Yoani Sanchez

Three times a week a young woman named Yoani Sanchez drops into a Internet café in a hotel in Havana. She wears touristy clothes and asks the receptionist in German if she may use the computers.

This is all part of a charade she routinely plays out in order to pass herself of as a foreigner. The Cuban government monitors Internet access carefully and only tourists are allowed to connect to sites hosted outside the country. Her subterfuge has allowed her to write one of the most poignant and moving blogson the web.

Her writing captures fleeting, momentary glimpses of Cuban life. One post relates her admiration for a madman she saw stumbling around Havana insulting the president and his brother. Another describes the two-wheeled carts that make up much of the traffic on Cuban roads. Called arañas (spiders) in Cuban argot, the carts are made from broken down soviet cars and are often the only means of transporting goods from town to town.

Yet it is the subtext that she evokes within each entry that makes Yoani’s blog so powerful. Nearly fifty years on from the revolution of 1959, Cuba appears to of stagnated. It lost nearly all its allies the moment the Berlin wall fell. Now Cuba stands alone, one of the last countries still to cling to a Marxist-Leninist political tradition. All that is left of the dream of democratic socialism are chronic food shortages, phony political slogans and weighty restrictions against political expression.

Her blog is shot through with a sense of disenchantment and a concomitant sense of protest. In one entry she recalls a tourist asking her about the national dish of Cuba. She states that she can’t remember what it is anymore, however she was sure that the most commonly eaten dish is ‘rice with a beef bouillon cube’ or ‘rice with a chicken and tomato bouillon cube.’ As always in Yoani’s writing such everyday encounters are loaded with a wider social significance. In this instance a chance conversation with a tourist conveys the spectre of hunger that has hung over Cuba intermittantly since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Yet Yoani is not protesting on her own. She is quickly becoming the figurehead of an underground ‘cyber culture’ in Cuba. Yoani’s husband also writes a blog, andmore are following. A young generation are gaining access to the Internet in spite of the restrictions in place. People are quickly reading blogs and transferring the information to memory sticks. These are then passed around a growing underground.

The Cuban government has criticised this groups actions. They have argued that their dissent focuses on a shallow desire to experience the cheap thrills of free market capitalism. This has become the standard way the Cuban authorities to deflect criticism within Cuba. The reality is that nearly all their protests centre around a desire for freedom of expression and association.

Those in power are now acutely aware of the threat technology poses to the status quo. The bloggers have also recognised this. Yoani herself is a computer scientist. She has stated that, in her opinion, perfectly written HTML code is far more beautiful than any Latin she learnt at school. She has also noted that the Internet is a medium which encourages free debate and the exchange of ideas. It is for this reason that a young group of people in Cuba are talking of creating an ‘army of information specialists’ which no amount of state prohibitions will stop

Many computer games now take place in visually stunning artificial worlds

Computer games offer children a chance to explore often beautiful artificial worlds at a time when green spaces in urban cities are disappearing fast. To understand why the virtual worlds computer games offer are so attractive to children, I want to return to my own childhood, and my own early experiences of gaming.

It was during the autumn of 1988 that I first became aware the powerful visual effects that computer games produced. My parents had recently given my brother and I one of the most popular game consoles at that time,  a Commodore 64.

Starflight

The only real game we possessed was called Starflight. I still have vivid memories of playing it that autumn in the evenings after school. The game  was pioneering in the way in which it left the player to freely wander around the universe as he or she saw fit.

These were largely mechanical tasks and as such they were not without their own particular pleasures. However the real interest of the game for the player lay in the unexpected encounters with aliens and the discovery of new areas that developed much of the plot.

Much of it was pretty standard science fiction fare- a mysterious force is causing supernovae to flare up all over the universe: can the player stop the same happening to their solar system? However, the most memorable element of the game was the brilliant twist in the plot the game provided at the end. The player is informed that the destructive force in the universe was actually caused by an alien race with a life span so long and a metabolism so slow that they were mistaken for minerals by other players.

These minerals would have been used for fuel and traded by the player throughout the game. Effectively, the player realises that through using these ‘minerals’ as fuel, they have unwittingly wiped out an entire alien race. The thought of being implicated in mass genocide was enough to trouble any six year old.

Computer games have developed rapidly since this period. Blocky graphics and beeping noises have been replaced with incredibley sophisticated visual effects that tend to be as obsessively naturalistic and fussy as a French 19th century history painting.

Computer games are becoming increasingly obsessed with visual realism

Nevertheless, many of the fundamental aspects of  game play have remained unchanged. Today, sci fi games take place in the same artificial, delimited space that they did two decades ago.

The gameplay of Freespace, a new shoot 'em up game, differs little from its precursor, starflight.

Even computer games’ vision of the future has changed little over the decades. The basic premise of Starflight has since been endlessly recycled into games such as Wing Commander and Freescape. Throughout these developments, the game’s vision of the future has remained constant. It is the future  of Star Trek or Star Wars, a child’s vision of the future, outmoded and pleasantly quaint.

A sense of nostalgia for the simplicity of childhood games can be found across the various genres of computer games. ‘Doom’ style shoot em ups, are just extended, computerised versions of soldier or ‘cops and robbers’ style children games that once used to be played in the playground. Similarly the violence present in many of these games rarely depicts the violence present in the real world, but the gory, almost humorous violence of a cartoon.

Henry Jenkins has argued that the popularity of computer games amongst today’s generation of children is inherently tied to changes in the social environment. Children play in artificially constructed worlds because the real world has become too dangerous for children to play in unsupervised, and the spreading suburbs are too boring for them to want to.

In this regard, the rise in road traffic has perhaps been one of the most crucial factors in changing social behaviour. Much of the iconic photography of childhood of the 1950s and 1960s would show children playing in the street. The majority of children could not attempt to do the same thing today- if they did, they would promptly get run over by some hurried urban motorist.

The mental relaxation that these games have to offer stem from the comfortable, nostalgic worlds in which they are set. They are worlds that can be controlled by easy, mechanical movements. When these movements are executed correctly, pleasing, predictable outcomes are provided for the player.

Playing computer games is a bit like knitting then, but a little bit more down with the kids. One thing is for sure; if we want children to stop playing computer games and go outside, we adults are going to have to make ‘outside’ a nicer place to play in.