Some Canadian Bacon: Carrington Vanston’s 1 MHz Podcast

Although I recognize that the readership here is international, I do owe some amount of recognition for Canadian writers, gamers, and fellow agent provocateurs. That being said, Carrington Vanston has continually impressed me with his 1 MHz Apple ][ podcast. I'm equally impressed by some of his writing on video games. Critical yet fair, the insights he has into video games always provide me with the kinds of creative inspiration necessary to think deeper about gaming.

"Video games, particularly the twitch-and-shoot kind, are remarkably passive activities for ones that involve such an increase in heart rate. I wonder what kind of effect that has on us? Do we feel less need to do other activities because, at least chemically, we feel we've already accomplished so much?" [link]

Always with an ironic, yet good-natured, sense of humor, Carrington’s work features some of the most subtle yet recognizably Canadian takes on modern and retro video/computer games. And, with a quick wit and tendency for poetic verse, his writing and speaking both exude a laid-back yet artistic sense. Not bad for a Torontonian!

Although all of his podcasts are worth listening to, I found his retro game reviews especially insightful. Podcast #1 features a review of “Tass Times in Tone Town” - a game that I referred to in “Revitalizing Dead Culture: Why Game History Matters” article, Podcast #2 has an excellent review of the classic Lode Runner, and Podcast #6 features what I think is his best review, of the game Portal. No, not the recently over-hyped game from Valve. Portal is a one-of-a-kind interactive novel that came out in the early 1980s for the PC. In a genre of its own, it’s hard to pigeonhole this excellent story in any particular game genre. Carrington’s review of the game does an amazing job of giving us the feeling of how the game plays - something rarely done in any review I’ve seen. While I don’t want to give away the premise of Portal, it still stands as a beautiful example of how literature itself can become the object of exploration in games. The whole idea of reading an in-game book or listening to a character’s voice logs in order to advance the plot, found in modern games such as System Shock, BioShock, and Mass Effect, was unimaginable before Portal. Unlike these games, however, Portal manages to unfold the storyline only through the player’s discovery of in-game literature and diaries.

So head on over to the 1 MHz Podcast and give it a listen, or check out his latest article on passivity in video gaming.