Kingdom of Loathing and 'feely kits', Technobile, The Guardian

Do roleplaying games have to be enhanced by offers of jewellery made from chainmail and 'feelie kits'?

[Kat Brown, The Guardian, Technology section, 23 August, 2007]

Is there a single computer game left untouched by the fetishised psychosis of people who still live with their parents? If so, for crying out loud, give it my number.

When I hung up my roleplaying game (RPG) cap I thought I'd said sayonara to the more obsessive end of the gaming spectrum. A genre with as many wobbly papier-mâché shrines and roleplay fanatics as you can wave a Wii controller at, the continual wading through fan fiction to find an FAQ got to be too much, and I ran away screaming.

In Kingdom of Loathing I thought I'd found my perfect retirement. An awe-inspiringly sarcastic online RPG that drops pop culture, gaming and scholarly references with the flair of a pixellated Pratchett, its intolerance of the usual internet mores is such that you have to pass a spelling and grammar test before you're even allowed to chat.

But there is a downside: as with most freeware, the game's creators make their money from merchandise and donations and an - honest to God - "feelie kit". For a mere $40 (£20), some keys, a participant's certificate and other hastily assembled crap can be yours.

It's the sheer disparity between the game and the merchandise that makes me twitch. Who are these complex individuals who can spend an afternoon laughing disdainfully at Lamz0r N00bs (that's lame newbies to you, auntie), only to lovingly admire their participant's certificate afterwards? You have to hope it's a little joke from the makers, this time more on their obsessive users than the general public.

It gets worse with Zelda, a series so unrelentingly brilliant that fan design should be made an act of treason. One fan makes a tidy sum selling Triforce jewellery made out of chainmail. "Ever wonder what the items and such in Hyrule really look like?" runs the blurb. No, because I've played the game and in fact they look heavily pixellated and a bit rubbish.

You can choose from the Ocarina of Time, the Moon Pearl, and even the potions. "The bottles are 16oz/500ml size and about (sic) the exact same size as the bottles Link carries around." You can just bet someone sat by her screen with a ruler and a calculator for that one.

While I'm slightly in awe of people who can use chainmail in anything other than a sentence, I wish they'd use it for Dungeons and Dragons instead of such dead-eyed kookiness. I know they're just games for children and people with no social lives who are frightened of cheese, but they're also mine, dammit, and I refuse to be lumped in with a load of reverential basketcases just because I like playing them.

Four stars in Three Weeks!

WIT: **** Underbelly, 1.15pm
Wit: A sharp sounding word with connotations of humour and sanity, neatly reflects the qualities of this play's heroine, Vivian Bearing, a fiercely independent academic facing ovarian cancer. Not one to be anticipated by an obvsious narrative device she deadpans to her audience, "It is not my intention to give away the plot...but I think I die, at the end". Like the poetry of John Donne she so reveres, she 'distrusts simplification' and fights fiercely against both dehumanisation and sentimentality. Despite the sparkling erudition of the script, done full justice by intelligent performances all round, this play's most forceful comment is in fact a simple one about kindness. An unflinchingly honest performance of this acutely insightful and poignant play.

Warning: may contain pretentious ramblings

About an hour before the show, I hid in the Jelly Belly bar clutching a vodka and diet coke, my script and trying to assume the expression of one who knows she looks like a wannabe four-year-old in that hat but that’s actually happening to someone else. The vodka helped, if not steady my nerves – vodka? Really? – then reassure me that at least we didn’t have press coming in like our sister show, The Dresser, over at the Baby Belly.

Approximately ten minutes before we gathered beds, straws and Beatrix Potter books and rigged the set, one of the nice boys from the Underbelly press popped his head round the door.

“Three Weeks have asked for a ticket,” he said, managing to be sweet and apologetic at the same time. “They know it’s your first day so I said they asked first. The only thing is they might not come back if they had to reschedule.”

We said yes.

We then realised one of the wings was too small and shunted the set around so that everyone had to do the play mirrored. This was fine up until I ended up doing some kind of absurd tango with Vivian’s IV pole, and my young doctor had to give her a clinical exam with the wrong hand. Nice.

The show was…odd. The amazing flyering done by everyone in their scrubs had obviously done the job: we only had six spare seats apparently. People laughed, a lot, but not always where we thought they would, but then audiences and casts don’t tend to agree very often. It seemed to go brilliantly, and there was lots of clapping and what looked like smeary trails down the cheeks of at least two smiling ladies in the second row.

We treated ourselves to two shows to celebrate, wangling whatever free stuff we could with our company passes. This backfired when we couldn’t get in to see a show called Greedy, which was sold out due to it’s having a reputation for being good. It also backfired when it meant we managed to get into see The Durham Revue, which also had a reputation for being very good, but unfortunately wasn’t. There was one boy who played Popeye in the show’s only slick, smart sketch, the rest had a lack of timing, direction and talent which was frankly bizarre. I know this sounds very mean, but it really was awful.

Afterwards we nipped along to see the House of Windsor, who we’d chatted up yesterday in the store room. Absurdist sketches, blissfully better than the Revue, with lots of deadpan camp about bears hibernating and Tim Henman.

This was all very good until we parted ways, I wen home, read for a bit, then realised that the only two people I actually know in the house and gone out to a cast dinner and forgot I was there. Ordinarily I’d have jumped in a cab and gone over, but I felt utterly disgusting after the show and it’s remained.

Basically, I spend an hour dying. The script is funny, it’s poignant, and the cast are brilliant. This doesn’t prevent the fact that I feel like I’ve lost someone everytime I do it properly. I know that’s unforgivably pretentious, but hey – this is Edinburgh. Also, because my character has so many bloody lines, I feel a bit like a prop who’s been brought in to perform, and because I’ve got that wig most of the morning til after the play, it makes me feel very self-conscious about flyering and also unavoidably stamped to the damned character. That got exacerbated when I got left behind at the house. I feel shaky, and ill and cried horribly and in short, feel like Vivian at her lowest – I just want to hide. I want to curl up into a little ball.

Bricking it like a house of bricks

I am sitting in the Fringe press office in the denim hat I got in the same skewed sales logic of “but it’s 70% off!” that got me a pair of cripplingly small silk shoes, and a bald wig. Wearing the bald wig has turned the cute hat into a Children’s Ward cliché. On the machine next to me here’s an elderly monk with Ming The Merciless eyebrows and a katana case strapped to his back. Nobody bats an eyelid, I rather want to grab his ankles and pledge him my troth.

The rest of the cast trooped up yesterday and took the news of our new and minimalist stage pretty well. We had a run-through in one of the spare playrooms lying around our gargantuan house – this one could have easily housed a Church hall – at which point it materialised that, while we were all dodgy on lines, one cast member was vomiting memory loss in hysteria-causing spades.

Charlotte quietly banished him to learn his lines upstairs. Marco, the cast adult, came back to announce even more quietly that when asked how many lines he actually knew, he reckoned “Um, about 30%?”

Ideas involving lines written on clipboards were bandied about. We ran through as much as we could, then Charlotte took her other cast off to the Baby Belly to have their tech. They got back at 2.30 this morning.

We ran through Wit at 9 this morning. Charlotte and Katie, who’s in both plays, are still somehow conscious. The cast member had miraculously learned all his lines and was absolutely brilliant.

I tried on my bald cap last night. These are not fun to do on your own and require a lot of cutting down before they stop looking like a gimp sock. Last time I had one I had significantly more hair. This time, I chopped it off beforehand, expensively. There was still too much, so I grabbed the kitchen scissors I’d used for chopping up plastic and cut a few chunks out, less expensively. I can’t see what it looks like at the back which is probably wise, but the effect from the front is something that a trust-fund hipster would probably fork out £100 for at Taylor Taylor. It’s DIY, bitches.

After my Royal Tenenbaums moment I went to bed and read children’s books and tried not to die of panic in my sleep.

It’s now about 90 minutes til the first show. I know it’s only a fucking play, but I’ve never had stage fright in my life, and right now I’m rather wishing I’d had practise because I am absolutely terrified.

Wit at Edinburgh - "taking the night bus didn't kill me" shocker

It’s a theatrical tradition that, for a show to go right, everything has to go wrong beforehand. I’ve always rather suspected this to be lies made up by companies blessed with more enthusiasm than skill, but given the endless stream of you’ve-gotta-laugh-or-you’ll-cry-and-never-get-up-again incidents that happened yesterday, I’m inclined to change my opinion.

From Monday we’re performing at Delhi Belly, a bijou space in the vast caverns of the Underbelly on Cowgate. Bijou is a kind word meaning microscopically small. Our director Charlotte – an unflappable genius whose anger/panic/insanity only becomes apparent if you look her straight in the eyes in the afternoon – walked in to find that four feet of the stage was missing.

“We needed a viable fire exit,” said one of the Underbelly techs cheerily. This makes our stage a measly 8ft deep (I am 6’2 and do a lot of lying down) and means we now have to put a large prop on the floor and call it ‘meta’.

Sunday was to be our tech, the first rehearsal since a week-long rush a month ago.

“Wit – um, yeah here you are. 1pm on Monday,” said our techie, Gavin, looking at his clipboard

There was a short pause while Charlotte battled the demons within.

“Gavin, the play has its first run at 1.15 on Monday. We’re supposed to be teching in the morning.”

“Um, well, someone-who-sounds-like-Dave-Michelle has got you down for then.”

Gavin is not thick, just massively overworked. Possibly-Dave-Michelle is also not thick, but definitely numerically dyslexic.After some Charlotte magic worked on the supervising tech, and bribing a reluctant Gavin with tea and donuts to get out bed for 9.30 Monday morning, we set about assembling the props. The NHS hospital bed and office chair are played by Ikea, both being cheap and famously unreliable. We hit a snag when the chair’s last wheel refused point blank to allow itself to be screwed in place. George, Charlotte’s assistant, nearly broke his head falling off it backwards, which will teach him for playing around on swivel chairs when there are beds of minute height to assemble.

The bed is Lilliputian. Alex, who plays one of the doctors, will have to limbo under my character’s pelvis in order to do an exam. Ikea outdid themselves again by making the mattress a good four inches smaller than the bed frame. A sketch group called The House of Windsor eyed our efforts dubiously as we then attempted to make it look a bit less like a horrific metal accident by covering it in sheets and hospital blankets. We lost George, who’d seen the House of Windsor show in London and subsequently turned deep pink and asked reverential questions.

“Wit? I think I’m reviewing that for The Stage,” said one of them horrifying casually. “Acts reviewing other acts.” Charlotte and I turned the full laser beam of our smiles on him. He looked slightly uncomfortable. George was still pink. We’re all probably fucked, but we’ve got a very good play and regardless of Swiftian influence, that should hopefully be enough to engross an audience. It’ll even be all be alright on the night – and it was. We went to Silent Disco. It was the most fun I’ve had in months.

Bad day for baby whales

Whales: stop coming to Britain. Maybe that fake great white could come up from Cornwall and scare him out.

Things that are good and things that are not

- The Bourne Ultimatum
Despite the fact I find myself physically incapable of calling it anything other than the Bourne Ultomato, it was anything but thoroughly stupid. Moving from one beautifully choregraphed and outlandishly plotted chase after another, the action was so snapped down it felt like Matt Damon had been taking dance lessons. The Guardian must be in absolute bits as well - Paddy Considine plays a hardhitting one of their number who Bourne has to mastermind through Waterloo station. My home departure lounge never looked so interesting - Bourne twats a bad guy outside the big Smiths! Amazing!

The sad thing Bourne has to contend with is that every assassin other than him seems to double as a Hot Model. Desh, the guy who trails him around Morocco (and Paul Greengrass certainly includes a lot of nice tourist shots from helicopters) is so pretty you almost forget your're not really supposed to be looking at him as much as you are. Oh yes, and Bourne kills someone with a towel. A TOWEL! And there's no chauvinism! And Joan Allen is the most fabulous nutcracker this side of the real CIA. Move aside Bond, this really is the greatest action franchise of the last 30 years. Even if there's no actual spying in it.

More than that, I haven't been to a screening like it in years: the audience was constantly breaking into applause after setpieces, laughing and wincing and collectively going "Ooh" and "Aah". Now that's amazing cinema. Helen couldn't make it because she was interviewing Josh Hartnett (a phoner! Not even a face to face, the poor lamb) and they're not screening it again for two weeks or something obscene. Yet despite this extremely generous gap between screening and release date, we didn't have to go through the usual rigorous security checks to ensure all phones, cameras and professional recording equipment had been removed. That's Sprite levels of refreshing, seriously.

- The Bratz Movie
Less about the film itself, more about the fun in the foyer. Despite the fact I'd been to an incredibly good party the night before and was thusly still dressed as the Industrial Zone from The Crystal Maze, I was still allowed to have some of the chocolate crispy cakes the PRs had got in, and watch as the little girls and (for reasons known only to the parents) boys got to mess around with the fun.

This is one of the nicest things about multi-media screenings: for the kids films, the PR company organises lots of nice activities for them before the film starts to get them in the mood. Bratz had glitter face painting (I fitted right in - my hair was still vaguely silver), cheerleading classes downstairs and those cake things. Little girls clutching pom poms and spelling out "F-A-B-U-L-O-U-S!" while dancing around might be the sweetest thing you'll ever see.

- Elopements
A friend from university sent an email round yesterday announcing the fact that he and his longterm fiancée had eloped to New York and were getting married on Friday. In Elvis style. How is that not the best thing ever? Now Matt gets to put his cherished brown cord flares in the limelight where he thinks they belong. Bless! Also, elopements. Brilliant. Apparently the average wedding costs £18,000. This is rubbish, surely - all you want is a nice summer day, some flowers, a garden and all your friends around you. That and enough gin to drown a city of Dickensian orphans.

- Cultural interchange on Radio 4
Zane Lowe talking about Mark Ronson's Bob Dylan remix on the Today programme. But mostly James Naughtie talking about "fattened up" music.

...and not

I downloaded a French artist before I moved house, namely because I love Camille and Sybille Baier and thought that someone called Katerine must be pretty alright. That and she shared my name and had an album called Robots Aprè Tout which just sounded like the sort of quirky quant fey crap I go nuts over. Fuck no. It's an ageing man with longstanding pretensions to electropop and it makes me want to rampage. Back to Cat Power, Catatonia, or Skatalites if we're being particularly tenuous.

- Coelacanths
Specifically fishing for them. So someone in Asia's picked up the first one in ages - doesn't that basically mean there's one less?

"He took the catch back to the port where it remained alive for 17 hours in a netted pool outside of a restaurant. It was then frozen and is now being examined by scientists."

Wow. They're examining a fish that barely exists to find out why it barely exists and how. Oh come on, seriously.