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ISSUE 3 / FEBRUARY 2012
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SOFT PALETTE
LAYING THE MAC DOWN
KONKRETA DRÖMMAR
THINGS CAN ONLY GET GUETTA
FUNKY GESCHICHTE
TOLKIEN VIA GYGAX
PHONEY SECURITY
WELL, AS LONG AS YOU’VE GOT YOUR HEALTH
CONVERSATIONS
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#ANGELOFDEATH
Issue 3 / February 2012
Editors
Romney Taylor
Tom Pounder
Deputy Editor
Sonny Baker
Contributors
Andrew Brooke
Nosheen Iqbal
Haywood Jablomi
Emma Lundin
Charles Olive
Ben Perdue
Duncan Robertson
Iain Sides
Amy Stone
Follow @gutpap
www.gutpaper.com
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SOFT PALETTE
Ben Perdue
There. On the lacquered beech arm of a hospital easy
chair, upholstered in opal green antimicrobial vinyl, your
elbows resting on the collapsible aluminium rail of the
bed adjacent. What you can see: the half-shut, watery pink
eyes of someone struggling (for the moment) to overcome
sedatives; a cornflower blue plastic cap on the cannula that
was responsible for delivering them, taped to their right hand;
a black crate you didn’t notice on the way in that contains
their clothes (folded) and letters of referral (unfolded); a
modular cream headwall system complete with night light,
mains supply, nurse call unit and a flow meter spooling coils
of translucent reddish gas tubing. The papery curtain has been
pulled round because you were smuggled into the women’s
recovery ward by a sympathetic sister who doesn’t want to
risk upsetting the other occupants. Over the reassuring hiss of
pure oxygen there are voices thick with anaesthetic coming
from the neighbouring beds requesting cups of PG and Rich
Tea biscuits. Nurses check with doctors before administering
refreshments. Through a crack where the curtain rail meets
the wall you glimpse a surgical nurse ferrying another fresh
gurney into its cubicle, passenger out for the count. She wears
unremarkable surgical scrubs in white, offset by the hot pink
arms of her clear disposable safety visor (available in boxes of
100). A new nurse turns up to take a pulse and – clocking your
ill-masked concern – explains in heavily accented English
that everything is normal; she’ll be back again in half an hour
with a cup of tea (not for you). The glowing dot on the tip of
your girlfriend’s finger fades, as the infrared sensor from the
portable ECG and oximeter is unclipped. When it arrives, the
tea is as anaemic-looking as the other washed-out residents
of the ward - in its beige throwaway branded cup holder with
matching light brown biscuits (on a green unbreakable plate),
but is all the more familiar and welcoming for it.
Colour theory and hospital administration have become
inextricably linked, influencing the practical coding of scrubs
and waste management, and the mood-enhancing shades
used wholesale across furniture and walls. The psychology
that underpins their careful deployment is well documented,
backed up with snappy anecdotal evidence that repeatedly
supports its success in reducing both violence and anxiety.
Wards and waiting rooms are the testing ground for clever
combinations of pales, neutrals, mid-tones and brights; created
to counteract the cold reality of a visit to A&E or outpatients.
Spend enough time walking the corridors of crumbling
plaster and chipped tiles in a tired Victorian institution, or
sitting in the prefab ward of a temporary annex building well
past its use-by date, and the potential benefits for patients and
visitors are obvious. Not that creeping dilapidation should be
confused with over-lit and soulless spaces as the root cause
of ill feeling, closely related though they undoubtedly are.
These grand utilitarian canvases communicate emotion on a
crowd-pleasing level, but brief glimpses of colour on a more
economical scale are just as powerful.
Modern medical supplies and healthcare uniforms use
colour in a way that feels customised, raising questions
about who benefits most from their contemporary aesthetic.
Manufacturers going HAM on the pastels in Pantone’s
colour guide to meet the demands of a market that equates
the look of clinical equipment and consumables with that of
disposable razors and plastic hair accessories could be one
cause. But a more likely explanation is that colour coding in
the workplace, to quickly distinguish between needle gauges
or airway sizes, has introduced the concept of trends to the
coloured plastic used in Luer taper connections and bite
blocks. The paradoxical nature of adding fun traits to starkly
functional, painful apparatus backs up the practical aspect of
the concept; no one will be fooled by the friendly sunshine
yellow rubber grip of a scalpel, or metallic purple finish on
a spinal punch. There’s no reason why a practical solution
shouldn’t incorporate a modern approach to colour usage
though, just as the production of new medical instruments
can comfortably sit under the category of contemporary
design. And in terms of ergonomics and material
development they undoubtedly influence other disciplines
already. Where this colour specification becomes less
simple to discuss is in its aesthetic appeal for the hospital
staff using these newly augmented objects. For the patient
it may be of fleeting interest that something expected to be
stainless steel, clinical white, or a sterile-feeling green in
appearance arrives suddenly reworked in a pleasing shade of
sun-bleached cyclamen. Soon forgotten once the procedure
begins and thoughts turn to more distracting subjects. You
could in fact argue that the familiar no-frills colour palette
traditionally associated with the NHS might actually have
its comforting qualities. But do doctors feel like their daily
experience is enhanced by the addition of expressive colour
to the coatings and grips of their equipment? The desire to
personalise is a very human trait and being able to choose
the colour of your fibreglass arm cast or air splint shows
how it already affects the world of public healthcare on a
patient level. While the possibility of picking the shade of
safety visor arms or pen torch casings reflects its increasing
influence on the professional side too. And the future
potential for this kind of customisation is likely to explore
new uses for performance materials adopted from other
fields. How about thermocromatic latex gloves that change
colour with changes in temperature? That’s one way to add
an entertaining new dimension to prostate examinations. w
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LAYING THE MAC DOWN
Duncan Robertson
In May this year I made a startling discovery. My best friend had never eaten
a Big Mac™, has not eaten a Big Mac since, and it seems unlikely that he
ever will eat a Big Mac. At first I saw this as a bit of a ‘statement’: “Sorry,
don’t go for the flagship, prefer a little esoterica. Pass the McChicken.”
I was wrong. It was just a coincidence.
That was the aspect that confounded me most. Every now and then it comes
to me in the night, like a premonition: my best friend is the last bastion of
resistance to Western hegemony and doesn’t even know it. Kim Jong-Il had
Big Macs airlifted to North Korea. Even Fidel Castro drinks Coca-Cola.
The more preoccupied I became, the more I enlisted guidance. I discovered
a few other regulars who had never sampled ‘the goods’. (Oddly, they always
go for the chicken option too.) Why? How can it be that several intelligent,
attractive people have let civilisation pass them by?
With this in mind and little qualitative data to substantiate my investigation,
I moved on to researching the entire global franchise and this, readers, is
where I struck gold.
Ronald’s reach extends to 119 of the 196 countries on this planet.1 In many of
these, the Mac is not the staple burg. In others, it doesn’t even exist.
What follows is a case study summary of ongoing, inconclusive research
into weird global ‘burgs’ and the extreme, often surreal, and sometimes
tragic, conditions in which they’re acquired.
1. For some reason, there’s debate as to whether Taiwan is technically a country. For obvious reasons, I’ve included it.
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People need to see these weird ‘burgs’
1
The McAfrika (not to be confused with the Olympic-edition
McAfrica) caused considerable controversy upon release in
Norway, one of the world’s richest countries, in 2002. At
the time an estimated 12 million Africans faced starvation.
I think you pretty much get the gist of it. I don’t know if it
came with the garlic or if that’s just for show.
4
モスバーガー (MOS Rice Burger) With the 1992
McDonald’s Bombings, Taiwan hasn’t had the best of luck
(don’t even get me started about Bolivia – McD’s was forced
out in 2002). I didn’t have the best time reading their menu
either. And when your buns are made out of rice…
2
If you’re living in Canada, as well as enjoying your
free healthcare and stable economy, why not tuck into a
McLobster roll? An additional pescatarian option! Selfexplanatory, really.
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McMollets This is a Mexican approach. I think it’s beanpaste, with melted cheese on top, with peppers and onions on
top of that. I’m waiting for McDonald’s Mexico to confirm
this at time of press.
3
Down and out in Malaysia? Prosperity burger wouldn’t
hurt your chances! Comes with Twisty fries and Prosperity
McFizz (orange juice mixed with Sprite).
6
Finally, all eyes on Argentina for the future of McDonalds.
Presenting the Triple Mac. Take note, world. I’ve been to
a Buenos Aires branch. They charcoal-grill all the burgers.
Look out for my book Laying the Mac Down in 2012. Contains a special investigative report on McDonald’s Guantanamo Bay branch. w
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KONKRETA DRÖMMAR
Emma Lundin
I grew up in a Social Democratic utopia, in a neighbourhood that had been
built as part of Sweden’s groundbreaking Million Project housing scheme
in the mid-1970s, in an area that had previously been fertile farmland and
where the smoothly tarmacked streets were named for prominent Social
Democratic politicians. I grew up on Axel Danielssons väg: Danielsson had
translated Communist Manifesto into Swedish in 1886 – 96 years before I
was born and 96 years before my family moved to a yellow-brick detached
house in a cluster of about 100 identical houses. The area might have been
considered a bit of an eye-sore (in his novel Underdog, author Torbjörn
Flygt compares it to post-war Dresden) and it has certainly never won
any architectural brilliance prizes, but it was safe and comfortable – carand carefree.
A small park with an avenue of trees leading up to the patch of land where
a farmhouse stood a century ago, and a green field dotted with daisies and
dandelions was all that stood between me and the ‘centrum’ – the villagestyle town centre that housed both a bank and post office in its heyday,
but where only the local supermarket, the hairdresser and the florist were
still in business by the time I started school in the late 1980s. By the time
I left school 10 years and a devastating recession later, the row of shops
was a dead place where nothing happened – at least nothing good. A boy
in my year was robbed at gunpoint as he worked a late shift in what had
become a video rental shop; there were fights – staged and spontaneous –
between whoever was considered “us” and “them”; and there were always
enough scandals to keep the school’s gossip rag churning out another few
issues. (The greatest achievement of that rag was having an issue banned
by the almighty school authorities who deemed it too salacious on account
of its potentially libellous content about some teachers. Still, the issue was
secretly distributed at the end-of-year after-party, and my copy is safely
stored in a box in my parents’ attic.) Despite its obvious weaknesses, I
loved that place, and I was bereft when persuaded to leave.
The thing about mass-produced areas is that they are inclusive and can be
welcoming, but only for the people who know them well – the people on
the inside. When I lived on a council estate (another yellow-brick building)
in Rotherhithe, I felt protected by the invisible communal security system:
knowing how to navigate through the lift, stairs and corridors, knowing
who the neighbours were, safe in the knowledge that an imposter would be
instantly visible enough to raise suspicion long before he or she made it to
my front door. (Mind you, one of my neighbours did a fine line in stalking,
and the invisible security system failed to keep the BNP from campaigning
on my doorstep.) But there is a price to pay for being on the inside, and the
architecture and layout of large council estates in Britain and the Million
Project housing districts in Sweden are largely responsible for keeping
the people who live there disconnected from ‘the rest of the city’ and vice
versa. No one wants to be an outsider, and no one walks across estate
neighbourhoods other than their own, and even though I grew up in an area
dominated by the working- and lower-middle classes in a country where
the school system at least tries to give children of different backgrounds
the same opportunities, we still owned our area and felt significantly
foreign elsewhere.
After nearly 10 years in London, I still have the same dentist that I’ve had
since I was four: she works in the council-run practice attached to my old
school, and these days the only time I visit my old area is when I have an
appointment with her. Her practice is housed inside the school. The sound
of the doors opening (a draught-induced sucking noise) and the scent as
you pass through them remind me of the 16 years I spent in and around that
building. (Incidentally, the school, the nursery next door, the row of shops
and the church were all built using the same orange-flecked maroon bricks
– uniformity is a leitmotif of the Million Project housing scheme.) But these
days, that wave of emotion is followed by an increasingly stark realisation
that I’m no longer at home, that I am the outsider – the one that knows no
one at school, the one who doesn’t know the names and addresses of the
cashiers at the supermarket, the one who can wait hours for the number 7
bus without seeing a single familiar face.
In the 12 years that have passed since I boxed up my belongings and
followed my parents to a flat in the real centre of Malmö, I have unwittingly
boxed up my longing and homesickness for the area I left in a neat little
box stored somewhere between my heart and stomach. I’m reminded of it
only during flashing moments when I fully understand that the place I long
for, the place where I grew up and where I felt like an insider, exists only
in the past. w
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Photos: Gustaf Emanuelsson (www.gblog.se)
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Illustration: Courtney Morgan
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THINGS CAN
ONLY GET GUETTA
Nosheen Iqbal
During the knowingly postmodern mid-nineties, a period
in which the ‘Britpop scene’ – as according to music
history – was the only one that mattered, another genre
climaxed to its peak, ‘Handbag house’, what Americans
would dub ‘Eurotrance’ and what generations of Brits
spent whole holidays in the company of, imploded.
An orgy of desperately dancefloor beats and overblown
synth arpeggios, the lurid sateen shimmer and River
Island diamanté to Britpop’s three stripe Adidas Canvas
and Fred Perry polos, had a good run on the singles
charts. It came booming from cars, sonically flashing in
high streets, seaside arcades and the kind of small-town
clubs always named either Quo Vadis or Fifth Avenue. Its
hits were legion – chart-defining tracks like ‘U Sure Do’;
‘Dreamer’; ‘Don’t Stop Movin’’ – its creators bouncing up
from anonymous assembly lines.
Big in Europe, platinum blonde or disco afro and
invariably pink of pout, the conventional face of Handbag
House was the turbocharged dance dolly. Her records
were Hi-NRG, deliberately trashy and injected with the
artificially synthetic beat of cheap production studios.
In short, colossal Eurodance with epic piano lines and
Barbie vocals.
With working class rock ‘n’ roll long since adopted
and appropriated by the middle classes – sensitively
cardiganed dweebs inevitably dug guitars – producers and
DJs became the sound of the mainstream masses. This
was the decade’s true pop music of the common people.
It was dubbed repetitive and unoriginal (unlike say, the
obviously still adored Menswe@r or Gene) and criticallyspeaking, left to wither in a black hole. Predictably, it was
also a commercial smash.
Some sweet sixteen years later and contemporary pop
culture has reached a natural, logical conclusion. The
morphed, dance-pop synths siren-calling from fairground
waltzes are no longer the preserve of so-called chavs. The
moneyed, and especially newly-moneyed, are dancing to
the same, incessantly attention-seeking beat. The critics
hate it for its vulgarity and its simplistic high spirits. But
musical opprobrium never got in the way of popularity
and so, the sound has gone global.
Think of 2 Unlimited’s ‘No Limits’, which ironically called
for “Techno! Techno! Techno!” despite containing none, as
an early forebear. The template was set. Cher capitalised on
it in 1998 with ‘Believe’; Usher married it to modern RnB
in 2004 with ‘Yeah’. Crunk’s upgrade to the mainstream
took matters to a whole new level. Thematically speaking,
if not stylistically, Fifty Cent threw the genre a curveball
in 2003. His deep rolling beats were no precursor for the
four to the floor rhythms and cheaply intoxicating whao
whao crescendos that followed. Yet Fifty advocated being
in da club and at some point between 2009 and 2011, so
did every other single. Rolling like a G6, partying with
the beautiful people, given everything tonight. This music
sold us an aspirationally good time, delivering fauxwellbeing through an acquisitive, money-hungry prism. It
manufactured RedOne. It gave us David Guetta.
Guitars carry the burden of emitting faux-cerebral vibes
which means it’s the pure rush of this, the most cynically
constructed pop, which will envelop present-day cultural
history. After all, the hefty bulk of critical adoration won’t
be heaped on cheaply disposable, bankably addictive big
tunes. That kind of worthy reverence will be saved for
PJ Harvey.
But in truth, contemporary pop’s present formula is the
more often recognised – if not forever remembered – by
great swathes of us. The bars of Beirut and the malls of
Singapore are enthralled by its shiny lure. Clubs and shacks
across continents are tuned into the cross-territory sounds
of American hip hop and RnB being steamrolled by Euro
club bangers. The result is internationally irresistible. At
a time when the economic and social outlooks are deeply
and discriminately bleak, why not let every other moment
in your life be soundtracked by the plastic party, pick ‘n’
mix bag of house pop?
In Britain, the charts and the dancefloors were meshed years
before, but until the arrival of Guetta ... had they ever been
so uniformly euphoric in tempo? Even Benny Benassi, Eric
Prydz and Tiësto – each once credible DJs on the clubbers
circuit, if not in the music press – have now become a
significant piece of the contemporary pop puzzle. Namely,
how did music finally become universally agreeable to
child, teen, parent and pensioner alike? At what point did
it become okay for ‘I Gotta Feeling’, David Guetta and
Black Eyed Peas’ definitive cultural opus, to be considered
a personal anthem spanning generational divides?
It’s for this achievement, not to mention a prolific rate for
knocking out floor-filling hits, that Guetta will later be
culturally revalued. He is this century’s first major musical
influence: an ex-stripclub owner and the archetypal French
music-making cheese. He’s also the only music act in
history to have his handprint immortalised outside LA’s
legendary Chinese theatre; the seller of some 15m singles at
a time where the format has universally been declared dead.
His fingerprint is stamped in songs across the planet, aural
flashpoints embedded in national psyches. His rise from
interchangeable house DJ to architect of our modern sound
is giddy. That familiar wuh wuh wuh is now inescapable
from our radio stations. And to think, judging by that noisemaking talent, it almost could have been Calvin Harris.
So what now? Wedding discos flounder without Guetta;
Ibiza falls over. Saturation point has been shot through
and yet the brilliance of the 44-year-old’s arrangements,
instinctive without needing to be creative, are still the first
and best example of truly globalised pop music. Undeniably
catchy, ubiquitously upbeat. The intelligence isn’t in any
of the songs themselves, which are soundbites for crassly
consumerist excess, but in the collective conquering power
of Guetta-ised modern music. The jury may be out on the
importance of its legacy but right now, everyone should
be too pissed to care: the pleasure is fleeting, instantly
disposable. The world might be undergoing a collective
political and financial mid-life meltdown but at least we all
know: tonight’s gonna be a good, good night. w
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FUNKY GESCHICHTE
Andrew Brooke
The man circled in the photo at this 1933 National Socialist
rally is Martin Huntvenk, born in Dortmund in 1903 to
parents Lilliane and Rolf. During the rally he was bursting,
absolutely positively bursting, to use the toilet. It was just a
number one, brought on by his over-enthusiastic consumption
of a few steins of lager just before the rally started, but buried
in the middle of the crowd as he was, it was incredibly
difficult to find an appropriate moment to achieve relief.
He was prevented from urinating more by his own social
awkwardness than anything else. Something that had tasted
so good, so cold, crisp and refreshing on consumption had
turned into something that felt like a hot sweet sticky soup
in his poor, wretched bellybag. The schnitzel he had eaten
to go with his lager was floating on a fast-curdling sea in his
bloated guts, and not going any way towards soaking up any
of the sluicing liquid rancidity.
Had he forced the issue into the open he may well have found
the crowd immediately surrounding him a great deal more
understanding than he imagined. Some two hundred yards
away in the same crowd a circle of men suffering from the
same complaint stood facing each other and enthusiastically
rained down urine onto the cobbles at their feet, droplets
splashing onto their boots as a grace-noting afterthought from
the main gushing gouts, just as the Führer got to a crucial
point in his speech relating to steel production. One instigator
had silently begun what swiftly turned into a bestial circle
of nature; he was Tomas Heidink of Leipzig, born 1914.
His father Ludwig had been killed at Passchendaele, and
as the eldest son of a large family he had become the man
of the house in what were very straitened times for both his
family, and of course for Germany itself. This had given him
a confidence beyond his years that grew as he developed into
manhood, and it may have been this confidence that led to
his being the initiator of what became a complicit group of
silent urinators on the day of the rally, the rest of the men
who joined following a leader; if none of us comment on
our breaking out into serving our base need – even by way
of a nervous laugh – then all will be well, all is allowed. If
Martin had known that this was occurring nearby then maybe
he would have felt able, given the dire extent of his need, to
simply extract his penis silently from its housing within the
rough fabric of his heavy wool trousers and allow himself
the release he craved so desperately. But he didn’t – instead
he suffered in silence for the whole three hours of the rally,
eventually finding a hedgerow to hose down away from the
crowd’s eyes as he walked to the train station. As he let his
pace quicken on finding the bush that would become his
toilet, he could swear he felt hot streaks of what he imagined
as dark orange streaking down his legs, and he was sure he
had strained a muscle in his groin with the effort of damming
himself. Just his imagination. He was so relieved on emptying
his bladder that he felt a physical emptiness so profound that
he started to shiver and tremble in the keen last light of that
autumn day. Martin would go on to be stabbed in a sentry box
in 1942 by Derek Wright, a British Commando from Ipswich.
Martin had one son, born in 1940, called Zigmund. He
would go on to be known as ‘Ziggy’ at the University of
Bremen where he would later study chemical engineering
at undergraduate level before going on to work for Merck,
the pharmaceutical company. Ziggy had been curious about
the Paris Uprisings of 1968, and would talk about them to
girls at the local beer hall favoured by students ‘Der Pikel
Haus’ but essentially he was non-political. He was a big
fan of The Beatles, and quite liked music that talked about
concepts of political revolution in non-specific terms, as it
allowed him to talk to girls in a way that was at once virilesounding, yet neutered. He wore a pair of much-prized,
much-patched denim jeans that were bought from an oldfashioned outfitters that had introduced denim to their stock
as a harrumphing concession to modernity, for ‘Der Jugend’.
Even though these jeans were a feature of Ziggy’s wardrobe
from the late 60s right through to the mid-70s (and would
make a wry reappearance as gardening-wear in the mid80s, until the embarassment of Ziggy’s children, Peter and
Oliver, finally forced him to retire them permanently (burnt
on a pyre in the garden with some receipts, an empty aerosol
and a paint tin). A time often represented by men wearing
flares, these were straight, if a little baggy, and with a high
waist. The denim used by the tailors was actually used as
cheap tarpaulin wrapping in industrial processes and had
been bought as a job lot for a one-off run. The tailors reverted
to their more traditional process swiftly as the jeans did not
sell. The proprietor of ‘Turgen Fashion’, Oscar Renkerz,
commented at the time to his young apprentice (David Ikksert,
who would pass away from pneumonia in 1983 and had a
patch of very dry hair at the back of his head just to the right
that would always stick up away from the head and could
not be tamed and that resulted in his keeping his hair short
pretty much throughout his life in contrast to the fashion of
the time, with only occasional disappointed branchings-out
into length, which would always result in a wounded scurry
barberwards) that: “We should stick to our purpose.” In part
due to his accurate reading of the fragility of the integrity of
these trousers’ dye, Ziggy rarely washed them, and in time
they came to take on a very ripe aroma, particularly around
the lower part of the legs, and inevitably around the crotch.
Ziggy’s son Peter would also go into chemicals and would
go on to propose changes to the blister-packs used to house
paracetemol at a meeting in 1997, at a time when he was
seconded to an English company. Peter enjoyed his time in
England up to a point. He participated in local life – joining
a canoeing club, a French society and filling his time with
many visits to the local cinema; he enjoyed Life is Beautiful,
released in 1997, but took issue with it in a way he couldn’t
articulate (he did not share this view with anyone, just noted
it to himself). He enjoyed The 5th Element more (“Stylish
movie – very funky,” he commented at the time to a colleague,
Angela Rustin, who had asked after his weekend. She liked
Peter, but found him essentially bland and unforthcoming
and thus hard to get to know. She and her partner, Paul
Meadows, had seen the same film and found it ‘weird’. Paul
had particularly not enjoyed Chris Tucker’s performance.
Angela would go on to have a minor health scare in 2002,
which worried her mother – a nervous woman – a great
deal, but it turned out to be nothing) and loved Good Will
Hunting; “Very smart. A bit like Rocky. I’m not explaining
well. See it and see.” In 1998, Derek Wright’s grandson
Dean would kill himself in the woods near his home using
several packs of paracetomol, which came in the packaging
that Peter had proposed and was subsequently implemented.
He made this a feature of his CV on his return to Germany,
citing it thus: “January 1997 to May 1998 Secondment to
Green Valley Pharm, Gloucestershire, England. Packaging
Department; Roles included complete repackaging of major
lines.” He would be pushed to expand on this in an interview
in 2001 and the interviewer was kind enough, having read
between the lines, not to call Peter on his use of the plural
“lines” once the penny had dropped. He did get the job he
was being interviewed for, as it was a fairly undemanding
role and all the other elements of his CV meant he was
eminently qualified for it. The interviewer, Richard Steiger,
was actually from HR as opposed to the department Peter
would end up working in. The woman who would go on to be
his immediate boss – Sylvia Kansch – was away on holiday
at the time of interviewing, but had said before going to what
she referred to as “the more restful part” of Torremolinos:
“It is not so important, and I trust you; if the CV fits all will
be well, they are in the office round the corner and it is not
so participatory.” w
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TOLKIEN VIA GYGAX
Charles Olive
Dungeons and Dragons was the first commercially
available role playing game – is this heritage
still apparent in today’s LARPs (live action roleplaying games)?
There are two separate aspects of LARPs that are worth
considering here:
IC Worlds – Not all LARPs are fantasy based – there
are Vampire, Wild West, Steampunk etc systems that
obviously wouldn’t share much of a heritage with D&D.
For those that are fantasy-based though, I would say that
they are heavily influenced by D&D. But having said
that, given that originally, D&D pretty much took all of
its inspiration from Tolkien, you could perhaps argue that
that’s where Fantasy LARPs really get their influence from
Middle Earth. (Just look at HQs realm of Thranduil!) If a
sound-byte was required, I’d say the influence was from
Tolkien via Gygax.
OOC Mechanics – I think the influence here is much more
overt. Hit Points, Armour Class, Levels, Fighters, Magic
Users, Priests and Thieves; the “Quest” plot construction
are all pretty much a direct lift from D&D.
LARP didn’t have a single point of origin, but certainly
some early LARP started as desktop players seeking to
use real combat as part of their table-top sessions (at least
according to Wikipedia). This may not have been D&D
sessions, but even if it were Runequest or something else,
these all came from D&D pretty much anyway.
So, the worlds came from Tolkien and the game mechanics
came from D&D…
Are there any LARPs that inhabit the same worlds
as tabletop RPGs?
There are LARPs based on the TV show Stargate and even
one based upon the Fallout computer game. There must be
others.
The company White Wolf had their ‘World of Darkness’:
a single game world in which all of their tabletop products
as well as a number of (usually non-combat, weird handwaving) LARPs were set.
‘Vampire the Masquerade’ was the most famous of these.
The main decision mechanic in role-playing games
seems to be the roll of a dice – how does it work
in LARP?
Similar to pencil and paper games, all characters have a
set of “statistics” which determines how skilled they are at
fighting, how effective their armour is, what abilities they
have. But unlike rolling a dice, in LARP you actually have
to fight! Not that this is a bad thing… the blows are firm
enough that you notice, but not so they’d hurt. At the end
of the day, it’s down to whether you did physically strike
that monster with your sword, or if he was in range of
your spell.
High-hit systems, such as Heroquest, are useful for those
people who might not be the most skilled natural fighters,
as “your character” might be so tough that he needs to be
hit twenty times before requiring medical attention! LARP
is a team game, and you rely on other characters (who
might be playing healers) to help you out.
Which countries are particularly into LARPing?
It seems to be very popular on the continent: notably France
and Germany. The Americans are also into it, although
it’s hard not to laugh at their weapons; due to some sort
of health-and-safety feature, they look very unrealistic. It’s
also widely practised up and down the UK too! There are
all sorts of LARP: high fantasy LARP (which I participate
in), vampire LARP, zombie LARP, Steampunk…
How much preparation usually goes into preparing
a game? How long do they usually last for?
Speaking as a referee: a LOT of preparation! There’s the
whole admin side of things, which is handled by a single
contact, that includes the more mundane things such as coordinating who is going to be on an event and whether they
want food etc, washing the costume and packing the kit
required for the dungeon.
Then there’s the event itself: a referee will need to start with
an idea of what will happen, translate that into a coherent
plot that is consistent with the wider universe of the game,
turn that again into a set of encounters and then earmark
what kit would be needed, and what stats the different sets
of monsters should have. On top of your day job, it can be
a couple of weeks of work to sort everything in advance –
and sometimes more for the bigger events!
Our shortest adventures are 36 hours long, and often have
more than one player “party” (grouped by the character
ranks). Our standard adventures run from Thursday to
Sunday, and our “hero” adventures last for 5 days. We did
once run a well-received 11-dayer, but nobody has been
13
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brave enough to attempt that again!
injured everybody’s characters are).
What is it that attracts you to Fantasy LARP?
Does someone have to write the game before it’s
played? Do you have dungeon masters?
Additionally, we have other sets of referees who co-ordinate
character plot and over-arching campaign plot, whose ideas
will also feed into the event itself.
For the most part: escapism. You can forget your job,
worries at home in your life, things that have been bugging
you and transform into another person. Sure, this other
person might have his or her own concerns: will I die in
this battle? But it’s a break from real life. And being with
friends, trekking out and about in the countryside, caves
and other landscapes outside the city, gives you a feeling of
wellbeing that you can’t beat.
An event will be pre-planned by a couple of referees, where
they write the background: what groups of people are in
the area, are they hostile or not, how they would react to
certain situations… The referee will usually write a series
of encounters, so that the monster crew can pack the right
costumes for the next segment of the dungeon. However, it’s
not pre-ordained how an encounter might go. I’ve been in
more than one expected “talking encounter” that developed
into a fight, due to the party actions!
I guess our equivalent of “dungeon masters” are the behindthe-scenes referees. For each event, we would normally
have at least three referees: the main referee, who has
generally written the plot for the event, and is responsible
for overseeing it as a whole; the monster referee, who looks
after the monster crew, packs the props and costume, dresses
the monsters and co-ordinates the dressing of the encounter
sites; the player referee, who stays with the players (usually
as a background NPC – non-player-character) and is there to
answer any rules-related questions they might have, and to
do the “battleboard” after each fight (where we work out how
Do people stay in character for the whole
weekend?
During “time in”, everyone stays in character. After each
combat, we usually call a “time out” where the referee
determines how injured your character is from the fight.
This is usually a 20 minute opportunity to catch up with your
friends about real life… or just froth over memories from
previous LARP events! We might have 10 fights a day ­ so
you do get a breather ­ but for the main part, you’re thinking,
moving and talking with your character’s body and brain.
You mentioned there are all types of LARP – is there
much interaction between the different types?
Not really.
Are any types on the rise?
Zombie and Steampunk genres seem to be on the rise.
Also you mentioned building plots that are
consistent with the universe. Do you have to
write your LARP into the universe after the event
like a post-event report? Where does the LARP
universe live?
Each system generally creates its own universe – or in our
case – a multiverse (one with many planes of existence).
Heroquest’s multiverse has been created and added to
over a period of 25 years, so it’s rich in detail, history and
politics. Each LARP event should fit into or co-exist with
that historical framework, just like you can’t rewrite WW2
and claim that Germany was allied with Britain. w
14
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PHONEY SECURITY
Romney Taylor
Jonas Erik Altberg is a Swedish singer-songwriter,
producer, and DJ better known to fans of Eurodance by
his stage name Basshunter. In 2006, his IRC channel
#BassHunter.se was out of control. “And then came
the day I didn’t think was real / The channel was out of
control,” Mr Altberg sings on ‘Boten Anna’, the number
one single off Basshunter’s third full-length LOL <(^^,)>.
Mr Altberg tasked a friend with creating a bot that could
keep his channel in order – a bot that could “get rid of
everyone that spams” and ensure “there is no take-over
that succeeds”; one that could “ban you so hard” if you
stepped out of line [quoted lyrics translated from the
original Swedish]. Shortly after the request, Mr Altberg
noticed a new user with administrative capabilities join the
channel. Her name was Anna and he naturally concluded
that she was the iron-fisted chatterbot sent by his friend to
kick disruptive IRC users into shape.
Months later, after several interactions with Anna, Mr
Altberg discovered that she wasn’t a bot at all. “I never
thought I would be so wrong / When Anna said to me
/ I’m not a Bot / I’m a really beautiful girl / Which is,
unluckily, now very strange to me / But nothing needs to
be explained / Because in my eyes, you will always be
a bot.” It turned out that Anna was the girlfriend of the
friend Mr Altberg had sought help from in the first place.
But she would always remain a bot in his eyes. Despite its
arcane subject matter, ‘Botten Anna’ topped the charts in
Scandanavia, Poland and the Netherlands, paving the way
for a successful career in dance music and a place on UK
Celebrity Big Brother for Mr Altberg in 2010.
***
Since 1991, the artificial-intelligence community has
convened to compete for the Loebner Prize – an annual
event pitting ‘people contestants’ against chatbots in an
effort to determine which is the most human-like. Judges
interact with contestants through instant-messaging
software, engaging in 5-minute conversations and
subjecting entrants to a measure called the Turing Test.
The test is named after the British mathematician Alan
Turing – one of the founders of computer science – who
in 1950 attempted to answer one of the field’s earliest
questions: can machines think?
Mr Turing predicted that by the year 2000, computers
would be able to convince 30 percent of human judges
that they too were human; and that, as a result, one would
“be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting
to be contradicted.” Chat robots have become increasingly
sophisticated in their linguistic programming and are being
widely used commercially, as automated online assistants,
to handle simple customer service for large organisations.
This, combined with learnings garnered from 20 years
of Loebner Prize competition, makes it surprising that a
computer is yet to pass the Turing Test. The 2008 contest
proved to be the machines’ most successful, with the topscoring computer program missing the 30-percent mark
by just a single vote.
As well as passing judgement on whether a contestant
is human or bot, the Loebner Prize judges must rank
contestants according to their ‘humanness’. This
culminates in the awarding of the ‘Most Human Computer’
title to the most convincing piece of software and, perhaps
more intriguingly, the ‘Most Human Human’ award –
given to the person best exhibiting traits the judges deem
to be unmistakably human.
One of the first winners of the ‘Most Human Human’
accolade, in 1994, was the journalist and science-fiction
writer Charles Platt, who explained to Wired magazine
that he had succeeded in convincing the judges he was
a real live human being by “being moody, irritable, and
obnoxious.” This is pretty bleak, and raises a fascinating
question: how do we be the most human we can be;
not only under the constraints of the Turing Test, but in
everyday life?
***
The most widely-used anti-bot technique is CAPTCHA, a
type of Turing Test used to distinguish between a human
user and a less-sophisticated AI-powered WWW robot, by
the use of graphically-encoded, human-readable text. The
term ‘CAPTCHA’ was coined in 2000 by three Carnegie
Mellon University alums – it’s an acronym based on the
word “capture” and stands for ‘Completely Automated
Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’.
Last year online ticket-reselling business Wiseguy Tickets
faced criminal prosecution for setting up a network of
shell companies, rented servers, and automated scripts
which it used to snatch up more than one million premium
tickets for coveted concerts and sporting events. The four
Wiseguy defendants used sophisticated programming
and inside information to bypass technological measures
at Ticketmaster and other major ticketing sites that were
intended to prevent such bulk automated purchases. The
group then resold the tickets for more than $25 million
in profits.
To prevent internet bots from large-scale ticket purchasing,
online ticket vendors use CAPTCHA challenges and Proof
of Work software to detect and slow down computers. They
also block IP addresses showing suspicious purchasing
activity. But as the Wiseguy defendants showed, humans
are capable of devising computer software that can outwit
Turing Tests like CAPTCHA, landing them prized spots
at the front of ticket purchasing queues, and leaving us
wondering if this small victory for the bots hints at more
worrying things to come. w
GUT
15
WELL, AS LONG AS
YOU’VE GOT YOUR HEALTH
Iain Sides
I was looking for something else this morning and I found a Christmas Card that I thought I’d lost. It was sent to
my Dad in, I think, 1994 by a man called Graeme. Graeme had been researching his family tree and was convinced
he was my Dad’s cousin, and that his mother, Pam, was my Dad’s aunt.
My Dad said no, he didn’t think that was right, and that he had never even heard of Pam.
16
GUT
CONVERSATIONS
Amy Stone
“Do you think the Piccadilly Line or the
Victoria Line will get me there quicker?”
“I had a great trip to IKEA last night. Go around
8 on a weekday, it’s practically dead.”
“Have you got timeline yet?”
“I’m cutting out wheat, dairy,
meat, caffeine...”
“How much did you end up paying for
your Olympics tickets?”
“Do anything interesting last night?”
“Your shoelaces are undone.”
“I personally think that all music should be
free anyway.”
“Pizza Express pizzas from Tesco are not
half bad actually.”
“Can you fit a sofa into an estate car?”