, there’s really nothing about being British to get your teeth into.

And if the only route for developers to make a British game is either people playing up to the stereotype (like the ghastly Sir You Are Being Hunted) or UbiSoft’s anodyne meditations on nothing much in particular, I think we’re better off without.

Reply
Barrie link
28/6/2019 12:07:12 pm

There's tons of British stuff people could get their teeth into. Any thing from JG Ballard for a start. HG Wells early stuff. Joseph Conrad stuff. Irvine Welsh. Mike Leigh. Modern day Adrian Mole stuff (Sue Townsend)... etc. etc. British music in the background....

Not boring to me at all. I love the UK, our fascinating history, the pioneering spirit.... We're just in the doldrums at the minute (and suffering from early Internet instant communication madness), but it will pass. I believe we're a far more accepting and tolerant nation than people realise.

But this follows that I'd be interested in other countries / areas too in games. The USA has been done to death.

Reply
Geebs
29/6/2019 09:32:11 am

Press “x” to feel embarrassment

Meatballs-me-branch-me-do
27/6/2019 02:41:33 pm

I said before that British games journos always go on about how the next instalment in Big Open World Game needs to be set in the UK, and then whinge about how the UK is depicted when that finally happens.

I agree with Geebs' comment that the UK as a setting isn't necessarily as great as you think it is, especially when you're after very specific small touches that happen to speak directly to you (and is almost impossible for a developer to anticipate).

I would posit it's more important that the game's own setting is compelling, interesting and believable. I've never been to Finland, but I found the decidedly lo-fi My Summer Car's setting extremely absorbing. All the detail and consistency within its own (sometimes surreal) logic just worked.

I had a lot of respect for the love and attention Rockstar put into their depiction of SoCal for GTA V, and likewise Far Cry 5's Montana is a extremely good recreation of rural North America (if you remove the cultists, not being facetious).

Trying to make a super-English game means that most people outside won't get it, either in terms of grasping what's going on, or in actually buying it. While I understand the desire for that home town shout out, all by the nichest titles need broader appeal or to not care. Not Tonight is probably the best, 'authentic', believable depiction of modern Britain I've seen in gaming, but the writing and little touches in the background will sail right over any non-Brit's head.

Reply
Ian
27/6/2019 02:45:14 pm

We need National Shite Day: the game.

The bonus stage could be a man with a mullet going mad with a mallet in Millets.

Reply
Nick
27/6/2019 05:09:47 pm

Theme music provided by Primark FM.

Reply
Robobob
27/6/2019 07:54:26 pm

Surely it's not beyond the wit of man to mash up GTA and Google Streetmap.

You too can escape from the fuzz up the A1!


Even London would be a bit too cliché now. Let's have that open world game set in the Lake District, or GTA: Glasgow, or Shetland Street Racer.

Reply
MENTALIST
28/6/2019 09:37:57 am

I once worked for a company which (in a project I wasn't working on) tried to do that.

It certainly ended up beyond the wit of them.

Reply
Penyrolewen
27/6/2019 09:43:31 pm

It’s WHITE board, not ‘wipe’ boards. Because they’re white, not because they’re racist. They’re great, basically it’s a touch sensitive projector screen with pens and that. You can look at lesson stuff on them and also interact with them, write on them, type on them, zoom in, look at the internet and ooh, everything. Blackboards (also because they’re black, not racist) are old school (literally]

Reply
That play where harry potter bums a horse
28/6/2019 09:11:57 am

I always thought Bully was hugely influenced by British school as much as it was influenced by the fantasy we have of what American school must be like.

I mean, the school itself is a Victorian building full of prefects, they've got a head boy and a head girl, the kids wear uniforms like we did, and you go round everywhere on a BMX.

I think most importantly is the attitude and the behavior of the kids. It's a failing school but it's failing britishly, they're all mean and spiteful little shits who make teachers cry. It's got an incredibly intense grange hill energy to it. If it was a failing school in the american way it would have a large presence of actual murderous gang members.

Reply
Meatballs-me-branch-me-do
28/6/2019 03:56:14 pm

Remember that it is a private academy, not a public high school.

Reply
That play where harry potter bums a horse
29/6/2019 06:15:23 pm

It is and it isn't, it's the only school in the town and most of the kids who go there are working class and/or not boarding. They put dorms in there because that's a popular school fiction thing, but they didn't constrain themselves to that sort of Tory boarding school fantasy because then they'd have had to miss out on all the stereotypical failed-ofsted situations.

Bullworth has whatever traits are needed to tell a certain joke, like Springfield in the Simpsons. The whole setting is ambiguous, even about what decade it's in, so as to evoke as many childhoods as possible.

I don't want this
28/6/2019 09:53:59 am

England is shit and I play games to escape the aching nonstop insipid banality of this dire country

Reply
Captain Commodore link
28/6/2019 05:51:17 pm

Totally agree and as such a diamond in the rough, thought Zombi U was an absolute delight for this very reason. Whacking 28 Days Later style zombies in hoodies to death with a cricket bat whilst looting an old chip shop with a crashed police Vauxhall’s Astra outside whilst a voyeuristic northerner guides me towards the next horrific location...such as the back of Tesco’s or a big green wheelie bin... thought it was a masterful rendition of suburban London. It was all the scarier exactly because I could relate, this was my world that was in an undead apocalypse!

Reply
Penyrolewen
29/6/2019 06:08:51 am

Totally agree. I had to stop playing it for that very reason- it was too bleak, too believable.

Reply
Meatballs-me-branch-me-do
1/7/2019 12:38:36 am

I couldn’t get enough of it, the developers had clearly had a ball (such as the various signs in the supermarket or the magazines on racks) building the world, and the lack of your usual tons of guns made for an interesting and welcome change of pace as the succession of everyday folks you control.

I think my favourite bit was going through the lane behind terraced houses, smashing zombie chavs’ heads in.

Mike
28/6/2019 07:11:43 pm

I’d like a Grand Theft Auto set in Glasgow. Walking up Sauchihall street on a Saturday night simulator would present a decent challenge.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    This section will not be visible in live published website. Below are your current settings:


    Current Number Of Columns are = 2

    Expand Posts Area =

    Gap/Space Between Posts = 12px

    Blog Post Style = card

    Use of custom card colors instead of default colors = 1

    Blog Post Card Background Color = current color

    Blog Post Card Shadow Color = current color

    Blog Post Card Border Color = current color

    Publish the website and visit your blog page to see the results

    Picture
    Support Me on Ko-fi
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    RSS Feed Widget
    Picture

    Picture
    Tweets by @mrbiffo
    Picture
    Follow us on The Facebook

    Picture

    Archives

    December 2022
    May 2022
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    November 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014


    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • MAIN PAGE
  • Features
  • Videos
  • Game Reviews
  • FAQ