Playing The Ashes

A few weeks ago, I spoke at Playful 09. When Toby Barnes talked to me about speaking, he asked me to propose something that interested me rather than something I was working on. I immediately answered 'The Ashes', having just been to the Oval for Day 3 of England v Australia, Test Match Cricket.

Here's pretty much the talk I gave - I hope - posted on request of Toby, and a few cricket-loving friends. Thanks to Playful for having me, and the incredibly generous response of you who were in the audience.

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Hello. I'm Tassos Stevens, one of the Runners of Coney. I don't have any slides but I have written my talk. Coney makes live interactive crossplatform play, taking whatever form and event to best make stories and play for, by and with its playing audience. Coney describes itself as agency of adventure and play, founded on principles of adventure - everything should feel as exciting an adventure, loveliness - we must take care of our playing audiences, reciprocity - you get back at least what you put in, and total potential engagement. These principles apply both to our work and to Coney itself. Currently amongst others, Coney is running A Small Town Anywhere, a theatre piece for no performers but a playing audience, in a sell-out run at Battersea Arts Centre.

I wanted to mention this at the top because I may come back to it in the coda to this presentation.

But I'm here to talk about something else. Something that is an extraordinarily compelling event of story and play, with unique architecture and qualities that enable a fluid engagement for its many constituencies of playing audience. It has been running now for 117 years. It's Test Match Cricket. England versus Australia, the greatest rivalry. The Ashes.

Cricket. Hope you don't have to be a fan to appreciate this. I'm not planning to get very crickety. Myself, I'm not even a particularly hardcore fan, I'm more immersed according to our traditional power-law pyramid.

Now cricket itself is of course a sport. Like all sports it embeds the most compelling question in storytelling, the question that we as narrative-machines are always asking ourselves whether we like it or not: what happens next. In sport, more than life, more than art. Sport is live and indeterminate, while we may feel confident in predicting what will happen next, we can never know for certain - whether that's in a match or in a single moment. But like art, the set of possible things that might happen next is focused in our immediate imaginative grasp, we know immediately that it's win or lose, hit or miss. And we know what that means in the outcome of the match. And that's compelling. If you don't believe me, try walking past someone in a park who is about to catch a ball and try not to pause to see if they catch it or drop it.

And it's not unusual for us story-players to be making eyes at sport as participation narratives, there have been a couple of good stabs looking at football. But it's the distinctive features of cricket, especially Test Match Cricket, that make this I hope an interesting comparison. And ultimately I am here to talk about the making of story and play by us audiences during the Ashes rather than the play of the teams themselves.

First, about cricket.

All sports have simple mechanics at their heart. Football: kick the ball into the other team's goal and score. Tennis: two players hit a ball at each other with a bat until one of them misses - score. Cricket's heart is a little more complex because the two teams are acting differently. One team is batting, the other is bowling, And then they swap. When you're batting you score points called runs by hitting the ball away from your wicket and running. You lose lives called wickets if the ball hits your wicket, or if it's caught, or... and then there are a few more complicated ways. But you can tell the simple mechanic because it's how kids will play it on the street. Kids will play cricket with anything. I once as a grown-up spent a long time in a rehearsal room playing cricket with a ball made out of masking tape, a plank of wood as a bat and a chair as a wicket. And the simple mechanic is almost always what the highest points of drama in the game hinge upon.

In Test Match Cricket, one side bats until they have lost all their wickets in their innings, then the other side bats, then they both repeat. And the one that scores the most runs in total over their two innings wins the match. But if the side that would lose on runs hasn't lost all its wickets, it's a draw. Simple. Ish.

There are 11 players in a team. But at any given moment, it distils down into a gladiatorial contest: one player is bowling and one player is batting. And bowlers keep changing, and batsmen get out and keep changing. So the two players who face off against each other are endlessly shifting, ball by ball. Players have different strengths and weaknesses, a good batsman is not often a good bowler, and vice-versa. The endless combinations of who versus who, makes for a set of very human narratives that collectively can become epic. But still all striving towards one ultimate outcome: who will win the Ashes.

Test Cricket is long. A match can last for up to five days. Who wins The Ashes is decided over a series of 6 matches, over 2 months. And then the whole series repeats 2 years later. It's almost impossible for any spectator to be at every single day of every single match across a whole series, unless you're a commentator. Or a player. Hard even to watch it on television without taking a holiday for that express purpose. But you don't have to. It is an ambient narrative that can percolate in the background of the rest of your life, always tempting but only occasionally demanding your full attention. No mistake that the archetypal medium for cricket is actually the radio: Test Match Special. Radio is an imaginative and ambient medium. You can do other things while it is on. And the most popular live format for cricket online is the Over by Over commentary, the best example for me being The Guardian's. A journalist is watching the game, usually on telly in the office. Every over they write a short paragraph about what happened and update it. They also include the emails from spectators they like the most. It's a live blog, and a conversation between host journalist and audience who come and go as they please, while the live event that is the focus goes on in the background.

Cricket is a punctuated sport, rather than continuous. Football is continuous in play, for 90 minutes - other than the half-time interval - and the ideal game would have the players are always keeping the ball in play, minimising the time it is out of play. In cricket, there are intervals for lunch and tea in any one day. There are nights off before the next day. But even moment by moment, ball by ball, the ball is in play as it is bowled, the action happens, and then there is a punctuation before the next action, the next ball. It's a comma rather than a full stop, but it still gives us time to breath, and to imagine what will happen next. And to talk to our fellow spectators, to make stories about what we imagine will happen next. Or just to talk to each other. Test Match Special is as famous for its commentary about the cake the commentators are eating as it is about the cricket. It's in the space between the game that the play really happens.

For here is the primary beauty of Test Cricket as a sport: it is intricately indeterminate. We don't know for certain what will happen next. We can only imagine what will happen next. We don't even know who's winning for certain, let alone who will win the game. In cricket, we spectators don't deal in certainties, only in probabilities. We are probably winning this match, but Dot Dot Dot. And in the space between then we tell each other stories about what we think will happen next, while anticipating the moment that play returns again so briefly.

Indeterminacy is true of any sport. But not to the same degree. You always know in football who is winning, so if nothing else happens in a game after a team goes 1-0 up, they will certainly win. So if a side like AC Milan goes 3-0 up at half-time in the European Cup Final, then they are winning, you as a spectator can be 99% certain that they will win the game. Which makes any subsequent comeback little short of miraculous.

In cricket, we don't actually know who is winning. Because you have to take turns to score runs and take wickets. So England score 435 runs in their first innings. Are they winning? Probably. But Australia bat, and they score 60 runs before losing their first wicket, nearly 300 before losing their second, so Australia are winning? Well here at 299 for two, they might score 600. Then they'll be winning. Probably. We imagine Australia winning as the outcome and as the game progresses it grinds inexorably towards that outcome. But it only takes one ball to get a wicket. And usually when one wicket comes, the batsmen are suddenly more vulnerable. So more wickets might come, and the game's imagined outcome will suddenly shift. A game that can play for days with only one result imaginable can suddenly turn around in minutes.

As it happens Australia score 674 runs in their second innings, a lead of 239.

But in cricket, it's not enough to score the runs, you need to take the wickets too. All the wickets. Australia on the final day are bowling at England who are on a pitiful 20 for two. Australia need to take eight wickets. England, 239 runs down, are trying to survive, not to lose all their wickets, in which case they will draw. But only 70 runs on the board and they are 5 wickets down. Their best batsmen have all gone. And wickets keep falling. Until our last remaining good batsman goes and Australia only need one wicket to win and facing them are two batsmen for England, one of whom is really not much better than me. Monty Panesar, a brilliant bowler, can't really bat, certainly can't catch. It could almost be me up there. He's got a better beard than me though. But he can't bat. And for 70 balls he has to keep out an Australian bowling attack baying for victory. It's almost certainly Australia's match. And. Monty survives. Miraculously. It's a draw. If you're told, it was a draw, you imagine that as unexciting. But there were 70 balls, 70 actions when the match could be lost in a second, where you imagined it would be lost, but were hoping it wouldn't, 70 nails and still the coffin couldn't be shut. And it's a man who's big and beardy like me up there.



Indeterminacy. Every bowl is different. You can bowl fast or slow, make the ball swing in the air one way or the other, make the ball spin as it hits the ground one way or the other. Different bowlers have different skills, different batsmen have different vulnerabilities.

Indeterminacy. The pitch matters. It's a variable. This isn't flat and green like a pingpong table. It's flattish and greenish like grass. It gets wet and then it dries, it gets trodden on, it cracks, the ball moves more and more unpredictably as the match progresses, so that when the game is being decided, it's usually harder and harder for the batsmen to survive and not lose their wickets.

Indeterminacy. This is the only game whose result can be swung by an Act of God. The weather is a crucial factor. If it rains, then play stops until the rain stops. The book that collected the Guardian Over by Over for the 2005 Ashes series was titled after an audience question on the morning of the final match of the series, in which England needed to avoid defeat to win the Ashes. That question: Is It Cowardly To Pray For Rain.

Indeterminacy and Punctuation and Ambience. The three key qualities of the Ashes.

And also tribalism, of the gentle kind. Tribalism is good because it gives you a common identity, your tribe and the opposition, a common focus and competitive goal, all of which mean you can start playing with your fellow spectators straight away. All sports share this, and I reckon that a football fan could start a conversation with strangers in a bar anywhere in the world (except the USA maybe). But football tribalism is often hot, intense, as befits a game where you are shouting for 90 minutes. This is disengaging for many, and can often spill into ugly abuse and violence from the hardcore. Cricket tribalism is often much gentler. It's much harder to get uglier, at least outside of the India-Pakistan furnaces which are fuelled by the hostility between those two nations.

That the Ashes' tribalism is gentler is partly due to those three key qualities. But also some innate ridiculousness. The trophy is a ceremonial urn containing the ashes of a bail burnt from the wicket in that first series in 1882, when Australia first beat England, and the Times published an obituary to English cricket.





It's tiny. How ridiculous.

This is a sport which stops for tea, where the result can be determined by the weather and whose commentators are obsessed with cake. How patently and beautifully ridiculous.

Still, there is a rivalry. There is an obsession for each side in beating the other, beyond any other rivalry. For Australia it's perhaps the casting-off of the Empire. For England in recent times, Australia were inexorable, winning all series between 1985 and 2005, becoming for English fans a bit like a different Empire, the all-conquering villain of Star Wars.

And this rivalry in a punctuated sport facilitates a certain kind of play in between balls, verbals between players designed to unsettle concentration or just score points: sledging. Some of my favourite examples. Australia's Glenn McGrath to Eddo Brandes (of Zimbabwe, but this sledge has spread virally into the Ashes too): Mate, why are you so fat? Brandes' riposte: Because every time I sleep with your wife, she gives me a biscuit. Paul Nixon, an England wicketkeeper and supreme sledger, to Andrew Symonds, perhaps not the brightest button in the Australian eleven: You should concentrate on when you're breathing in, and when you're breathing out. Symonds was flummoxed and got out. Players like the spinning god Shane Warne can use the crowd itself to unsettle batsmen - Warne's showmanship rallied the focus and anticipation of the stadium for just what kind of ball he'd bowl next, rattling the batsman's nerves. And spectators can sledge players. I was at the Oval in this Ashes series on the Saturday for the intense pleasure of England's batting led by Jonathan Trott and Graeme Swann smearing the Australian attack over the ground. Australia's Mitchell Johnson was bowling, badly. In turn, his fellow pacemen Ben Hilfenhaus and Peter Siddle were fielding at the boundary about 6 metres away from me in the second row. A well-timed 'why aren't you bowling, mate?' I hoped was enough to amplify what they themselves were probably thinking as Johnson got battered. I kid myself that this contributed to themselves both getting hammered when they bowled. That's the play.

So. The Ashes. Indeterminacy. Punctuation. Ambience. Tribalism Lite. All facilitating the play of us spectators.

Quickly about A Small Town Anywhere, as the promised coda. It's not cricket but it does feel very much like sport. Up to 30 people take a role, hat and badge as a citizen to enter a Town. Through their own play, gossiping through conversation and correspondence using the working postal service, a story unfolds. There are events external to the Town which demand their response and the voice of the Town Crier as a narrator guiding them through a week, but ultimately it's down to them, and every night it is different, unpredictable, alive. We're behind a wall, monitoring it imperfectly through CCTV, mikes, spyholes and especially reading every letter as it passes through our sorting office. We're then responding as best we can in writing and posting them letters, the riffs and inflexions of the Town Crier, the lights, sounds and the spinning clock. We have some influence, but no control. It makes me feel like a football manager on the touchline. We know the range of possible results and outcomes of the whole or any given moment, but the play is so emergent we have no direct control, only limited influence. It's incredibly exciting though.

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Writing this up afterwards, I cannot honestly remember how I finished the talk other than in nervous sweat to be done in time. Maybe this was it. Thanks to everyone again for such generously positive responses afterwards.

My friend Andy had teased me that surely this was just an opportunity for me to wheel out my cricket-bore story, that my granddad took me when I was 12 to one of the most gobsmacking days in the history of Test Cricket: 1981, Headingley, Day 4, when England were so staring down the barrrel that they were 500-1 against to win, until Ian Botham and Graham Dilley hit out in hope and glee to push towards what became the most improbable victory. There, Andy, I got it in now. I think my granddad would have been a tad bemused but happy to see me giving this talk in this context. Thanks to him for awakening this passion in me for a beautiful sport, in http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifthe most excellent day I ever spent with him.

Frog; Saucepan

Thanks to Neillie for this most peculiar snapshot from another world, and musings on reality musicals. Posting this to remind me to keep musing. An extraordinary advert in the middle. This was made only 16 years before I was born.

A Small Town Anywhere

I mean to write more about this, I do. But right now prompted to correct an otherwise lovely Guardian article.

For the record, A Small Town Anywhere was co-created by the six of myself, Tom Bowtell, Gary Campbell, Annette Mees, Ben Pacey and Melanie Wilson. Many many other brilliant people involved but we are the co-authors (along with each and every playing audience).

Resolute is the new black

Challenge and Response

This is a promised response to Matt Trueman, whose blog is well worth tracking. He wrote at length about Rotozaza's autoteatro, and observed how he felt "performative elements of our participation overpower our role as audience". I thought he'd meant one thing - how the thrill of immersion can sometimes drown a more reflective experience. But it turned out in his comment he actually meant another: how the sometime self-consciousness of audience play can undermine the intentions of the piece and the capacity to look and listen as audience to what the piece offers.

You can read Matt's original post here. I'm responding in relative depth here because it's provoking thinking that might be useful as we return to making A Small Town Anywhere, tomorrow...

But this is a draft, I don't think I've nailed what I want to say just yet.

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The autoteatro of Rotozaza is evolving from an earlier practice they revealingly dubbed TOCAR: Theatre of Command and Response. It's giving instructions to unrehearsed performers, whether they are performers in front of an audience - as in Doublethink or Bloke, in which I was once that unrehearsed performer - or whether they are autoteatro's audience as performers - as in Etiquette or GuruGuru (which I've shamefully not experienced yet).

-- btw before I go any further, don't read any of this as being negative of Rotozaza's work; I haven't always agreed with everything I've seen, but I'd back Doublethink and Etiquette as miniature masterpieces and they remain a crucial company --

The avowed intention in TOCAR was to give beat-by-beat live instructions that gave no space to the performer but to carry them out as well as you could as soon as you could. It's a liberating - although exhausting - experience because you carry far less responsibility for your performance. It rarely gave you space to reflect or to exercise any creativity (or agency) in your response. The audience watching you might be moved by your effort in striving to complete the instructions as much as the overall constructed effect of the piece of which you might be mostly unaware. And you largely lose your sense of self in the process.

Game-based performance often does something quite different. In the orthodox game-design camp (that often dominates Hide & Seek), it gives objectives to its players. Pursue this goal, follow this set of rules, achieve the win. Objective is an analogous term to that of your Stanislavskian actor. The good game usually presents you with an obstacle to your objective - whether a dynamic between two contrasting mechanics or a competing player. Sometimes there might be different ways for you to achieve your objective, that give space for player creativity. The focus on the objective often drives players into a very lean-forward high-flow engagement such that they again can lose a sense of self in the game.

Starting to get lost in terminology now. The challenge is an objective that gives the minimum necessary specification of how you should achieve it, and plenty of space for players to get creative in how they do that. A game like Noah's Lark by Coney - which I mean to write about soon - rewards that creativity in game-points. But creativity is implicitly rewarding - it's fun. Andy Field's game Checkpoint challenges its smuggling players to get awkward and clumsy contraband past guards, and leaves it to them to find the ways to do that. The art here is in the specification that the game puts into the challenge - over-specify and you kill the creativity and therefore the fun, under-specify and you end up with responses that aren't supported by the rest of the piece or simply bewildered players.

The ask: literally that. Ask something of your playing audiences to help them colour in your framework, or to give the piece something that it then incorporates. Whether it's a list of ideal dinner guests asked for The Feast as Matt reported, the skeleton in your closet that the Small Town Historian might ask of you should you engage with him in advance of A Small Town Anywhere, or perhaps the granddaddy of them all, the suggestions from the audience that improvisers like the Comedy Store Players take to make funny (or not). There's a similar art in specification for the ask, which can be explicit or implicit in the atmosphere or world of the piece. There also should be a responsiveness to the audience's initial answer that can transform it deftly into something the piece can properly incorporate without diluting the audience's investment - if you tell the Historian that you are expecting the child of Le Publican, he might remind you that the paternity could yet be questioned, keeping the spirit of your suggestion but giving more space for interesting storylines to emerge.

The space that opens up the consciously creative response for a playing audience is also that which opens up a sense of one's self in the game/play. Which opens up into self-consciousness when that becomes performative, in a room with other people. This sense of self in the playspace is not necessarily problematic - it's also what enables reflection. Nor indeed must it be pervasive, it's easy enough to make space for playing audiences to get accustomed to it and retune to listen to the piece. Or punctuate so that the transitions in and out of the liminal space enable a more reflective response.

Matt's main gripe seems to be against players who are working against the game/play. I'd say it's not always their responsibility. The piece itself must foster and encourage the kinds and specificities of response from its audiences. Which could be an improviser thanking an audience for the umpteenth suggestion of "toilet" and taking another. In the case of The Feast, I suspect that as we'd deliberately left the piece quite light to make the feasting itself easy, there wasn't enough meat to harness the audience to its central themes - not that I mind getting that list of suggestions. I reckon that sometimes what seems like a 'griefer' response is because the player rebels against the imposition of the format, real or perceived. I did Internal earlier this year at Burst at BAC. As interesting and provoking as the piece was, it left me feeling slightly cheapened by its manipulation and I wouldn't have begrudged anyone who strove to assert their self. And in what sounds to me like the world's most misconceived piece of theatre ever - Badac's The Factory - I was only cheering the critics who rebelled.

The challenge for us making this kind of work is how to allow a range of active responses which might be inspired, might be self-conscious, might even be rebelling. Without ever losing the beauty that comes in a group of people playing together. Baby, bathwater.

Scratch Manifesto

I was challenged in a cold-call from BAC on Friday. In the Scratch Festival themed on Democracy, they had persuaded Martin Linton, MP for Battersea, to accept a challenge and wanted me to do the same. Namely that we'd each be given 24 hours to prepare a 5-minute manifesto. Martin as an artist, me as a politician; it happened last night. Martin was great, underlining his unsung role in the setting up of BAC, and more recently in saving it. I liked what I wrote, so I'm posting it here with the caveat that yes, it's a manifesto so it's got a lot of rhetoric. But also some rabbits.

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The Manifesto I Sign Up To

In the American Declaration of Independence, Jefferson underlines the pursuit of happiness.

Happiness matters.

The manifesto I sign up to drops wealth as a measure and goal for the nation; instead of Gross National Product, rather embraces Gross National Happiness. Just as they have - for real - in the kingdom of Bhutan.

Not the happy-clappy happiness but something deeper-rooted. That comes from agency and responsibility and connectedness. Community.

In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln declared government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth. But here it's withering. The connection and agency that people feel to party politics is diffused and diminished, dominated by personal interest.

The manifesto I sign up to radically transforms democracy into a living community.

Councillors - at the local level - and MPs - at the national level - are no longer the decision-makers. Rather they are elected best to facilitate the debate of the issues and assemble gatherings of people - in council chambers like this one. It's democracy for the day, like jury service, new people gathered every day to decide matters brought to them. New votes every day, but every day the people are present.

At national level, cabinet is elected by MPs every quarter. You only get to do it once.

The office of Prime Minister and the Monarch are both abolished and replaced by rabbits. A pair of rabbits. It's in the nature of rabbits that it's difficult to keep track of precisely which pair of rabbits is which. But actually, crucially, any pair will do.

The House of Lords is abolished and replaced by two chambers with veto power.

One chamber is full of eight-year-olds, who will veto any proposal that is not clear, not fair or not fun. Or appears to be upsetting the rabbits.

The other chamber is full of eighty-year-olds who veto not on behalf of their own elder generation but on behalf of all future generations yet to come. So we do right by the past and the future.

Everyone is responsible. We take the consequences of our actions and discover our own passions. So I have some proposals that are rabble-rousing. And rabbit-rousing, not that they need much encouragement.

For every extra zero on the end of a banker's bonus, an extra digit of their PIN is released to the general public.

The headquarters of every energy and resource-burning corporation, together with the house of their CEO, is forcibly relocated to low-lying islands in the Indian ocean, better to focus their minds on melting ice caps and rising sea levels.

And on a lighter note, borrowing a trick from Google, 20% of our time in work or in school is for us to pursue whatever we find interesting, without worry of results, and to share what we find with everyone, better to dream our future together.

The Manifesto I sign up to abolishes income tax and instead creates The Club of the Common Good. It's a bit like a Christmas Club. There's a means-tested tax for everyone to pay their bit together for the things we can't afford to buy properly individually. Education. Health. Art, even.

You benefit more individually the more you do for the Common Good, - recycling, gardening, loft insulation, even feeding back on scratch performances.

But every time you do something for your own individual good, it's taxed and hypothecated for the Club of the Common Good.

Private school fees? Great. You just bought textbooks for your local state school.
Filling up your car? Good work. You just helped make train tickets cheaper.
Plastic bag? Brilliant. You just subsidised a local allotment.

And everyone is themselves challenged to come up with new ideas and rules for the Common Good. And rewarded with an opportunity to pet the rabbits.

Happiness is also born of reflectiveness.

We're in this together. That's what politics is about, fundamentally. People here in the first chamber of the manifesto I sign up to, please look at each other. Take a moment to say hello not just to your friends but those on the other side of the room. Imagine windows here, here and here through which the world is looking in, and you can see the world: past, present and future.

We're in this together. Us and the rabbits.

Manchester, so much to...

Just returning from a trip to a vibrant Manchester. I spoke on Friday morning at the International Talent Campus in the Festival, an inspiring group of artists and producers who were properly international. I was speaking about my work and technology - which is why I get invited out sometimes. Even though most pleasingly the talk converged on how technology is a bit of a red herring, rather it's all about communication and how people do that. I can't wait to follow up some conversations in some very different places.

Had a bunch of meetings and catch-ups with friends from Manchester - Leach, Stambo, alas an absent Thorpe - as well as a London visiting posse.

And saw some very interesting work.

End Of The Road was the Young at Heart chorus collaborating with No Theatre. Beautifully old people singing songs from the heart. That's the basic bullet-proof appeal and - even though anything critically bullet-proof worries me - it sustained, even if the theatrical and musical framing of the experience didn't really flow for me. But it only took the most thrown-away invitation to dance from one of the on-stage geezers to get everyone in a packed concert hall joyfully up on their feet.
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Prima Donna was an opera by Rufus Wainwright, staged with colourful vim by Daniel Kramer. I don't have much confidence in my operatic sensibility to judge the piece properly. But I was really moved by the final aria sung beautifully by Janis Kelly and apparently - not knowing Wainwright so well either - this was the closest the composition was his voice, indeed he's even singing it here. The rest felt like brilliant pastiche, and the storytelling clever but oddly ramshackle.

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It Felt Like A Kiss was the talk of the festival. Literally. Everywhere people could be overheard nattering about the thrill of the chase of the last sequence. It delighted me and it bothered me, and inevitably I'm writing more about it. Great to see Felix/Punchdrunk tackling a different event model from masked free-roaming, and getting his Japanese scare-house obsession into public. It's a brilliant funpalace he's made here. Great to wander inside and discover an Adam Curtis film. His montages dredge streams of cultural unconsciousness - I can't help thinking of Ozymandias in Watchmen - to gather argument. If you know Curtis' work - and if you don't then find The Power Of Nightmares, The Century Of The Self etc on google video - then there's nothing especially new but on screen it's always a good provocation. As Lyn Gardner says, plenty more political food for thought than a David Hare play, although.. no... I won't go there.

But but but. To be placed as an active player within this filmscape fundamentally changes the function and quality of the polemic. When it's interacting with you, Curtis' red-hot rhetoric feels as blunt as a poker. We're given a survey in a holding pen and the questions - do you believe in freedom? would you commit an act of violence to achieve positive social change? - just beg so many questions back in this context.

Says Curtis in one of his Helvetica captions: When you start to tell a story, you have to know how it ends. Hmm. Really? And doesn't that change when you and your audience are a part of the story?

There's no sense of hope here, even of change, just a studied futility. We don't get meaningful agency, a chance of transformation, we just get to run, as - yes - "the dark forces that were veiled by the American dream" come to get us. Somewhat of a ghost-train for the cognoscenti. Not this so much as 'he chased me; I felt like a quiche'. (ok, I'm begging for a punch with that one.)

Sure, I had a total blast in as close to L4D as is surely legal, and the best bits of the scary act were all about how my group of strangers suddenly started playing together resourcefully for survival. But then that solidarity is forcefully winnowed by a Skinnerian maze and spat out into the car park. You're left talking about the thrill of the chase. And not much else.

I've always argued pedantically that laughing at a Bush joke lets you off the hook of thinking anything else more probing. Getting spooked by a spook is perhaps just the same. However, undeniably brilliantly constructed the ride.