I'd never heard of Paul Graney before Tuesday. In Central Library, as part of Manchester Histories Festival, I learnt about a man curiously absent from any number of histories.

Paul is most famous for his archive of sound recordings of folk concerts and interviews with his friends. Born in 1908 in dire poverty, he captured the sounds and experiences of industrial Manchester. His archive comprises of hundreds of tapes, notebooks, photographs (he was also an accomplished photographer), and other paraphernalia, from a life of collecting and hoarding. He spent some years living as a destitute tramp, possibly fought in the Spanish Civil War, got in brawls with fascists whenever given the opportunity, and worked as everything from an ironworker to a theatre set designer. The whole time, he carried cameras, notebooks, and tape recorders, capturing anything and everything that interested him.

You can read about him in the book which has recently been published, edited by one of his friends, and browse some of his recordings on the Archives+ SoundCloud. This story about "Coal Pie" is particularly wonderful.

Paul is now tentatively being credited as being a crucial pioneer in the field of oral history, although his disdain for academia would probably mean the man himself would hate this.

To add another title he'd hate, I want to add that he predates the field of Acoustic Ecology by around 15 years (exact dates a little fuzzy). Acoustic Ecology is one of the fields from which Soundscape Studies emerged (the subject of my PhD research if you've not read any of my other work), mostly in 1970s Canada. The key text is R Murray Schafer's ubiquitous The Soundscape: the Tuning of the World, which is part theory part toolkit for understanding our acoustic surroundings. Something about the acoustic ecology idea always rubbed me the wrong way: a feeling of a lack, or half a story being told.

In my thesis I was pretty rude about this. One prominent author¹ implied that having “[the] aural sensibilities and ethical conscience of the musician” made that person somehow a more important listener. I found the group had a certain image of themselves as ‘sonic explorers’ in this ecological approach, kind of latter-day Elgins. Schafer et al perhaps saw themselves as acoustic pioneers, ignoring the technology they used to get to the spaces (cars, planes and recording equipment), creating sonic spectacle for the cognoscenti. As one author² pointed out “paradoxically, the deep wilderness is accessible only either to those who believe themselves to be eschewing technology, or to those who actively embrace it” -- raising the status of the quiet, the high-fidelity, ‘unspoiled wilderness’ above all others. The WSP defined “criteria such as variety, complexity and balance to describe a positively functioning acoustic community”¹. There seems to be an implicit denial that these can happen in the lo-fi city. Sophie Arkette³ put this as “a romantic bias towards antiquarian or rural soundscapes, as if these are assumed to be more refined than their modern-day equivalents”.

Schafer hated the lo-fi city soundscape of the city at the time he wrote The Tuning of the World. I found it hard to read this as anything other than intellectual snobbery, kind of like the people banging on about their latest triathlon or Buddhist retreat in a yurt or George Monbiot's cringe-inducing article about how kayaking saved him. Please note I have a huge admiration for Schafer and the WFAE's work, this represents pretty much my only major critique of the field, and they may have changed their minds in the meantime!

Arkette continues her defence of the city as an interesting sonic environment.

Schafer’s project is full of acute observation, much of which I agree with, I have fundamental misgivings about his approach. To say that the urban supervenes upon the natural soundscape, and that urban sounds can be cleaned up to resemble natural sounds is to misread the dynamics of city spaces. A city wouldn’t exist if it mirrored agrarian sonic space. [...]

To say that cityscapes can be reduced to a matrix of soundwalls is to misread the notion of city. City space has been and is constantly being carved up into communities defined by economic, cultural, ethnic, religious divisions and consequently acoustic profiles and soundmarkers are in constant transition. Equally, amplitude and density level change, sometimes radically, according to the time of day or the day of the week. Walk around the commercial London districts of Bank or Clerkenwell on a weekend and you’ll find that these hollow spaces resonate footsteps in a number of distinct ways; from the sharp attack as sound is reflected off glass to the softer sonic envelopes as sound collides with, and is partially absorbed by, stone. On the other hand, walking through Brick Lane market on a Sunday morning you can hear myriad vocalized advertisements, each voice having its own distinct inflection, modulation and rhythmic pattern.

I agree. I think city soundscapes are just as fascinating as anywhere else, and aethetic fidelity is more complex than simply "signal to noise" ratio. I always felt there must be another shoe waiting to drop somewhere. There had to be someone or some group documenting their surroundings like the WFAE did, but with none of the spectacle or hoopla -- just mundane recordings of the day-to-day industrial city. Now I know that there was at least one person, and what a recordist he is. Graney seems to be a master recording engineer and interviewer: on tape, he is an engaging storyteller with a knack for drawing out stories from people. He seems to have been consistently in the right place at the right time and asking the right questions, vital skills for any journalist, not least a sonic one. Despite what was presumably pretty terrible equipment and storage conditions, presumably bashed around a few pubs and protests, the archive holds up remarkably well from a production standpoint.

John Ruskin was also a fan of the city. He wrote, in 1853, this piece, comparing the variety and beauty of nature to that of industry. His style is tricky to read but it's worth it:

Let us contrast [the animals of the African Steppe's] delicacy and brilliancy of colour, and swiftness of motion, with the frost-cramped strength, and shaggy covering, and dusky plumage of the northern tribes; contrast the Arabian horse with the Shetland, the tiger and leopard with the wolf and bear, the antelope with the elk, the bird of paradise with the osprey; and then, submissively acknowledging the great laws by which the earth and all that it bears are ruled through their being, let us not condemn, but rejoice in the expression by man of his own rest in the statues of the lands that gave him birth.

Let us watch him with reverence as he sets side by side the jasper pillars, that are to reflect a ceaseless sunshine, and rise into a cloudless sky: but not with less reverence let us stand by him, when, with rough strength and hurried stroke, he smites an uncouth animation out of the rocks which he has torn from among the moss of the moorland, and heaves into the darkened air the pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea; creatures of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish lie; fierce as the winds that bear, and changeful as the clouds that shade them.

Ruskin and Graney were both socialists, and I think both saw the modern industry of their times as just as wondrous and awe-inspiring as nature. Both saw industry as something natural, something inevitable, and part of the human experience. What the Canadian acoustic ecologists ironically wanted to remove -- all evidence of human involvement -- Graney and Ruskin celebrated. Graney captured something really special: the people, sounds, and experiences of industrial Manchester, in a way perhaps no-one else has.

The greatest irony, of course, it that his archive was at Salford Uni, where I did my research in the Acoustics department (please note it's now been moved to Central Library). Postgraduate university life (as least as a disabled student) has many "ships in the night" moments of missing key opportunities on your doorstep -- this surely must be high on the list. And I'm sure he'd have hated soundscapes as a field too just has he hated academia in general. Either way, let's add "early pioneer of acoustic ecology" to the man's rap sheet and consider his recordings part of the essential British soundscape canon.

• [1] Truax, Barry and Barrett, Gary W., "Soundscape in a context of acoustic and landscape ecology", Landscape Ecology 26, 9 (2011), pp. 1201--1207.
• [2] Bishop, Peter, "Off road: four-wheel drive and the sense of place", Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14, 3 (1996), pp. 257--271.
• [3] Arkette, Sophie, "Sounds Like City", Theory, Culture & Society 21, 1 (2004), pp. 159--168.

Dear Friend is a letter-writing project celebrating women in public life and struggles for liberation. I co-founded this project with Sylvia Kölling as part of The Cassowary Project, our DIY research project into identity, place, and history.

Visit Dear Friend now!

The goal of the project is to raise the profile of women in history and let anyone who wants to write a letter contribute to a growing archive. We run workshops at events, and accept letters by post - for full info on how to contribute, check out the site.

This site was developed in Metalsmith, a node.js-based static site generator. The source is compiled by Travis, and pushed back to GitHub Pages, which adds a nice layer of protection from bad commits. This kind of solution is fast becoming my go-to for no-budget or low-budget sites: static sites are free to host, ultra-fast, extremely stable, and are easy to migrate to a fully fledged CMS later if required. Not building an admin interface saves tons of time that can be better spent on running the project.

I enjoyed working with Metalsmith, but am finding the lack of documentation and relatively immaturity of the project frustrating. Simple things like sorting lists by date seem extremely difficult to do compared to the Ruby-based systems I'm used to. I think I'll go back to Middleman or Jekyll for now, but will definitely be keeping an eye on it in future as it promises to be an extremely flexible toolkit.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the site and feel free to send a letter!

• Team: Kim Foale (development), Mark Dormand (design), Sylvia Kölling (content manager)
• Tech: Metalsmith, Github Pages, Susy
• When: Spring 2016
• Source on GitHub

Beta website for my own business, Tai Chi School, which offers the best Tai Chi tuition online. After doing so many client sites, it's been nice to work on my own project.

Visit taichi.school now!

The site's my first commercial one in Ruby on Rails, and uses Spree for the shopping cart functionality. I initially used Foundation for themeing but found it a poor fit for the site, and have now shifted over to Susy grid system for responsive layouts.

Our market research interviews indicated that people wanted lifetime access, but lots of detail. So we set about making a course that's about 12 hours long.

The main complexity with this site is having an access system for what is soon to be hundreds of videos. Other sites I reviewed had "all or nothing" approaches - either monthly memberships to access everything or one-off payments for the lot.

The dashboard shows the complexity of the system: this is how an unregistered account looks, showing the free content and making it easy to see the site at a glance.

Access control is done using a tiered system (Courses > Units > Lessons), using Spree hooks to assign ownership to users after purchasing things in the store. I might do a writeup of this at a later date. I used ActiveAdmin for the admin functionality.

This site's been a great challenge: I've learnt about video production and editing, Lean Startup ideas, and had some great business support. We're aiming to launch the site properly in August.

• When: Winter 2015 - now (still in development)
• Tech: Ruby on Rails, Spree, Susy, ActiveAdmin
• Team: Kim Foale (development), Mark Dormand (design)
• Site: http://taichi.school/

This piece was written in response to The Modernist Society's callout for articles with the theme factory. It's published in Issue #17 - Factory, which is out now. If you like it please consider picking up a copy! Thanks to the team at The Modernist for all their support.

What is a factory?

Most obviously, a factory is a place: a building where products are assembled on a production line. As opposed to the cottage industries that came before, a factory is a space specifically designed for efficient production: one where every stage of making something can be indefinitely measured and refined; perfect products for general consumers.

You could also say that a factory is an idea: a way of managing a job by breaking it into smaller pieces. These smaller parts can then be standardised. We don’t expect to mill our own flour before making a cake, for example: we buy a product off the shelf that will be a good quality, something we don’t have to think about any more. Standardised flour means we are free to innovate on another level: experimenting with recipes, flavours and ingredients.

The metaphor goes further. Almost everything in the modern world is made of standardised parts. A simple mains plug contains parts from all over the world. If we buy a new computer mouse we can be sure that the USB cable will fit; if we fit a new kitchen, we can be sure that our existing screwdrivers will work.

Perhaps nowhere is the metaphor of the factory more evident that in modern computer design, both hardware and software.

Computers at their outset were more of a cottage industry. They would be made for one specific purpose, designed from the circuit board and valves upwards to run one specific program. Eventually Turing and his colleagues created ENIAC, the first “Turing Complete”, or general purpose computer, that could be programmed to do many tasks. Still though, it ran its own custom operating system, and needed its own special parts.

IBM’s OS/360 was the first creation of a general purpose operating system, which allowed standard programming over their entire product range, and probably lead to their commercial success. Still though, this could only be run on specific IBM computers. Standardised hardware almost happened by accident. The 1981 IBM Personal Computer was so successful that it got completely reverse-engineered by rival companies such as Compaq. This then became the de facto standard: the “IBM Compatible” we simply call a “PC” today.

This standardised platform then meant that it was possible to write one operating system that would work reliably across a huge number of computers.

This is probably the first time we can claim computers were truly modernist. It is here, with both standardised operating systems and hardware interfaces that the business of iterative, research-based design can begin. Linus’s law states that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” -- the eyeballs are not possible without everyone singing from the same hymn sheet.

From these standardised operating systems come standardised software libraries. Much like our cake metaphor, we no longer have to write the code that plays an audio file, lets us browse the operating system, or simply copy a file: we can download a library that does it for us, letting us get on with what we wanted to do in the first place. And the software for all these vital, day-to-day filesystem tasks we can be certain are almost perfect pieces of design, constantly updated by the best coders in the world: used billions of times a day without us even noticing they are there. And what is modernist design if not design we don’t notice? What is more functional than a machine we are not even aware exists?

The industrial, factory nature of the computer follows through to software design itself. Brett Victor, in his classic Magic Ink paper, tells us:

“Although software is the archetypical non-physical product, modern software interfaces have evolved overtly mechanical metaphors. Buttons are pushed, sliders are slid, windows are dragged, icons are dropped, panels extend and retract. People are encouraged to consider software a machine—when a button is pressed, invisible gears grind and whir, and some internal or external state is changed. Manipulation of machines is the domain of industrial design.”

It’s no real surprise this is the case. We still think of computers as machines, although perhaps of more modern, human devices like tablets and smartphones we do not. Webservices like Facebook are in everything and installed without asking on new phones: and yet Facebook and Twitter too are built using these layers on layers, standardised libraries using standardised computer controls, iterated constantly, each part under intense scrutiny by teams of engineers.

Like all hyper-designed systems though, perhaps this level of specialism and nested layers has lead to the current disconnect people feel with computers. It’s now almost impossible to understand how a computer works from end-to-end, even if you wanted to: computers are designed by computers nowadays. We are hugely divorced from any level of dealing with our machines directly. Would the walled gardens of services and hardware like Apple’s App Store on the iPad have been possible two decades ago, or would they have been rejected as a silly toy for its needless lock to a single vendor?

As Corey Doctorow points out, nobody has ever invented a “Turing Machine minus one” -- a computer that can do all but one job. So we are now in a world where companies are able to stop people doing things using vendor lock, but as a public we are divorced enough from what we are actually doing to not really care, and see our computers not as machines but as specialised devices with tasks pre-determined by the vendor. Perhaps Victor’s comments are already on the way out.

I’m sure the rise and rise of the Raspberry Pi has something to do with this. As a long time hacker, I find the Pi’s success curious: most of the things it does can be done on a regular desktop computer, booting a Linux OS like Ubuntu off a USB stick. People already have everything they need to mess around. And yet now computers feel like black boxes: things we are scared of poking around inside in, in case they break: and when they do break, we’re suddenly reliant on either the vendor or a geeky friend to fix it for us. But who could be scared of breaking a £20 computer that has the status of a “project”?

Computers and modern software libraries are exemplars of modernist design, both for good at bad. At once they are hopelessly well engineered examples of a factory mentality that has enabled unbridled progress, but as their complexity grows, they also become increasingly arcane and esoteric. While industrial manufacturing is on the decline in the UK, I feel the mentality of the factory -- ever increasing, component-based standardised construction -- is more popular than ever.

Thanks to Justin Hellings for some invaluable advice and technical feedback on this article.

Originally posted at The Cassowary Project.

There has been an explosion in the use of maps to visualise data, prompted by the rise of the "data scientist", available open data, and a wealth of new tech tools. Authors like Tufte a Few have created ground rules and beautiful examples of what's possible with data visualisation, from the minimalist to the maximalist. With access to big data sets and a basic grounding in statistics, it's possible to make all kinds of quantitative data visualisations using tools from R (a DSL for data manipulation) to Tableux (freemium data visualisation software).

What though of qualitative data visualisation? How can we visualise cultural changes, geographical changes, or the movement of communities? There is no shortage of inspiration for mapping say, population density, crime or employment rate, or anything that makes a neat quantifiable percentage; even if the underlying statistic is in itself flawed, it still makes a pretty map. Visualising good qualitative research in interesting, interactive ways still feels under-explored.

Why does my map look poorly?

Overwhelmingly, qualitative data is represented using what I call a "pincushion" map. Arbitrary pointers referring to qualitative phenomena are plotted on a map, with no order or story told. At its most extreme this kind of data looks like the aftermath of a paintball game: an unnavigable mess of markers vying for attention that don't tell you what they do till you click on them, a classic example of the "mystery meat" anti-pattern which supposedly went out of fashion a decade ago.

Here's some examples. The first from the British Library's Sound Archive, which makes it look like the UK has measles.

Clicking one of the zits gives us some context...

What does this have to do with the map? Seemingly nothing. I can't even see where this came from as it's overlaid the map. I'll give them a break for the poor metadata as this is seemingly user contributed data: but a map here seems a particularly poor choice for showing these sounds. Have data, must project?

This is a particular poor example of mapped data. However, I think the pattern is flawed even when done well. Here's one from Trafford Intelligence Lab.

At least here we have some clue what we're going to see before we click on it. The cog on the left navigation allows us to toggle and untoggle layers. Again though: I struggle to imagine any uses for this map. If I want to know what arts spaces there are, I'm going to do a search for that in Google Maps. If I want to find out where there's a lack of say, services for over 50s, the map's far too busy to make a meaningful reading, and even then it doesn't tell me if there are actually people over 50 living there. It would help a little if the markers would "dodge" each other and not overlap: however it would then lose it's accuracy.

As a design pattern I think it falls flat: I'd much rather read this information in a simple directory with a filter for region. It simultaneously has too much and too little data: not enough to make a reading of anything, but so much that the output is cluttered. Perhaps this would be better as a series of visualisations using the same technology: as is though the smorgasbord approach is overwhelming.

With both of these maps I'm really struggling to imagine what I'd actually use them for. In neither case do I think this is the best representation of the data.

Examples of mapping qualitative data that work

It's been a struggle to find good examples. The few I like tend to do one or two things beautifully, with a strong focus.

This version of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion map by Geoff Christou, which shows an interpretation of the historical migration of his own family, is somewhat qualitative. The Dymaxion map is my favourite projection: showing the globe as an unfolded icosahedron centred around the North pole shows the world as a connected landmass in a way nothing else manages.

The lines show the migration of his family, as far back as he can chase it. It's a simple visualisation that's extremely effective at demonstrating how we are all people of the world: I could see myself using something like this as a tool to argue for free migration, for example.

Another example I really like is Mike Bostock's visualisation for this travelogue piece. This is an extremely minimalist example, but lets the copy tell the story, augmented by a sparkline-style map which shows where you are both in the piece, and where the story is geographically: a really clever combination of two bits of information. Click through and have a scroll.

Finally, I have a real soft spot for the "map as propaganda".

While this is essentially a cartoon plotted onto a map, it shows a lot about national stereotypes at the time (and perhaps today). The graphics are directly laid on top: showing national tensions and perceived tendencies using illustration in a way that wouldn't be nearly as engaging as say, a series of lines showing where conflicts arise.

Are maps themselves qualitative data?

Of course, almost all data is both qualitative and quantitative: as Ann Oakley outlines, attempting to split the two or make claims for the superiority of one or the other is futile and stifles progress. Even the most quantitative data requires interpretation to make sense and not just be a jumble of numbers; even the most qualitative data requires justification as to its importance in some way. Well conducted research uses the data most appropriate: whether a table of values or an open-ended interview. We need the right tools for the right job.

Maps themselves are perhaps one of the most used qualitative data visualisations in everyday use. Yes, they're made up of millions of data points measured quantitatively: but they give no intrinsic reading about these points mean without a key or local knowledge, a perfect vindication of Oakley's paper. Data is meaningless without context and vice-versa. To any reader, they're clearly an abstraction, a way of finding our way around. There is no intended start or end point. They allow a lot of approximation, but accurate measurement requires an extra tool. We know they go out of date, and make mental notes of the parts of them that are obsolete. A map helps you find your way around: pinpoint accuracy is not a priority.

Quantitative data though -- statistics on anything from immigration to tax to population growth -- perhaps an air of objectivity that maps do not. They're reported verbatim by politicians and press, and rarely questioned or seen as an interpretation in the way that a map is. We rarely question where numbers have come from one they've been plotted.

It's somewhat fitting then that the easiest and most immediately obvious visualisations to make when given a new tool are to map quantitative data on top of it. Quantitative data tends to be dry, flavourless: we know, for example, that 20% unemployment is bad and 5% is better: but represented on a table this looks like so much accounting data. Projected onto a map, things change: we can see the boundaries of unemployment, we can look at where we live and place ourselves in this world. The map gives us the qualitative flavour to interpret our Excel spreadsheet.

The downside is that the accuracy can be low: any deprivation index for example can have quite a low geographical resolution, so while an area might have several different pockets of varying deprivation, these will be averaged out in a way that can lose crucial context. However, the perfectly mapped boundaries of a digital map can make it look more accurate and authoritative than it is: similar to how representing a 0 as 0.00000 implies accuracy which might not be there, a map area with perfect boundaries implies a misleading level of geographical accuracy.

Another problem is with showing changes over time. While there is a large move towards open data through sites like data.gov, these only tend to apply to relatively recent data. The way things are measured and what's important changes a lot, so while comparing the last 5-10 years is manageable, comparing the last 100 is significantly harder and it will take a long time for our datasets to catch up. This means any time-series visualisation will have a fairly recent cutoff point, and the medium will overwhelmingly start affecting the message.

So how can we use maps effectively as designers and researchers?

I think like most modern technologies, now we have them we need to take a step back. It's easy to project X onto Y: now we need to apply a level of research, design and UX that is normal for any other more mature technology.

Some ideas.

Be opinionated

The main problem with pincushions is that they give no route through the data. Clearly the visualisation has been made for a reason: so make the reason clear. Why have you built the map and what can I take from it? Being opinionated can feel like losing objectivity: but everything is subjective and political, even the Gall-Peters projection is a political statement. Be upfront about the meaning of the visualisation and what you hope to gain from it from the outset. It's more honest and will create maps which answer one or two specific questions, rather than answering no questions at all.

Give the user a path

If the visualisation doesn't have an obvious route through it, give it one. Create a timeline, a tour, or reduce the data points to where everything is visible. As Bret Victor argues, a website should give just as much information as a printed map before interacting with it. Clicking should add more context that wouldn't fit on paper, not be a crux for poor design at the outset.

Concentrate more on content

As a coder I know this one well: often the tech challenge is so large that once it's in place, it feels finished. This is not the case. The technology should be invisible: we should be just as keen to tell a story with our visualisation as we would with a press release or pamphlet. What is the story you're trying to tell?

Next time...

I'm working on a project that's tried to learn from all these and create an engaging history map fro Hulme, where I live. It's still in development, but in the next article I'm going to aim to explain what we did and if it worked or not. Let me know if you see any good examples of maps that transcend my critiques!

NoiseEater is a webapp that automatically identifies wind, distortion, and microphone handling noise in your audio file. This was a commission from Salford University in order to show off cutting edge noise detection algorithms developed in the Acoustics Research Centre.

Check out NoiseEater now!

This was a significant technical challenge, as the algorithms are written in C++. To do this, I developed a wrapper for it in Sinatra, a lightweight Ruby framework. There are essentially two apps: one that handles the upload and displays reports of your audio file (in other words, the website), and one that runs the algorithms themselves and emails the user when it's complete. The algorithm runs slowly, taking about a minute to process a minute of audio, so it was important to make this clear to the user too.

There's a lot of server-side processing going on here: from checking that they're valid audio files in the first place, to checking the type, monitoring for errors, providing an edited file, and emailing the user when the process is complete. The reports look like this, using the BBC's amazing Peaks.js library. If you upload your own file you're able to download it on the right.

This was an enormously fun project to work on, and I think the final result works a treat. Give it a go!

• Tech: Sinatra, Ruby, ffmpeg, Peaks.js.
• Team: Kim Foale (development), Mark Dormand (design)
• When: Spring 2015
• Site: http://noiseeater.net/
• Source is on GitHub

Civilization was one of the first computer games I really learnt anything from. I'm not sure when I first played it, but Wikipedia says it was released in 1991 so I guess around age 10-12. I was terrible at geography in school. I had one of those teachers that puts you off the entire subject. Looking back, I certainly learnt more from Civ about world history than I ever did from that awful class.

It's essentially a whistle-stop tour of the biggest hits of engineering and technology. Near the start you're researching (and building) granaries, libraries and temples. Aqueducts make bigger cities possible. Nuclear plants give a huge production boost. All these things are very obvious as an adult -- but to a shy 12 year old, it made concrete some idea of technology, civilization and a rough overview of history as a whole.

Screenshot of Civilization 1. It's come a long way!

It also taught me about various world leaders (Shaka? Hammurabi? Who are they?) and 'wonders of the world' ranging from the Oracle to a cure for cancer. These features all got expanded and improved through successive Civ games (we are now on Civ 5).

More profound than any of these "general knowledge" themes was an insight into the inevitability of war. A common scenario, as a peaceful civilization, is to get attacked by an aggressive neighbour. After raising an army to fight off the invaders (at significant time and cost), you have a huge, veteran army, costing you a fortune to maintain. What do you do? Disband them all? Of course not -- you send them to roll over the next nearest neighbour.

This experience was one of the most moving things for me. I was dedicated to pacifism as a kid (I couldn't bear to watch the news when I was young for all the death), and as soon as I was placed, if only virtually, in the shoes of one of these world leaders, I made the same decision. While other games I liked at the time like Dune 2 or Syndicate were explicitly about violence, it was an integral part of the game: the objective is to kill people, by following the path laid out for you by the game. In Civ however, the decision to go to war is that, a choice: it's perfectly possible to win without attacking anyone by science or culture ¹, and the decision to go to war is entirely down to the player. Yes, I could choose to simply stand down and win another way. But inevitably, instictively, war just seems so... natural.

Screenshot of Civilization 5 showing a big army. Pew pew pew.

Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate

Of course, Civ is very much a game about colonialisation. There is a winner. There is a pre-defined tech tree, which reflects a Western, scientific-industrial timeline. The genre is generally called "4X": eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate. There is very little in the game to do with slavery, equality, dwindling natural resources, or pollution². The title of this section refers to the retrospectively given name for the genre: and sums up not just the game mechanics, but the goal of capital and colonialism in general, on which most of these games are based.

Another "grand strategy" game, Europa Universalis 4, offers a very fine-grained simulation of the early modern world, starting in 1444 at the beginning of Early Modern history. For my first playthrough of EU4, the game recommended Portugal, for whom the ideal strategy is go to colonize North Africa and the Caribbean. This is done very abstractly, with "explorers", who go and "establish colonies", with potential countries being rated by the value of the land and the "hostility" of the natives. At least this game does have some acknowledgement of the horrors: some countries produce wheat, or iron, or gems, but some explicitly produce slaves. Aside from that though, there isn't really much to do. It's very sanitized.

Screenshot of Europa Universalis 4, showing some fertile land ripe for the taking… if you can get past those "aggressive" natives.

Even outside "history"-based strategy games, the issue of work and workers is usually highly downplayed. Even RTS games like Starcraft and Warcraft 3, like Civilization, usually have a single "worker" unit, which is generally the cheapest unit in the game, doesn't upgrade or go obsolete (unlike military units), never revolts, and generally does very little all game apart from harvesting resources.

Why is it that slavery, and work, are so underplayed in not just these games but games in general? Given what a fundamental part it is of any "build an army/civilization/culture" narrative, how come the actual mechanics of 4X games are so underplayed? Why do games commonly have veteran units and high technology but no trade unions, management innovation, or master builders³?

The other kind of learnt violence is in any kind of "god" game, where the user is an omnipotent overmind that communicates via perfect telepathy. Even benevolent games like Cities: Skylines have this mechanic baked in: your minions do what you want, your actions are taken immediately and perfectly, and there is noone to answer to at any time. What would a city planning game be like that put you in the role of negotiator, politician, planner? What would an army game be like where the game took place in a secret bunker, with out-of-date intel relayed to giant screens and no ability to issue orders directly? Even the God Emperor perspective itself I think has given us poorer, less fertile, safer games, that do nothing if not keep us at a safe, critical distance from something that we should be engaging with more sincerely.

Screenshot of Cities: Skylines. Nicely free of pesky humans to deal with.

Board games

This obfuscation of underlying themes is often at its most extreme in board games. Board games are currently very much in a golden age of development, so this should be thought of as a modern development, based on lessons from videogames, not the other way around. And in board games comes one of the rare occasions games do focus on work: worker placement "Eurogames".

The most cited example of a complete gloss is Puerto Rico, and for good reason. This game is the polar opposite to a simulation game: it's very much a Eurogame, perhaps best thought of a mathematical puzzle with a vague theme added on top. From the game's description:

In Puerto Rico players assume the roles of colonial governors on the island of Puerto Rico. The aim of the game is to amass victory points by shipping goods to Europe or by constructing buildings.

Each player uses a separate small board with spaces for city buildings, plantations, and resources. Shared between the players are three ships, a trading house, and a supply of resources and doubloons.

The resource cycle of the game is that players grow crops which they exchange for points or doubloons. Doubloons can then be used to buy buildings, which allow players to produce more crops or give them other abilities. Buildings and plantations do not work unless they are manned by colonists.

That's about the last time that the word "colony" is used. "Colonists" can only be interpreted as slaves, in this game: reduced to coloured blocks of wood. In board game parlance, this is a "worker placement game" -- you assign workers to tasks, which give you things. So somehow "slave" (real life) becomes "colonist" (game manual) becomes "worker" (in common use), a chunk of wood completely void of theme that does exactly what you ask, doesn't upgrade, have any needs, and doesn't answer back.

Puerto Rico. The circular purple disks are slaves.

Bruno Faidutti has written an excellent article on this topic (scroll down for the English version). He states simply:

The problem in Puerto Rico is not that there are slave tokens, it is that they are called colonists. The problem with Saint Petersburg is that one of the worst episodes of forced labour in modern European history is treated as a good spirited competition between hardworking craftsmen.

I agree with this. I also go further, and suggest that as a pedogogical tool, these games teach that slavery is trivial, and its use as a tradable commodity an inevitable element of the past. I've not played Saint Petersburg, but Purto Rico has no aspect of slave revolt, of the problamatic nature of the central concept: slavery becomes a purely abstract concept for the exploitation of the players.

Otherwise excellent review site Shut Up and Sit Down, which is partially responsible for my interest in board games and possibly some of the best journalism on the subject, is just as guilty in this respect. In two reviews now, they've chosen to review games with slavery as an abstract or explicit element, and completely glossed over it as a problem other than acknowledging it exists. In rounding up, in neither review was it acknowledged that a reason for not buying them is a completely problematic theme which would be seen as laughably oversimplistic if not racist in any other context.

Why is this? What other kind of self-respecting literary review would so easily gloss over such a crass central element? SU&SD did cover one game explicitly focussing on slavery: Underground Railroad, but this mostly seems to be an "oh isn't it awful" style review that asked no questions of the absence of the theme from other games. I don't mean to bash SU&SD, as at least they mention the theme: It's a problem affecting the entire industry, and not something that can be fixed lightly especially given the huge quantity of games with this theme.

Imperial Settlers. Yes that's the real name of an actual, unironic game.

In many ways this feels like an example of one of the key critiques of #GamerGate. One of the debates in the Game Gate furore is over the idea of the "Gamer" as the "core demographic" audience for games. In other words, this literature argues, "gamer" is an identity manufactured by the games press and industry to justify 95% of games being targeted at white, 14-30 year old men. Part of the invention of the "gamer" identity is a focus on "mechanics" as the central experience. Theme, narrative, design and sound don't matter if a game plays well. Increasingly accurate simulations of shooting people seem to be released on an almost weekly basis. And, games go from being targeted at everyone, to targeted at the euphemistically titled "core demographic"

Board games and board game journalism feels like it has a similar problem. There is clearly some kind of recognition of the poor taste and unimaginative themes going into modern boardgames, but publishers and seemingly designers either don't care about changing themes, or see it as too risky. And review sites tend to err on the side of design, judging the new Essen hit Venitian Slave Trading is so elegant, so well designed, the designer is so talented, and look at the card stock and wooden pieces! And the box inlay! Simply: it doesn't matter if your game is racist if it plays well.

Learning through play

Of course, I'm describing general themes here. And in any genre, people will follow known formulas. But the lack of imagination and crass themes abound make me almost embarrased to be a board gamer, in the same way I think GamerGate made many uncomfortable with being a (video) gamer.

I think generations of games with both crassly-done themes, and mechanics are to blame. As Faidutti notes, the problem with the games is not the theme per-se, but the trivialisation of the content. As a young, middle-class white boy, playing games like Civilization undoubtedly affected the way I thought about the world and its inhabitants. As mentioned, it fundementally justified to me the inevitability and use of war. As an adult, with a commitment to anti-racist thinking, I was shocked how long it took me to realise Purto Rico's theme, given how abstract the game is. And I'm still considering the potentially enormous impact playing dozens of war games has on both my perception of the world, and that of others.

Like my previous article on selective imagination in board game design, this bothers me on a creative level as much as anything else. So much imagination with game mechanics, play testing, art, and yet: so little thought gone into the central theme's implications. There is a crucial lack of critical dialogue here: almost entirely white game designers are omitting a theme where it relates to icky parts of white colonialist past, and almost entirely white game reviewers and players seem on-the-whole happy to accept these games at face value. At least, given the endless procession of games with these themes seems to continue unabated, I can only presume someone is buying them, and someone else is giving them good reviews.

Pax Porfiriana

Finally then, the nominal reason for this article, and the game that triggered this entire thought process: an example of conflict theme done right. Pax Porfiriana is one of my favourite games now, partly for this exact reason.

Designer Phil Eklund is renowned for creating deeply complex and well-research simulations of space travel and evolution, and I think it's fair to say he values accuracy more than ease of teaching, or simplicity. Pax Porfiriana caught my eye. From the authors' description:

Pax Porfiriana is Latin for “The Porfirian Peace”. It refers to the 33-year reign of dictator Porfirio Díaz, ruling Mexico with an iron hand until toppled by the 1910 Revolution. As a rich businessman (Hacendado) in the turbulent pre-revolutionary borderlands of the U.S. and Mexico, compete to build business empires of ranches, mines, rails, troops, and banks while subverting your opponents with bandidos, Indians, and lawsuits. Win by toppling Díaz, either by coup, succession, revolution, or annexing Mexico to the U.S. If Díaz remains firmly seated at the end of the game, then the player with the most gold is the winner.

On paper at least, this sounds like a cut-and-dried euro worker-placement game that should by all rights have the same issues mentioned above.

This couldn't be further from the truth.

In Pax, as described above, you play a hacendado. These are varied historical figures who were all power players at the time for various factions. The short biographical text at the bottom is especially cutting: one hacendado states simply "Ideology: Racism".

Some sample cards from Pax Porfiriana. The chickpeas card must be my favourite card in any game ever.

The game itself is incredibly theme-heavy. "Unrest", caused by union activists, prohibition leagues or revolutionaries, is a core mechanic for shutting down opponent's enterprises. Slavery of Yaqui people at the time in Sonora (one of the game's three regions) was still legal: the manual provides deep historical background for its inclusion. This is represented by plantations, which are significantly cheaper than their non-slave equivalent, ranches.

To simplify, the game is won by collecting more of one kind of victory point than everyone else put together and then manipulating the interim government to one conducive to your cause. The four win conditions are through Loyalty (succeed Diaz as his heir), Command (stage a military coup), Outrage (lead a US annexation of the region), and Revolution (lead the glorious uprising).

All these victory conditions are thick with theme and essentially require you playing as someone attempting that victory condition would do. One of the most interesting game mechanics is playing negative cards on yourself, known as a "straw man" play in the game's terms. This can mean paying off some unionists to extort your own enterprise to gain more desire for a US annexation, for example. Or you can build a slave plantation, make money off it for a few years, then "liberate" it yourself to cash in on the revolutionary cool.

Most importantly though, everything in the game has a voice: the enterprises are real. The armies and factions all have their own twists and quirks. The government changes fundamentally alter the economy. The game models the unpredictability of a country in turmoil in a way that's hard to describe: this isn't an "optimal path to victory" game, it's a "hold on and hope for the best" experience. The game makes real what a monopoly means in practice, makes slavery the messy, immoral game mechanic it should be, and forces you to pick sides at the last possible moment when strife breaks out. A remarkable achievement given the admittedly godawful graphic design and tiny box size.

I can't think of any other game I've played that not only has quite such an explicit reference to this topic, but makes it a sensible game mechanic reflecting the hypocritical, political, messy nature of power struggles. As a result of playing this game, I feel I've learnt a lot about revolutionary Mexico, ticking the same button in my brain that Civilization did so long ago. And like most things that do something really right, playing this was the stimulus for this entire article and reevaluation of my own learning through playing.

Final thoughts

We learn a lot through play. This can be through explicit themes, like Civ and EU4, or abstractly, like in Puerto Rico. Obvously these types of learning are very different, and work on a lot of levels. But Pax Porfirina really scratched an itch I felt lacking in other games: it single-handedly proves it is possible to deal with these themes maturely, and with a post-colonialist maturity. Not everyone can put the research into a topic that Eklund et al clearly have with Pax. But the feelings playing this game are quite unlike anything else: there's obviously a lot of thought gone into making everything feel, well, human.

I would like to see more interrogations of work and workers in gaming themes: games which put the humanity back into work, as opposed to the current paradigm of "build a grand civilization" by pointing your mouse or placing a wooden block and that being the end of it. Games in which you instruct people to build monuments to your greatness that "stand the test of time", as Civ puts it, is now a hugely mature, dense genre.

I'd like to see heavier games like Archipelago from the perspective of the slaves/native peoples. I'd like to see more games like The Great Dalmuti, which simulate caste in a light way. More than anything though, I'd like to play more games which highlight the role of people, and the complex nature of power; games that critique the military-industrial complex; and games which do what they do already but with the kind of maturity other media have had for a long time.

The Great Dalmuti. Social class is the card numbers (1 is highest) Source.

I'd like to see a recognition of the subliminally learnt violent messages in all these games, and publishers, designers and critics to take seriously the themes as a central part of the experience rather than a disposable layer of design fluff. I'd like us to think more about how we absorb knowledge even when placing a block of wood, and move past colonialist themes into something new, and more exciting.

Footnotes

• [1]: In Civ V this is certainly true: honestly I can't remember how viable non-military victories were in the original.
• [2]: Some of these themes were attempted in Civ 4 and taken out for Civ 5
• [3]: Yes, Civ has "great people" but these are a very surface mechanic which just contributes a large amount of hammers/culture and doesn't really make a substantive game change in the same way say, the invention of artillary does to warfare. I could concede this point though.

As Communications Director for the First National Festival of LGBT History, I built this site and wrote all copy and communications. This was a huge and engaging volunteer job that took over all my free time for a year or so.

Check out the First National Festival of LGBT History now.

Here's a screenshot of the homepage but you really need to browse it, we spent a lot of time spacing out content so it doesn't translate well to a still.

I knew I would be approving and publishing all the content for this site, so I built it in a static site generator called Middleman. Static site generators have a lot of benefits, but the main ones for this project were the hackability - I was able to custom code in anything we needed to be responsive to the shifting festival aims.

The main technical challenge for this site was around the calendaring. With 8 volunteers organising getting on for 100 events over a lot of sites, it was important to have something that could be edited quickly and let people find events of interest. I looked at a few commercial and open-source solutions, but none of them really did what we needed, or were hopelessly overpriced. To the drawing board!

I built this solution with Phoebe that uses Google Calendar as a backend. Each of the 6 categories shown here (main festival, family space etc.) are downloaded as an ICS file and then converted into HTML using a Ruby parser. Ticketing information and the like was then parsed from YAML data stored in the event listings. This solution worked like a dream for developers and attendees alike, and I've still not seen anyone else publish a better festival calendar! You can play with the archived site or check out the source on GitHub.

I'm no longer involved in this festival but the 2015 site is still up to browse.

• When: April 2014 - February 2015
• Tech: Middleman, Github Pages, Google Calendar, custom calendar code
• Who: Kim Foale (build, copy, management), Mark Dormand (design), Phobe Queen (calendar development and editorial assistance)
• Source on GitHub

Art Of Noises is an experimental board game of avante-garde musical improvisation. Five words are dealt out (like purple, Communism, Taj Mahal, scared, snooker), and players take it in turns to perform one of them using a variety of toy instruments. It's like Pictionary, but for sounds, but more abstract. More information is on the project page.

It stems from my PhD research in listening, and is aimed at getting people to think about how they use sounds to communicate. It channels John Cage's passion for experimentation, chance, and his open-definition of what music is, and explicitly makes the players performers in their own scratch orchestra.

It's named after Futurist composer Luigi Russulo's The Art Of Noises, a book which in many ways laid the way for both Cage and the Experimentalists, and the soon-to-emerge Musique Concrete. In it, Russolo lays the groundwork for a compositional toolkit of scrapes, bangs, screeches and whistles, and began to theorise man made sounds as a category. It seemed an apt title for the game: in which I encourage people to create sounds using a similar auditory palette, in order to represent various concepts.

The rules of the game are on GitHub, and will be periodically updated. The whole thing is available under a Creative Commons license, if you want to print-and-play your own version. I have a few physical copies too, available from me when I tour it. The rest of this article is about the process of development: from experience to finished product.

Background

My experience of live art (sound or otherwise) is overwhelmingly an emphasis on spectacle. Aesthetic and artistic considerations aside, audience members are conditioned to stand in silence, "shh"-ing anyone who speaks, listening to an "expert" perform, after long days at work, preferably while nursing an overpriced drink. Lefebvre called this "Dressage": a kind of social conditioning that is taught and enforced through repetition and ubiquity, akin to horses being "broken-in". Human interaction, actually talking to people, becomes difficult: secondary to the central experience of hearing the auteur perform their latest composition. The same rules apply for art galleries or performance art or any other "high" culture. In these contexts, silence is holy.

Of course, the aesthetic and the artistic can be wonderful, life-enriching, educational, moving experiences. I've been to thousands of gigs and hundreds of galleries and exhibitions over the years, and love the experience of live music. I love learning about art, and creativity, and understanding different periods in history through their creative outputs. I love listening to or watching talented performers in their element, creating sounds for a live audience, immersed in the music. Live music can be electric. This is not in question. What the above paragraph hints at though, are the "invisible" rules of music, and art in general. One does not heckle at a classical concert. One does not wear a suit to a metal show. The strictest rule all though: the performers are the performers, and the audience are the audience. This relationship is rarely, if ever questioned.

The inadvertent inspiration for Art Of Noises came from taking a tipsy friend to a noise show. While I was enjoying the performance, the friend I was with, who I hadn't seen in a while, really just wanted to talk to me (with hindsight): in the room with a performer (the wonderful Rosanne Robertson) making subtle, sometimes quiet, harmonically complex sounds using a sheet of metal. My friend's not-so-subtle (or quiet) attempts at making conversation immediately made me feel... uncomfortable? Embarrassed? Apologetic? It's hard to put a finger on the experience which immediately accompanies the feeling of doing something wrong, like being scolded by a teacher, but there it was. This is a form of dressage that I have been taught and internalised: being around someone who has not was (and is) a distinctly unsettling experience.

My immediate reaction was to bundle her out the room. But then the thought started growing: isn't part of the point of experimental music to be open to all the possibilities? What would John Cage think of a drunk person talking all over a performance of 4'33'? I strongly suspect he would laugh, and smile, and be amused and delighted at the varied reactions from the audience: horror from the music critics, muted sniggers from the less fanatic. Given the legacy of the scratch orchestra and random chance in composition, as well as my own PhD research into listening, how is it that this kind of real, honest, spontaneous intervention is something that makes me feel this uncomfortable?

I have no idea how anyone else in the room felt, apart from my friend who was probably not enjoying it as much as me. Perhaps the performer found it funny too, or simply a valid part of the piece. I've no idea what the audience's impression was either: perhaps they didn't hear, didn't care, or were more open to it than my intuitive subconscious reaction that this just isn't the done thing, don't you know. And indeed, there are surely many, many concerts where this kind of chatting wouldn't even be noticed: in short, my reaction surely says more about my socialised attitudes than anyone else's. It was a watershed moment in understanding my own research, and the socialised implications of listening.

Experimental Music

"Experimental" music I think is often misunderstood. The central idea of the Experimental music movement was that the processes of creating sounds should be documented, rather than extensively documenting the specifics about what the sounds should sound like. The latter approach was that of the Serialists, most famously Stockhausen and Webern -- who created scores that attempt to encompass every facet of the final sounds (Weltanschauung) -- exact measures of pitch, duration, timbre, and so on, with increasingly detailed scores. John Cage and the experimentalists, by contrast, denoted what should be done rather than what should be heard -- perhaps most famously, his Prepared Piano works which instruct the performer to attach rubber bands, sticks, bolts, and other materials, to a piano's string bed. There is, by design, no way of knowing how this will sound from the score. Instead, the performer is following a list of directions, performing an "experiment", to see what emerges.

All improvisation is experimentation, to an extent. A live happening always has some aspect of audience interaction, apart from perhaps some of the more uninspired laptop performances. However, if (say) a drone musician is creating drone music, like they did last time, to an audience of drone music fans, is there anything experimental, or unknown, apart from on the most literal of levels? Does anything truly surprising or unexpected come out of this process?

As a previously-frequent attendee of this kind of music show, I would say no. Off the top of my head, I can think of three shows that genuinely surprised or shocked me, and expanded my idea of what live music could be. The vast majority of the time, I know what I'm in for. Again: I love live music. What I'm arguing is that the experimentation in experimental music, the core concept, has been sidelined in favour of music which sounds "a certain way". In fact I think many performances I hear are in much more of a Musique Concrete tradition than an experimental one: generally electro-acoustic, and using sounds and noises as "instruments": a music style that emerged with the invention of magnetic tape, finally allowing composers to both fix music in place forever, and experiment with new sound-creating techniques.

Loss of aural sensibilities

As many authors have documented, we have moved from an aural society (perhaps unconsciously pejoratively referred to as "pre-literate") to an incredibly visual one. Gone are the broadsides: news stories and songs sold on cheap sheets of paper for performance by individuals or crowds to familiar tunes. Gone are the speaking and listening skills of these "pre-literate" societies, where one orator could address 5,000, and politics, philosophy and culture were communicated through mnemonics and rhyme. Gone is a widespread focus on general music education, take-home plays and live musicians in cafés and bars.

Of course there are many places where these things still happen. There are many community choirs, cèilidhs, folk music gatherings, jam sessions, amateur dramatics societies, marching bands, and other places where the lines between performer and audience are blurred. However, there is no doubt these things are a shadow of what they once where. The visual is now king, experts in art, music or literature rule the roost, and considered appreciation is a more socially important skill than being able to actually paint, or play, or write. As Simon Frith tells us, contemporary culture is lived through consumption: we judge people (at least to a degree) based on their music taste and what box sets they own. There is no similar cultural judgement for instrumental skill.

Tying this all together

That's why I composed? wrote? designed? Art Of Noises. We don't have enough opportunities to talk to strangers, to communicate, to make noises, give meaning to the things we are told what to think about. Equally, we are encouraged to be passive listeners or lookers: disengaged in the process of music creation, and yet well informed about its history, and up-to-date on the cool new bands.

Art Of Noises encourages people to be performers, rather than just audience members. It encourages creativity, laughter, play, learning, and establishing a vocabulary of sound. It breaks the ice, encourages performing, listening, interpreting, laughter and experiencing the intimacy of new forms of communication. Fundamentally, it breaks down the performer-audience relationship I've talked about so much in this article. As a composition, it's both prescriptive in some ways and free in others. I've decided how people will interact: people take turns, judge others' performances, and there is a score and a winner. Structurally, I am still a "composer" organising a "recital". However, I feel that the experimental playfulness of Cage and his contemporaries is carried through the work. The barrier to entry is near-zero. There is a freedom of interpretation limited only by the participants' imaginations and shared cultural experiences.

Experiencing people play the game is a joy. Firstly people seem confused -- is this it?. They look with trepidation at the pile of instruments. They pick a few up, tap them gingerly, people mutually giggle. After a pause, an idea forms: you can see the creative idea forming. Q: "How many instruments can I use?" A: "As many as you like". They realise it's only physically possible to use one or two. They have a go. The answer is revealed. Everyone agrees: relief, elation. People disagree: "how could you not get this, it's so obvious?" -- laughter, an exposition of a new creative idea.

The next rounds, people are more confident, the ideas get bolder, the performances longer. People try the more difficult words or concepts. New ways of playing the instruments are discovered -- perhaps smashing a clave into a tambourine, or using a table leg. By the end of that game, the group of people has a new aural shorthand -- a range of shared aural experiences, and a story for next time. They experience performing, playing, improvising, getting positive feedback, and learning about cultural associations and differences.

Final thoughts

I think this piece has been a huge success. With my PhD out of the way, I hope to have a lot more time to promote the game: as mentioned above, the source is on GitHub, but you can make your own version using the guidelines.

I also hope this demonstrates some ways that, as academics, artists, performers, composers, people, we can reconsider the power relationships implicit in everything we can do. As my previous piece demonstrated, ability to create noise while others cannot is power: a power we should not take lightly, or take for granted.

I also hope I can encourage some new forms of risk-taking, and a re-evaluation of the power structures implicit in all noise and sound production. Perhaps we can attempt a return to the more aural sensibilities of past times, and think about the pedagogical implications of our work. As the famous socialist arts and crafts movement artist William Morris wrote: "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful". Beauty is ephemeral: usefulness is something we can perhaps begin to explore more. In a time where people are simultaneously hyper-available and yet feeling culturally alienated and emotionally disconnected, collaborative music, and play, are perhaps two ways we can re-establish connections and relationships. Art Of Noises provides a stimulus for both.

For me, one of the most frustrating things about any kind of vaguely nerdy fandom is the application of what I can only describe as selective imagination. This is most extreme in things like Game Of Thrones -- producers and fans will happily defend the whiteness and male gaze of the thing as it's "realistic", you know, because it's really just medieval. Leaving aside how inaccurate that is, this misses the fact it has fucking dragons, frost zombies and magic. Why is it so easy to imagine those things but not an even remotely representative cast?

This has also struck me as a board game phenomenon too. By way of reference, let's compare two relatively recent games I really enjoy: Android: Netrunner and Mage Wars.

Both have a lot in common.

• They are what Fantasy Flight calls "living card games" -- designed from the start to be expanded, with an ever-increasing array of interesting design and new concepts.
• They are two-player, competitive games, based around deck building.
• They are very highly rated on sites like BoardGameGeek -- exemplars of board game design.
• They both require you to select an avatar -- a representation of yourself in the game.
• They are dripping in lore and theme.
• The artwork in both is, technically at least, fantastic (most of the time).

So why is it that Netrunner is currently the in vogue game, and Mage Wars is lesser known? Outside a few practicalities (Netrunner is much more portable), for me at least, a key factor is that Netrunner didn't stop its creativity when it came to the art.

The art and theme in Mage Wars could not be more generic. The four basic avatars in the game are all old, endlessly recreated tropes -- fiery warlock, robed bearded wizard, under-dressed healer lady, wilderness guy with pets. The women pictured above can only be described as "teenage boy fantasy from Photoshop magazine", and seem to lack internal organs and sensible clothing. Again, I'm sure this can be justified as "appealing to our demographic" or whatever code people use for "we only think boys will buy it anyway" nowadays, but really.

Netrunner, in the other hand, is a breath of fresh air. The default avatar is a brown (I think) woman hacker artist. Other avatars, which are released on a regular basis, are incredibly diverse. This theme is carried through to the actual cards you play with -- there is no shortage of imaginative theme, fresh ideas and a diversity of body types and people.

Why is it that Mage Wars' creativity stops at the art, when other games embrace it so much? With so much investment in other aspects of the game, why did the theme have to be so generic I actually feel embarrassed getting the game out for new people? What is is about the selective application of creativity that bugs me so much?

I think it's that this doesn't seem to stop at the level of game design. The board games community is famously overwhelmingly male: the "core demographic" excuse mentioned I've heard way too many times. There is equally seemingly no creativity aimed at ways to make the hobby less sexist and racist and more appealing to people who are not white men. Yes, it's difficult, yes, it's no one person's job, yes it's a hobby, I agree with all those things. But it is constantly bewildering to be how much even talking about these issues is a taboo, when it is in everyone's interests to have a more diverse hobby, from publishers to gamers. I think the core of my annoyance is that this is an embodied example of the "not my problem" school of sexism deniers everywhere.

I'd love to think that part of the reason for Netrunner's success, and its reputation as the "nice" TCG is it's art and theme. It seems that it should be a marketing imperative -- do publishers not want a range of people playing their games? Do gamers not want a more diverse hobby? For all these reasons, I cannot think of a better place to start in these games than abandoning this kind of juvenile art, and a move towards creativity in all aspects of game design.

This World Cup, I've been quite surprised to find myself really enjoying the football -- but only when England lose. Why is this? What about my native country losing fills me with such schadenfreude?

Dwelling on this, I've come to think that the England football team represents almost all the things I hate about this country.

• First and foremost, we are the great colonial nation. There is not a country in is World Cup that we, or one of our other European friends, have not invaded, extorted, or enslaved at some point. We are a nasty country, a racist country, a country that has conveniently forgotten almost it's entire wealth is based on slavery and exploitation. Being beaten by those we might have owned not so long ago feels like fantastic karmic retribution.
• Following this, it's even more hilarious when foreign players who play for English teams score against us -- Balotelli and Suárez. We invented the sport, sent it out unto the world, and now our incredibly anti-immigrant country can't win without them. We like migrants when they are convenient to our sporting success -- but then treat them like shit.
• This is not a sport that even pretends to be diverse, or care about diversity or equality. There is no concurrent women's tournament, as there is in tennis or athletics. The anchors are almost entirely men, and almost entirely white. Sure, the players donate their match fees to charity, and perhaps this is the most unfair part of this polemic, but this feels like a profoundly obvious PR exercise. Given how much we lose, can the players really accept public cash to buy even more yachts and houses with? It's also very obvious how sanitized the selected good causes are -- nothing with a remotely political stance, or pro-actively anti-discrimination in a famously racist, sexist, homophobic sport. Not even anything related to domestic violence, match day violence, justice for the victims of Hillsborough. Safe, sanitized, baby-kissing charities, that would coincidentally easily make the cover of Hello! magazine.
• Football must be one of the ultimate bastions of neoliberal handwringing. The corruption of FIFA, the drastic rise in domestic violence following England games, the ludicrous salaries, all are forgotten when the event begins. Why is it that any kind of even remotely critical journalism stops when there is a trophy to be won? Why can the pre-match or half-time spots not be about these things?

All this money spent, all this attention given, and we still lose, and miserably too. English football then perhaps the standard bearer for the kind of country UKIP and the Tories think we live in, and them being beaten is sweet revenge.

PhDs take years, are an "original contribution to knowledge", and are generally paid for by the taxpayer. They are then generally read by a handful of people -- generally a supervisor or two, and your examiners -- and then left to rot as a PDF on a university document repository of some kind.

I don't think this is good enough.

"Open Data" has increasingly come to mean large, public data sets accessible by APIs. I argue that in addition to this, we should be thinking about publishing our research in the most open and beautiful ways possible. Publishing as, for example, HTML5 in addition to PDF gives several benefits.

• Research can then be crawled by a search engine. PhDs are so specific, finding them directly is usually after searching for an author. A web-friendly form can skip this, allowing people to find unusual combinations of words that the author may not anticipate.
• It allows access to other collaborative tools. For example, a thesis could have a per-paragraph or per-section commenting system, allowing people to respond to a specific aspect.
• A proper digital pipeline reduces work. As O'Reilly (amongst others) are currently showing, HTML5 is a solid publishing format that exports well to PDF, ePub, iOS and other modern formats. Instead of creating several different versions of the same document, a single source can generate multiple outputs.
• Modern versionning tools can be used. This one requires greater digital literacy, but potentially github and local webservers can be used for edits and changes, and forks and edits done by other people. "With many eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" could one day apply to research as well.
• HTML is a free, open source format. Academics should be trying to abandon proprietary software full stop, in my view. HTML is a good alternative to current, terrible tools for thesis writing such as Microsoft Word, and is much less intimidating than LaTeX, with a variety of good editors.

Therefore I will be attempting to convert my PhD thesis to HTML5 over the next few weeks, keeping these things in mind. The output from my current editor, LyX, is not nearly as clean as I would like, so this may take some time: hopefully with a vision of what a PhD can look like online though, I can create a positive blueprint for future tools.

I've been pointed by a few people now towards I Side With as a policy guide. This site is extremely poorly sourced, and uses a highly flawed questionnare design. I strongly reccomend against using it.

There are two things it gets wrong. Firstly, the sources often do not back up what has been said by parties, usually relying on dubious press releases or quotes from candidates rather than policy documents. The site lists me as a 94% match with Labour, but this seems to be almost entirely based on garbage quotes. In the most extreme example, I am told that I side with Labour on Welfare benefits ("Should there be more or less restrictions on current welfare benefits?"), and given this link to James Purnell's site as a source.

It seems however that the linked page has absoltely nothing to do with restrictions on it, and in fact, it seems James Purnell himself has not been an MP since 2009 (and is now a BBC director), since quitting to protest Gordon Brown's leadership. So far so misleading.

Right, maybe it's a one off. Let's look at the economy.

Should the UK raise or lower the tax rate for corporations?

I am highly in favour of this. There is no source given. A quick google suggests that in fact, Labour are not for raising corporation tax, they're just not in favour of lowering it any more. Hmm. Which brings us to the other main problem with this site. A 5-point Likert scale of "least to most" suggests that if I say it is "most" important that corporation tax is raised, I expect to be matched highly with a party with a strong line on increasing corporation tax, not given a high weighting with a wishy-washy position.

This is a misapplication of this kind of survey design: the semantic scale given measured is incorrectly affecting my result weighting, not the degree of the given party's commitment to a policy.

These aren't exactly isolated. I'm also against zero hours contracts, apparently Labour is too. The actual quote given is:

The huge spike in the use of zero hours contracts has brought increased reports of abuses and bad practice. There should be zero tolerance of this.

So, they're not actually against zero hours contract, just "abuse", whatever that entails. Again, this is a high part of my weighting. I'm also against fracking:

Labour has always said that fracking should only go ahead if it is shown to be safe and environmentally sound.

So again... hardly a strong position.

This isn't meant to be an attack on Labour: I'm sure the matches for the other parties are just as poor, I was just suprised to be matched so highly with a party that, in practice, I didn't think supported any of these issues. Seems they don't, and that I Side With is about as accurate as a "which cat are you?" Buzzfeed post. On top of this, I'm almost positive from looking at the javascript source that the "we are now matching your answers" screen is artifically added, a shady tactic that airline and train companies use to make you feel like their website is doing something complicated.

Alternatives? Vote for policies seems much better, being based on actual policy documents. However, as with all politics at the moment, it seems manifestos have very little bearing on what happens, so take it all with a pinch of salt. Just make sure you vote for someone!