Oh, the weather outside is frightful…

At the time of writing, it is snowing outside (which should give some of you an idea as to the length of backlog I keep). All I see is some varying shade of white or grey, as the snow lies several inches deep in patches- and is still falling. Even the road is barely visible between its white dusting. All is calm, all is quiet, all sound deadened in that weird way snow does.

This has, understandably, somewhat altered my plans over the weekend. With all rugby-related activities off for the immediate future and a large repository of awesome awaiting in the hills near my home, I have spent around four hours over the last two days rolling around in, sliding over, throwing and falling into heaps of snow whilst wrapped in twice the layers of clothing I customarily wear; and loving every minute of it. Monday has come inconveniently early for me. I am a big child.

Of course, snow is not all great news. When the snow first fell I was stuck away from home and offered to give a friend a lift back to his; after I’d dropped him off I became caught in the worst traffic jam I have ever experienced, and took a total of three and a half hours to get to my house, eight miles from my point of departure. This is just one part of the minor infrastructure  meltdown that occurs whenever snow ends up where it’s unexpected; across Britain (where, incidentally, this decade has seen more serious snowfalls than the last half-century) roads have been clogged, schools have closed, airports have had to cancel flights and shops have shut. After a few days most people have basically got used to it and some aspects of life are starting to return to normal, but the smaller roads are still treacherous and flights continue to be cancelled across the country.

This of course inspires the usual parlance of “we are all a bunch of useless wusses, why is the country grinding to a halt, in Canada/Sweden/Switzerland/the mountain passes of Tibet they can deal with this pitiful dusting in their sleep”. This is generally an opinion put forward by a) raging pessimists who hate everything and b) people who are angry at having been stuck in traffic or similar for an extended period, and is somewhat stupid. In countries where snow is regular/predictable/all the year round, people have all the equipment (winter tyres, snow chains, snowploughs etc.) to make sure they can cope when the inevitable bad weather rolls in. In Britain however, snow is so irregular and unpredictable that to own all this expensive equipment is simply not financially viable to keep all year round, much less remember how to equip and use. If we just take the economic standpoint, despite the chaos it causes, we are better off in the long run having a few days every year or three of total mayhem than an expensive state of perpetual readiness that we really don’t need.

The fact that this sentiment exists, however, is indicative of the strange love/hate relationship we have with snow. On the one hand, we idolise it; we holiday across continents to spend weeks slithering around over a predictable supply of it, hail snowy landscapes as some of the most breathtakingly beautiful our planet has to offer, and every year as December rolls around we in the Northern hemisphere are greeted to endless images of snow in adverts, TV and everything else even remotely associated with Christmas. In this context, it is seen as a kind of wistful image; a wish for the snow’s beauty and the kind of landscape to make a crackling fire and time spent with the family seem even more attractive and like the perfect family Christmas that we all seem to aim for during the festive period. Snow is something to be lusted after, something we are willing to pay an awful lot for, and that has some kind of mystical quality to it.

But then we consider the inverse; what happens when it arrives. Across the country, news bulletins offer us stern warnings of icy roads, treacherous conditions, the occasional serious incident (this year four people were killed in a hiking incident during the worst part of the cold weather) and, of course, the thousands of parents facing childcare problems as little Timmy’s school has shut and he wants to go play in the snow. When it comes around, the number of people who say they hate snow grows rapidly; it traps us in traffic, riles our tempers, messes with our schedules. The snow itself, so pristine when it first falls on fresh, cold ground, rapidly becomes compressed down to slippery, dirty ice, before turning into a messy slush. For many, there is no option but to wrap up warm, stay indoors and curse the day God invented the ‘cold rain’ (as a mate recently described it).

To an extent, this is an age thing; when young, we yearn for the snow that is so often promised but never comes, and without the responsibilities of adulthood we are fully equipped to make the most of it when it comes round. To an adult, being unable to get to work is frustrating and inconvenient; but a closed school is a child’s paradise, and offers an excuse to spend the entire day messing around doing as you please. And not only that, but the weather has also provided the best playground imaginable; not only is snow soft and relatively harmless, but it can be easily compacted into a harder, more solid form, allowing it to form snowballs, snowmen and even makeshift igloos. Even better than that, snow is mighty slippery stuff, allowing us to go flying down hills far faster than we could hope to even sprint, whilst still being soft enough to break our fall and clean enough that we don’t have to worry about ruining clothes, adding sledding to the ‘snow play’ repertoire.

Perhaps children are simply those best equipped to enjoy the snow; they don’t have to worry about the roads or work, and have none of the adult responsibilities that so weigh our older selves down. Or maybe they just have the correct mindset to deal with it, because in all honesty, snow is really good fun; a form of entertainment that is great precisely because it comes around so rarely, and provides so many opportunities. Maybe I’m just a big kid, but to me snow is a chance to forget a few of my responsibilities for a while, and just have fun bouncing off the trees. To return to the mind of a child one again, but with the adult body that allows me to get the absolute most out of it.

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Desert Bus

Charity is, as has been well documented, the most competitive industry on the planet. The trouble is that there are many, many things wrong with this world, and lots of people who believe that all should get the same thing- but nearly all of them are going after the same target demographic (the rich middle classes who can afford to give to them), and there are simply so many of them competing for people’s time, energy and, most importantly, financial support that many get drowned under the weight of competition. This has lead to many charity events in recent years attempting to break out from the mainstream collection ideas, focusing on charitable enterprise or other such concepts in order to be different and identifiable. However, when preparing for one such event that is happening in the very near future (hence why I’m publishing this post a day early) I saw an opportunity to combine the topic of charity with blogging and an old favourite fall-back topic, gaming- but to start with, I’m going to talk about magic, so sit in for a story folks.

In 1975 a pair of American magicians delivered a show in Minnesota that would quickly become the first of many. With another co-host, the duo built their reputation with a regular show that lasted until 1981, before moving to New York to start their own off Broadway shows. By 1985 these were garnering them some top reviews, so as the 90s approached they turned their act to Broadway proper. During the 1990s they were appearing regularly on chat shows, doing US national tours and making TV cameos, firmly establishing themselves as possibly the most famous magicians on earth at that time (and possibly the present day too). Their names were (and are) Penn & Teller.

By 1995 their career was reaching a zenith; famous both nationally and around the world, they were the closest the magical world had to global superstars. And with stardom came all the trappings of fame, including incessant requests from various publishers and agents asking to be allowed to use their name to plug something, and presumably in late 1994 one such offer from Absolute Entertainment was accepted; to allow Penn & Teller to be the subject material for a videogame.

The game in question was to be called Penn & Teller’s Smoke And Mirrors; the console, the Sega-CD (an add-on for the Sega Mega Drive that was at the time fighting a furious console war with Nintendo’s Super NES). The game itself consisted of a series of mini-games, in a similar way to how a magic show is comprised of individual tricks- or at least, that was the idea. Each game was a trick you had to master, a little bit of slight-of-hand/controller that you had to learn before inviting your friends over and thrashing them since you knew how the trick worked, as a form of payback against those friends “who come over to your house, eat your food, drink your soda, play your games and always beat you” (Penn’s words, not mine). Many have since voiced the opinion that videogaming was a rather odd choice of platform for this idea, but whether this would have impacted sales was never discovered, as Absolute Entertainment went bust after (conveniently) they had completed the game’s development, but before they got a chance to ship it and pay Penn & Teller back the licensing money they were owed. Under the terms of the contract, this rendered all deals regarding use of Penn & Teller’s likenesses and intellectual property null and void, meaning Absolute Entertainment’s owners (Skyworks Interactive Inc.) couldn’t sell the game, and all the copies they produced presumably sat in a corner gathering dust somewhere. However, before the studio went under another player entered our story, by the name of Janet Reno.

At the time, Janet Reno was Attorney General of the United States under Bill Clinton’s leadership, and at the time in question she chose a particularly opportune moment to join the chorus of voices against the violence in videogames. Reno’s argument partially centred on the idea that these games were unrealistic, and should try to depict life as it really was rather than clouding the mind’s of the nation’s children (or something), so as a rather sly joke Penn & Teller slipped one more minigame in, the only one that wasn’t a magic trick. A little minigame going by the name of Desert Bus.

Desert Bus was described as being designed to be an example of ‘stupefyingly realistic gameplay’, and in it you played as a bus driver. Your job was to drive between two US cities, Tucson, Arizona, and Las Vegas, Nevada, at no more than 45 miles per hour (presumably the bus was electronically limited), in real-time, right across the Great American desert. The scenery was fairly unchanging (the odd tree or bus stop goes by), there is no traffic coming the other way, the graphics are about as good as could be expected from that generation console, there are no people to pick up, and the journey takes 8 hours to complete in each direction. After 5 hours, a bug hits the windscreen. This is considered a highlight.

However, there were three things that turned this from a rather interesting statement by the game developers to a simultaneously evil and absolutely hilarious game, depending on whether you were playing or just hearing about it. Firstly, there is no ability to pause; pressing the pause button merely activates the horn, so you’re in for the long haul. Secondly, the bus lists to the right, meaning one cannot simply tape down the accelerator and leave it for eight hours- it requires one’s constant attention (and repeated turning left) to avoid crashing. If you do crash, and stay still for 15 seconds, a tow truck comes to take you back to Tucson- again, in real time, and at 45 miles an hour. Thirdly, if you reach Vegas, you get one point- and 15 seconds to decide if you want to try for another one by heading back to Tucson. The game has a limit of 99 points, never achieved without the use of an emulator. This is the world’s greatest endurance test- Penn & Teller even had plans, had the game been released, to set up a competition for who could get the most points, the prize being a luxury trip in ‘the real Desert Bus’, a few nights in a luxury Vegas hotel and tickets to their show, but of course the game never exactly received widespread coverage.

That is, however, not until 2007, when two more players enter our story- Penny Arcade and LoadingReadyRun. Penny Arcade is probably the most famous webcomic in the world, written by a couple of games nerds for games nerds (I should probably say at this point that I’ve never actually read it, but ho hum), and very much acting as a voice for the gaming community. It’s founders, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, have become successful enough to start their own gaming convention (PAX), and in 2003 they embarked on another project- Child’s Play. Designed with the view in mind of a gaming charity, a chance for gaming culture to give something back to society and to improve its negative image as being violent and uncouth, it aims to deliver toys and videogames to sick children in hospitals worldwide, in order to make their lives a little more bearable. Some have said that it’s message is perhaps not as righteous as that of, say, Oxfam, but these people are kind of missing the point of charity and it is nonetheless charmingly sweet in concept. Penny Arcade’s prominence among the gaming community is such that many key industry figures have got behind it and the charity has so far raised over $12 million, nearly one million of which has come thanks to the work of a group of Canadians behind an 8-year old internet sketch comedy series called LoadingReadyRun.

You see, in 2007 the guys behind LoadingReadyRun decided that they would try to use their small but devoted hardcore fan base to raise some cash for such a good cause, and so decided to organise a charity gaming marathon in aid of Child’s Play. Casting around for a suitable game to play, they decided that ‘the most boring game in the world’ would form a good backdrop whilst they danced, pissed around and generally humiliated themselves on camera to get donations, and so they plumped for Desert Bus. As they slotted a copy of the game (don’t ask me where they got it from) into a borrowed Sega CD, they hoped to try and raise $5,000 dollars, the plan being that their strategy of ‘the more we get the longer we play’ would last them about a weekend. They made four times their target, and the following year did the same thing again and hit $70,000, forcing them to play for nearly 4 days. By the next year their comedy had reached a wider audience after being picked up and hosted by The Escapist online ‘magazine’, and they broke $100,000 for the first time; last year they made $383,125.10, and hope to bring their sum total to over a million this year. Desert Bus For Hope 6 starts tomorrow, at 5am GMT (or 9pm PST), it’s for a great cause, and it should be entertaining to watch the kind of challenges they get up to- they are professional sketch comedians after all. The website’s here, and the list of people ringing in is here (spoiler- the list includes Notch), and a far more entertaining history of the game is here. If you’ve got the time free, give them a watch. It’s for the children.