Online Life Lessons

I estimate that currently about 75% of my self-worth is tied up in Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Blizzard's hideously addictive online collectible card game. It's a fantastic game in many ways, a blend of careful strategy, knowledge and the brutal vicissitudes of blind chance. It's a bit like playing poker but with more dragons and you don't win anything except not having to think about your life for a while.

As a 36 year old white man I automatically assume that everyone else in the world is the same as me until I see evidence to the contrary. When I play Hearthstone my accidentally ageist, misogynist, and racist hind-brain pictures an ever flowing stream of white male opponents in their middle thirties who happen to be playing an online card game at 2 pm on a Wednesday because otherwise they would just be screaming into a careless void. The limited communication tools of Hearthstone encourage this narcissism, unless you know the person you are playing you are limited to a handful of emotes (that can be switched off) and trying to make inferences based on the name they have selected. There's not much there to challenge my lazy demographic assumptions. Unless someone is literally calling themselves 'LadyOfColourBorn1999' I'm going to struggle to picture anything other than an analog of my own stupid face staring back at me from a screen somewhere in the blander regions of England.

In my head everywhere in the world looks like this

Hearthstone has a quest mechanic whereby you can earn in-game gold for nugatory achievements within the game. Sometimes these relate to wining a certain number of games or playing in a particular way but there is one quest which requires you to watch another player win a game in the spectator mode so that instead of feeling bad yourself for losing, you can feel bad about yourself because someone else is much better at Hearthstone than you are. The only players you can spectate are those that are on your friends list. I had a problem with the spectate a friend quest for many months, I only had one friend in the game, I was married to him and he didn't play Hearthstone anymore. This is in many ways a reflection of real life where I have precisely zero friends in a town where I have lived for the last four years.

Hearthstone allows you to send a friend request to anyone who you have just played. This being the internet this is mostly used to try and circumvent the limits of the emote system in order to dump homophobic, racist, and semi-literate abuse on someone who has just beaten you. You get beaten, you send a friend request, they add you, you act out your childish insecurities right into their stupid friendship accepting face. However, it's also used by lonely people so they can have someone to spectate when the relevant quest comes up. I've got a couple of people who added me for that reason and I'll occasionally get a message saying that one of them has started spectating me, usually at the point where I'm about to lose a game in the most humiliating way possible. These people are strangers to me, and me to them. We are voyeurs in a very specific part of each other's lives and that is all.

Who wouldn't want to watch something like this?

All seemed well. I was sat in my bubble of self-loathing torpor, just getting on with playing the game and trying not to think about my life. Then I noticed that one of my "friends" was online at the same time as me, specifically at a time when normal people are at work. At first I thought little of it except to idly wonder whether they too were severely depressed. The thought cheered me slightly, misery is relative after all, and the idea that someone I don't know might feeling worse than me always brings the ghost of a smile to my face. It's not a very nice smile but then it's not a very nice thought either. While I waited for my next game to load I toyed with idle fantasies concerning their identity. A drink problem, a failed marriage, fired from their job for performing sex acts in the boss's office, the sort of problems with which I could empathise. Then I thought that they probably just had the day off work and felt irritated that they were probably much happier than me. They were probably playing Hearthstone for fun rather than because beating strangers at a pretend card game was their only source of self-esteem. The swine, I thought, the happy fulfilled swine.

Over time I noticed a few other things. Sure, they were around during the day but this was a recent phenomenon. Then I remembered a few months back I'd idly noticed that the often logged on at four thirty or so played for a couple of hours and then stopped. I recalled that I'd seen them around during the day before, at around Easter time when I'd had some time off work. It dawned on me that one possible explanation for their logon times was that they correlated with the school holidays. It seemed possible, likely even, that I, a 36 year old man, had accidentally made "friends" with a child.

Oh God, is this me?

My next thought, not unreasonably, was that I had been automatically added to some sort of list held at Blizzard and freely shared with law enforcement agencies. "Middle Aged Weirdos" the list was probably called, either that or "Potential Nonces". I imagined being interviewed by hard faced inspectors, men and women who called each other 'guv', were riddled with institutional homophobia, and extracted confessions through intense psychological pressure. I imagined trying to explain that I had no interest in this child, this vulnerable youth adrift in a digital ocean of seething, cunning pedophiles. I would try, likely in vain, to explain that all I wanted to do was watch this innocent child play a card game, that my voyeurism stemmed only from a desire for pretend gold with which I could buy pretend cards. 'Do you expect us to believe that?' they would answer, their sneering contempt breaking down my resolve. In desperation I would sign the proffered confession and my life as I know it would be over.

In truth I had no way of knowing for sure who this unknown person was. It was at least as likely that the tenuous connection I had a had made was with an adult and my paranoid suspicions were the results of confirmation bias. Nonetheless I removed them from my friends list with a frisson of guilt, the sense that I had somehow got away with something. I resolved in future only to accept friends requests from people whom I judge, by standards that I would be completely unable to articulate, to have selected adult sounding names. By applying this standard I have been subjected to a barrage of abuse from almost everyone whose request I have accepted but that feels strangely comforting. It makes me feel like I'm ten years old again but without the burden of having my whole life ahead of me.

The strange case of Vampire's Kiss

Vampire's Kiss is not a good movie. Let's get that out of the way at the start. The overwrought tale of Peter Loew, a literary agent losing his mind and starting to think he's a vampire, has an intriguing premise but fails to deliver. It's a strangely ugly little film, a harrowing tale of misogyny masquerading as a black comedy. It is frequently deeply uncomfortable to watch but for all it's faults there's something strangely fascinating about it. Part of that fascination stems from Nicolas Cage's legendarily exuberant performance. You can get a flavour of that performance from the clip below in which he rants the entire alphabet at his therapist to illustrate how easy filing is.



Cage delivers a performance that punches straight through parody and comes out the other side with a deranged grimace and a determination to baffle and confuse. He rips through the ghastly script with a maniacal enthusiasm, gurning and waving his arms about as though the audience were somehow watching him from a nearby hill. This is the element of the film most people remember.

Watching Cage stalk, harrass, torment and sexually assault his employee Maria is deeply uncomfortable, not least because his grotesque behaviour is ostensibly being played for laughs. We are invited to smirk at an awful human being behaving in an awful manner towards a woman who is clearly traumatised by his increasingly erratic and dangerous conduct. There is little sympathy for his descent into madness because he was clearly a terrible person before the collapse. We learn nothing about him, we learn nothing about his psychology, other than bad things sometimes happen to bad people. This, for me, is why the narrative of the film fails.

There's a comparison to be made here with Bruce Robinson's exhausting film How to Get Ahead in Advertising, released in the same year. That film stars Richard E Grant as an advertising executive to starts to believe that a boil on his neck is talking to him and growing into a second head. It's a strange, funny little movie, which charts a man's breakdown and resurrection as a biting satire on the advertising industry. It's another riff on the same theme that Vampire's Kiss fails to properly address. You can get a flavour of How to Get Ahead in Advertising from it's darkly upbeat final rant, delivered with fervour by Richard E Grant. It's well worth a look, if only because Robinson should be known for more than just Withnail & I.



One thing that Vampire's Kiss does do well is to interrogate the idea of the vampire as a sexual predator. This is an old theme, Dracula in particular has long been seen as a dramatic enactment of Bram Stoker's sexual issues. What Vampire's Kiss does is strip away the layers of glamour and charisma to reveal the rather grubby reality beneath the facade. Many vampire films work with the ambivalence of sexual feeling, a strange mixture of attraction and trepidation that leads to fascination. Peter Loew behaves exactly as a vampire does but the result leads to a feeling of revulsion in both the protagonist and the viewer. The vampire is not glamorous, not fascinating, just a nasty little creature on a deranged power trip. Had the film been played straight, rather than inviting the viewer to laugh, it might have worked rather better. The sheer ugliness at its heart just isn't funny, it isn't sad, it is ultimately just ugly. You'd be much better off watching George A Romero's Martin which deals with the subject of vampirism as mental illness in a much more intelligent and interesting way.

Vampire's Kiss made me think about my own work and what I was trying to do with This is Not a Lovesong (available here for not much money). I wanted to get inside the head of monsters, to convey a sense of what it would be like to be a monster. I wanted to write something that expressed ugliness but with prose that was carefully crafted. I spent a long time writing and re-writing every scene to try and get under the skin of the protagonists and to make the horrors completely . I don't know whether I succeeded but I do wish that I had seen Vampire's Kiss before I began as knowing how not to do something is as important as knowing how to do it.