Charles on… anything that comes along

• Esquire:Feature Story:The Lester Bangs of Video Games
  

  I realize that many people write video-game reviews and that there are entire magazines and myriad Web sites devoted to this subject. But what these people are writing is not really criticism. Almost without exception, it’s consumer advice; it tells you what old game a new game resembles, and what the playing experience entails, and whether the game will be commercially successful. It’s expository information. As far as I can tell, there is no major critic who specializes in explaining what playing a given game feels like, nor is anyone analyzing what specific games mean in any context outside the game itself. There is no Pauline Kael of video-game writing. There is no Lester Bangs of video-game writing. And I’m starting to suspect there will never be that kind of authoritative critical voice within the world of video games, which is interesting for a lot of reasons.

  This is a really, really interesting article. Expository followup at Gamespot with a longer interview with the author.

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• Sudding Sudoku! How long can it go on? (answer: a few billion years more) (14 May 2005; score: 32.81%)
• My latest stories at the Guardian: Microsoft/Yahoo (doomed to fail!), hardcore games, Xbox problems and time travel (1 February 2008; score: 29.58%)

In the past couple of weeks I’ve received some copy from freelances with the mysterious suffix “.docx”. Uh? What’s that? I thought it would be a normal document - you know, the sort of thing that Word would open. (Because you know how much I love Word’s quirks. Ah, I still delight in its refusal to open RTF files that it hasn’t created.)

But - no dice. It won’t open them, or if it does, it finds junk: ticks and umlauts and so on, as if I’d tried to open an image as a document.

So what’s going on? Turns out that people have been downloading the Microsoft Office 2007 Beta, which has gaily taken over their machines and begun churning out their documents in this non-compatible XML format which no XML parser in my reach can, uh, parse.

Kind of an own goal there, guys - both Microsoft guys and writer guys. I don’t see that Microsoft can honestly believe that we’re all going to rush to upgrade to Office 2007 just because a few people running the beta have produced documents in it. Time for a downgrade - if it’ll let you. (I’ve had people saying it’s crashed horribly on them.)

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• Pieces fall into place for Apple to launch "iWork" next week (4 January 2005; score: 39.94%)

• When you stop bothering with the news…
  Fraser Spiers discovers that he has much more time to, well, I dunno, but he’s stopped worrying about the bits of the world that are blowing each other up. The extract from The Day Today is priceless - if horribly true. Except I can’t help thinking that one ought to be more interested in stuff beyond one’s purview, if only so you can work out why someone would let off a bomb or three in the underground. (Seen at Fraser Speirs)

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• In the Guardian: stop this online sharing now! (25 January 2008; score: 29.81%)
• In The Independent: why we're all reading slower than 10 years ago (9 November 2005; score: 28.82%)