The Headache of Online Applications

As regular readers know, I have recently been applying for jobs of all kinds in the hope that I can find work before I run out of money and my house is repossessed which I calculate will happen by December.  Compared to last year when I applied for 38 jobs, had 16 interviews and only received feedback from 3. In some ways the situation this year has got both better and worse.  Out of 35 applications I have had 7 interviews, and another due next week, all but 2 of the sets of interviewers this year have provided feedback.  The feedback was sometimes quite expected, i.e. they had a candidate already working for them who knows their business better than me and at other times it has been quite offensive, accusing me of having lied on my application form.  It does seem that my interview skills needed polishing and so I was lucky being unemployed that a local training centre gave me a free two-hour session.

Of course, in contrast to the past, interviewing skills are not the only ones you need to get a job.  Once you would simply send in a CV or complete an application form then hope to be called for an interview.  Then things moved from paper-based applications to electronic ones.  Saying that, in interviews Powerpoint seems to have passed its peak of the early to mid-2000s and people are now wanting presentations done by you simply speaking or using handouts at most.  The step from paper-based to electronic application forms was very much in my favour.  For some reason the way I wrote seemed to be either juvenile or threatening and it meant that I only got 1 interview for every 25 applications I put in.  Being able to complete the application in Word which generally came in, in the early 2000s for the kind of employers I apply to, meant my hit rate rocketed to 1 interview per 3-5 applications even though I was writing basically the same thing.  Now, of course, we have gone a further stage.  Rather than simply emailing your completed application, now you have to log on to the company's human resources website and complete the whole application online.

Application forms were not always best designed and sometimes you were desperately seeking the right place to put in good information about you.  Like all recruitment processes, they seemed obsessed with details that had no relevance for the job you are applying for.  Having completed my O Levels now more than 25 years ago, I do not really seem what impact whether I got a B or a C in Physics really has on my current skills and knowledge.  Furthermore, what significance is the date I was awarded that O Level or what the address of my school was back in the early 1980s?  Yet, time after time whether on paper or electronic forms I have to give all of this in detail.  Some take it even further and I had a ridiculous situation of being in an interview last year with a man sitting in the corner of the room comparing photocopies of my faded, typed certificates from the 1980s against all the originals.  I did not even get the job but the company insisted on keeping the photocopies for a year!  Why?  I have no idea.  To me it seems that many companies have little idea what they want out of their recruitment processes and so end up putting in these rituals as if they had some significance.

Now, I have commented on poor interviewing before, and today need to focus on the difficulties of online applications.  I am good at the applications, so much so that people are startled (sometimes angry) at how poor I appear in real life, hence them accusing me of lying on the forms.  I never bother to lie, there is no point: given how much trouble I get into writing the truth imagine the risks I would run lying.  However, interestingly, at two interviews in the past year I have been told that I am the only candidate to have completed the application form correctly.  This means that everyone else I have been up against has failed to do it right.  The forms may be repetitive and restrictive but they are generally not at all difficult to get your head round; the problems come from other sources, as I explore below.  Weirdly it seems I could still get interviews if I did my applications less well and it would help reduce the level of disappointment interviewers get when they question me!

The first issue that you encounter when trying to do an online application is the same as you encounter when trying to buy or pay for anything online, you have to log on.  For most of us these means setting up a new account.  However, having been unemployed so much recently, and applying for jobs with the same companies time after time, I kept getting told that I already have an account with that company and should use that, and, no, I cannot set up a new one.  Even when I have guessed how they see my user name, I have to try to remember the password they tolerated this time last year.  Of course, you can have them email you a reminder, but nowadays you are told that 'for security' there will be an intentional delay before the reminder is sent out, so you lose another 2 hours waiting for it to turn up in your inbox or more often your Junk box.  A plea to employers, please do not send out emails with simply 'HRdept' or 'HRServices' or 'Resources' in the email address; most email systems will send them straight to Junk immediately.  Get addresses that are more distinctive if you want them to get through.  So, finally you get to log in.  That is only the first hurdle, many more will follow.  I do wonder what is the point of logging in.  Going back to a company I had applied to for a different post a fortnight before I logged in and expected all the tedious details like my address, schooling and previous jobs to be remembered by the system.  It was clear that the account was working but had stored none of the information I had put in before so I had to go through right from the beginning once more typing in all the minutiae it requests.

A key challenge with online application forms seems to be the common mismatch between whichever department is recruiting the staff and the IT people who build the websites that you apply through.  Neither seems to be aware of how the other thinks.  Consequently I regularly apply for jobs with more than 25 requirements which I am expected to respond to and yet I read 'limit 4000 characters' sometimes with 'including spaces'.  Now, even if you use words no longer than 5 letters long that gives you less than 800 words to write.  This means you can only use 32 words per requirement.  You could basically type 'yes, I can do that' repeatedly, but certainly not 'provide evidence of your use of these skills'.  Typing in the name of one or two of the companies I have worked for uses up a quarter of my allocated words.  Of course the websites are generic for all sorts of roles across the company, but there is clearly no conversation between the web developers and the departments recruiting as to the amount of information the latter are demanding.  Of course, as I have noted before, many companies put far too many requirements for their jobs and they are often repetitive.  However, even if you halved it, to, say, 12 requirements, you would still have only 64 or fewer words and for most of the jobs I am going for, you need at least 200 words to say anything sensible (and, of course, many of the words will be longer than 5 letters).  A couple of the forms have further complexity.  Certain ones will not accept particular characters, difficult if you have ever worked abroad.  Some even do not accept common punctuation marks; one removed all the full stops, brackets and amphersands from my text.  It accepted full stops on some pages and not others and would not accept brackets anywhere, so some numbering had to be ended with a comma and some sentences simply with a space!  It seems no-one had tested the form using it in a way most people would.

Another key problem is pull-down menus.  Rather than allowing you to put in free text, increasingly it appears, you have to select from a long list.  Sometimes these lists seem unnecessarily extensive, I am not certain how many people entitled 'Lord Colonel' or 'Professor Reverend' the companies I apply to be employed by; even 'Sir' and 'Dame' seems a little too much.  In terms of towns and counties you seem to get a bewildering mix of locations 'South-End-on-Sea' rather than 'Southend' was one interesting option I saw.  Many of the towns seemed to be in the Russian Federation rather than the UK and the same applied to counties, many of which were located in India.  One one application form it seems they simply scooped up what people put on former applications, so one 'town' was a street address and Hampshire appeared both as 'Hampshire' and 'Hants' its old postal abbreviation.  If you leave these sections free text then people can put in their address no matter what country it is in.  When you reach the equal opportunities section, companies seem at a real loss as to which categories to put.  I think some intentionally are taking a dig at Nick Griffin who claimed there were no black Welshmen, as you can select 'White British' and even 'White Scottish' or 'White Welsh'.  As for mixed-race people you can tick a whole plethora of combinations.  The most genders I have seen is four (male, female, male to female transgender and female to male transgender); in my estimate they have left out hermaphrodite. I think the diversity information is useful to gather, but there needs to be real thought about drop down menus which make it complex especially as you have to search so far down the list to find 'United Kingdom' and you get so tempted to select a British dependency from further up the list instead.

The worst situation with the pull down menus, however, is on qualifications.  Of course, you are asked to put in everything you have ever studied even if it has no relevance to the job.  "Yes, I see you got a 'B' in Latin 'O' Level in 1981, excellent, that will really help with quality control of the production of our oil pipeline fittings'.  Then they do not have the qualifications you have studied from the list.  They have ever form of German doctorate you might want to take, but a lot of standard UK qualifications, especially professional ones, are missing.  Do you simply leave them off or stick them under some other category or try to get them into some free text part of the form?  I do not know, I have tried all approaches.  As UK companies recruit not only from across Europe but globally, it will be impossible to list all possible qualifications.  What does an engineer from Shanghai have on their list?  What about a call centre manager from Mumbai?  Can you list all the different qualifications?  Even if you tried you would have a list even more unwieldy and irrelevant than the current ones.  Again, it seems, that rather than being fit for purpose the choices are simply what someone on the website building team can think of.

The other key problem with online applications is how little time you get to complete them.  In recent days I have done one with a 20-minute time out and one with 30 minutes.  I know they do not want people staying logged into their system all day, but again there clearly has been no discussion between the web staff and the people recruiting.  Even if you do not have to type in every school, every employer and every training course you have attended since your birth, the requirements section, which, as I noted above, has an average of 25 things to respond to.  I cannot write anything coherent in less than 1 minute on each requirement.  The best online applications either save automatically periodically or allow you to save when you like.  At least then if you get timed out you (should) have a chance of logging in again and continuing.  Some of the functionality leaves a lot to be desired and the guidance shows how poorly the sites are designed.  One advised me to keep clicking forward on to the next 'page' and then back again (of course not using the browser 'Back' only the small misaligned one on the page) to ensure my answers we not lost. 

The worst, despite me logging in, timed me out having given me 30 minutes to answer 29 requirements that were to be put into 5 different groups on the website to the 7 groups they were in on the job specification.  Naturally I logged back in again and was frustrated to find that not only had I lost all the content on the page I had been working on, but that despite all the promises, all the content of the previous pages had gone.  I had to face typing in all my O Levels once again with no guarantee that I would not lose it all again.  The only solution was to mock-up the online form in Word and cut and paste (very quickly) the answers from each section.  I guessed it was worthwhile because given how difficult the website is to use, many potential applications are likely to give up reducing my competition.  However, what is the point of having an online application if the only way to complete it is to create your own form and copy over?  At least this online application allowed cutting and pasting, many disable that function meaning you have to type out every tedious bit of employers address or qualification again and again.

I know that with 70 applicants for every graduate vacancy, companies are seeking to reduce the number of applicants.  However, the online application forms which are now the norm for so many posts, seem simply to be poor and difficult to use due to the fact that the people building them have little idea what is required of them or how applicants will actually be expected to use them.  You get a good one only when the web designer has some experience of such forms and those that do seem very limited in number.  The general ignorance among so many staff about how websites work means they do not feel in a position to intervene or even ask for particular functionality.  There needs to be good dialogue between the recruiters and the web builders in a company as there should be between the marketing staff and the website builders.  People forget that often an online application form is the first real encounter a person who is considering working for you, has with the company.  On the basis of the bulk of (well, in fact almost all) the online application forms I have used, I would believe that UK companies are incredibly badly organised and have no control over their web presence; not something which is going to encourage me to work for them or, in fact, hire or trade with them.

Camping in the 'Me First' Era

In many ways I am a middle class person.  My parents were certainly middle class, having risen from the skilled working class through study and hard work.  I did not go to private school, but I went on foreign holidays through my childhood and attended university at a time when probably a seventh as many people did as do these days.  My parents were certainly not wealthy middle class, they always drove a second-hand car and owned a black-and-white television when many neighbours had moved over to colour; most of their furniture was second hand and refurbished.  They grew their own vegetables at a time when this was a predominantly working class activity, despite the popularity of the television series 'The Good Life' (1975-8) [about a couple trying to live a self-sufficient life in suburban Surbiton] and certainly not filling the prime time television programmes and bookshelves that it does today.  Despite being a graduate, through bad luck, bullying landlords and bad judgement over buying a flat, my income is far lower than my parents' equivalent was back thirty years when they were my current age.  Being made redundant twice in twelve months has not helped this, especially at a time when we are rushing headlong into a even more unpleasant remake of the 1980s. 

I have always subscribed to E.P. Thompson's view that social class is not a structural thing but a relative thing.  We define our class by comparing ourselves to our 'referents', the people we think we are like, those we want to be and those we want to avoid becoming.  I do have middle class aspirations: that I can replace the things that wear out, that I can own a car newer than 15 years' old and especially that I can continue to have the foreign holidays that I had in my youth, but none of these things seem likely.  According to 'The Guardian' the middle class is dying, though the attributes that the newspaper sees as being the defining ones for that class are well above anything I could aspire to, let alone possess.  Maybe I misplace myself, I am just bumping along certainly in the lower middle class (though eschewing the aggression and chauvinism still associated with such people) and in terms of income, worse of than many working class people.  Of course, skills these days are very different and are as much about computers as using a lathe.  In addition, we have 'labouring in a suit' or 'machine minding at a desk', in other words a lot of jobs look middle class but in fact are just the modern version of factory work; most notably in call centres.  Of course, even in revolutions, a class does not disappear as a mass, it is made up of the failure of family-by-family, individual-by-individual as we each lose the fight to retain what we need, let alone what we want under economic policies which seem to be charging headlong in destroying huge swathes of economic activity in the UK just because it is felt by Cameron and his henchpeople that Thatcher did not impose monetarism hard enough for the good of the wealthy.

Anyway, this is the socio-economic context of now.  What is interesting is how in the past decade at a time when we were all supposed to be becoming middle class and leaving working class jobs to migrants, the middle class may have lost some of its traditional attributes, but has also absorbed much of what was once the preserve of poorer people.  The classic examples have often been commented upon: football and large families.  Large families were once the reserve of rural people and the poorest in cities and yet since the 1990s it has been the sub/urban middle class that has started having the large families and 'family' has become a middle class hobby in a way it was not, say, in the 1970s, when private schools and nannies/au pairs were there to deal with the children while middle class adults went on foreign holidays, to cocktail parties and 'wife' swapped. There has been so much said on the gentrification of football spectating that I will leave it to others.

In 2010, we encounter another example of middle class absorbtion of working class culture.  I am not the first to notice it, all I am doing here is highlighting my personal experience of it. As you will have guessed from the title the 'in' holiday this year is not to go to a Tuscan villa or a small Greek island, but to camp in the UK.  Of course, there has always been the 'nerdy' strand of the British middle class, quite often teachers and civil servants (and their conscripted children), who have been the backbone of camping (in the UK this means staying in tents) and caravanning.  However, their ranks, this year, have been swelled by a much broader slice of the British middle class and this is where a lot of the problems are beginning to appear and this stems from a clash of ideologies.

Having laid the background at length, I will explain how I ended up camping.  Like many young British people I experienced camping predominantly as an adjunct to attending festivals (ironically never in the UK) and in the back garden.  I did have friends whose parents were of the 'nerd' middle class who camped as well and my parents experimented with one year of using a tent and one year of using a caravan before settling on renting holiday houses instead.  When I used to cycle on holiday I had enough cash that I stayed in youth hostels rather than camped.  Given how I would struggle with my panniers, I imagine my holidays would have been even more constrained if I had had to lug a tent around as well.  So, that is my personal background with camping, not overly experienced, but not a total beginner either.  The woman who lives in my house, is extremely experienced in camping on two continents and the 8-year old who shares our house, had camped in a rear garden but was certainly up for a proper camping experience.

One reason for picking camping is because it is cheap.  We had managed to get a tent to accommodate us for £35 in a sale and had picked up odd items throughout the year, at a price far less than the travel insurance for just one of us would be if we had flown abroad let alone an aeroplane ticket.  The campsite space cost us only £15 per night, about the same as we would spend for burgers for all three of us.  We had inflatable beds, but no luxury sleeping bags (we took bedding from our beds, pretty necessary to have a lot of it, plus thick socks and jumpers as the woman in my house knows from experience in a British summer it can become bitterly cold at night) and the most high-tech piece of equipment was a wind-up torch and radio.  We drove for an hour to reach our campsite in Dorset.  The one we had intended to visit (which you could not book ahead at) was full and the next one could not accommodate our 3-person tent.  The third site, however, one of four new ones in the area, could fit us just precisely for the period we wanted.  Despite battling the wind while putting the tent up, we got it all sorted and felt immediately to be on holiday.

The camp site is attached to a working farm and it certainly appears that for some little investment a farmer can kit out some fields and then have a solid revenue through the summer.  I think the field of possibly 100 tents probably, even at the rates, we were paying brings in far than a herd of sheep or cows on the same plot.  What was striking was that we so soon felt on holiday.  I realised that having had four days of diarrhoea in Bath and two stressful days in Belgium in the past five years was an insufficient quota of holiday for a properly healthy life. 

The other thing which struck me immediately, though I do not know why I forgot it, given my sensibilities, especially seeing it has been discussed by the commentators of the new middle class enthusiasm for camping, was the communal nature of the activity.  I suppose it is more the surprise for Britons, used to keeping behind closed doors and only interacting with our neighbours when they do something 'wrong'.  However, on a camp site, you cannot avoid having to collaborate with the society around you.  Even on the best equipped you have to share the communal facilities.  I know many caravans have their own showers and toilets but they still have to come out to replenish water supplies, and certainly anyone in a tent has to go and use the communal toilets, showers and dish-washing facilities.  You have to take your rubbish to central points and these days sift the recycling.  No-one seemed to be needed to regulate these activities.  People waited patiently to take their turn with the each particular facility, not elbowing in.  There was sharing of washing up liquid, scrubbing sponges and anything else others seemed to have forgot.  Perhaps simply not having so much of everything was in itself healthy.  It was incredibly easy to slip into this manner of behaviour and I found it incredibly relaxing, though in fact, having to walk 5 minutes to urinate should have made it tiresome.

Unsurprisingly there were an immense number of children in the camp.  That may have been a facet of the particular site which had facilities appealing to children.  The first one we had visited had more teenaged people and the second one seemed almost purely adults.  Camping for children will always be a challenge.  There is the excitement of doing something different, going on an adventure, but there is also a lot of sacrifice.  In one big leap they are suddenly cut off from their television programmes (though most caravans seem to have television aerials) and their games consoles (bar the odd Nintendo DS or other hand-held), their own beds with most of their soft toys, the place where they usually wash in favour of one with tens of strangers in it, food cooked in an unusal way and probably tasting pretty different, and generally new smells and noises.  However, bar a few tears, usually from people not taking turns properly in the games or children falling over, there did not seem to be despair.  I could imagine teenagers being less impressed which may explain why most of the children there were younger than 13.  Certainly for the one child in our party it was an excellent adventure and he seems to have come back seeing the experience camping as different, but not less than the delights at home, and perhaps, more appreciative of those things.  Not a bad lesson in this age of consumerism.

What was striking at the camp site was the autonomy the children had.  They were running around playing everywhere, conscious of cars coming in and out and often warned about knocking over barbecues with their balls, but there was not that every-second concern that they were going to be abducted or injured.  This created a far more relaxed attitude compared to the usual attitude of mewing up children in suburbs.  I assume it does not work all the time, but it did while we were there.  Conversely, children are also set to work.  They tend to dominate the washing-up facilities in the evening and even primary school children are sent to accompany even younger siblings to the toilet and especially to fetch water.  I am not saying that we should try to get children to ape what their counterparts in the Third World would do nor go as far as my parents did in assigning chores that filled the weekend, but there seemed to be benefit in having children do these little jobs.  I suppose it is the 'all mucking in' attitude that has been commented on in the newspapers, in force.  Certainly it restored the woman who lives in my house's faith in humanity to the extent she now wants to go and live in a commune.

When you are living day-by-day with 'walls' as thick as your fingernail, privacy and respect for those around you becomes vital.  You see this in shanty towns and refugee camps.  Whilst it is good to live communally, you also need to be able to absent yourself from it and not have the voice of your neighbour intruding into your conversation and similarly not to think everyone can hear your discussions.  Thus, in line with camp site rules (well, more guidelines, we later found out), people had spaced themselves out properly, leaving 6 metres between tents.  There were a lot of people there, possibly something over 400, but it did not feel crowded or oppressive.  It worked through 'unwritten' rules and the fact that if some was asked to be a little quieter they did not take offence or turn aggressive, they seemed to know that if they were upsetting people it would put a chink in the dam and the structure they presumably were enjoying could crumble.  It was no idyll, but it worked better than society does in most streets I have lived in (the current one is an unusual exception).

Of course, as anyone who has been a regular follower of my blog, something always goes wrong very soon into my holidays and this one was no exception.  We spent a wonderful day away from the camp site in the town of Swanage which is as much of a time warp place as any I have been to.  It seems stuck not in the Victorian era but something like the mid-1960s.  There are some modern eateries and we had some really excellent sea food at a very unassuming cafe, but a lot of architecture and things like dedicated toyshops seem to date from when I was born.  It only has a steam railway (diesel in the evening) running into it so I suppose that adds to the feel.  Families fish by unwinding fishing line sitting on the hard and there is a punch and judy show on the beach assisted by a PA system.

Arriving back from a day in Swanage and seeking to have a doze before firing up the barbecue for dinner we found that four families had moved right into our area.  Rather than the six metres between our tent and theirs, there was less than 10cm.  They had a wide assortment of tents, two of which could have housed our one inside it three or four times over.  I have no problem with large tents, in the 1970s they all used to be heavy metal framed ones with plastic windows and always high enough to stand up in.  The more pod-like strutures of the 1990s are still the norm, but now have grown so the average adult can stand erect within them.  Some now have an atrium with wings off it; one looked like a chapel.  I imagine these appeal to the new category of middle class campers wanting to bring as much of home to the camp site as they can.  I have no problems with that as long as it is not erected, rather than parallel to the already pitched tents but at an angle which leaves the residents bare centimetres from where my head is going to lie.  I could hear them more clearly than the child in the other part of our tent.  These people seemed to have no understanding of what they had done wrong, they seemed to think that because their door faced in a different direction to ours that was fine.  However, they clearly had not paid attention to the numerous signs about spacing nor the pattern that every other tent in the field was laid out along.  The woman from my house was bitter and complained quietly too them.  One offered a bottle of wine as recompense, the others still did not seem to understand what the problem was.

The camp site authority came and like us, realised that with their four main tents and their smaller storage tents around already they could not be compelled to take them down and re-align.  The regulations plastered on numerous signs were revealed to be only 'guidelines' anticipating expected EU legislation.

There was no option but for us to leave which we did in record time, feeling that all that we had enjoyed about the mutual respect had been violated by people who could not see anywhere beyond their own wishes and certainly had none of the communal spirit everyone else seemed to operate by.  I swore at them as we left, because though I had not wanted to let my temper show, I realised that I had to do something to at least raise some attention that they had upset us.  It seemed to beyond their comprehension that they had done anything wrong that I despaired that they would understand.  It is painful for me that these people probably no doubt the children of very selfish parents, cannot even recognise when they have upset others and broken the rules which made the site such a nice place to be.  I suppose it is unsurprising.  I see it every time I go driving.  No-one signals, they drive around dangerously and park carelessly because their own concern is their own ease.  There is no recognition that when you drive or camp or simply live in a town you impinge on others whose rights (though they fail to even comprehend this) are as legitimate as yours. 

Given that the current political culture based on the creed of a woman (Margaret Thatcher) who said (to 'Women's Own' magazine in 1987): '...you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.'  It is ironic she mentions looking after neighbours, because I think that aspect has been left behind too.  The horizon of far too many people in British people is only 'there are individual men and women and there are families'.  Yes, you see that on camp sites, everyone in their own tent or caravan but they are still inter-linked we cannot live in isolation,  The trouble is that too many take the 'people must look after themselves first' and see that as the justification for not taking any consideration of not only the needs of others but simply how their own behaviour impinges on the human and physical environment around them.

In the space of a couple of days I saw the best and the worst of British society.  I had found an oasis of respect for others and the benefits of communal living and yet it could not keep out the pig-headed inability to comprehend that other people have a right to enjoy facilities too and that means you have to sacrifice a little, just a little of your desires, and think before you act rather than assuming everyone you do, however inattentive it is, is perfectly fine because it gives you the outcome you want.  I hope that next year the selfish middle class move on from camping to some other activity, possibly even one they have not comandeered from other sectors of society to distort to their own tastes and then contaminate with their self-centred perspectives on things.  For myself, realising that I am too unfit to return to cycling, have my eye on hiring a canal boat, but please do not tell the middle class idiots, I want at least one holiday per decade that selfish morons do not stamp all over.

How I Became Addicted to 'A Room With A View' (1985) and the Consequences

As anyone who has followed this blog for any time will know some of the greatest detriment I have done to my own life is to have been afraid, primarily in two areas: travelling and relationships with women.  In many ways in my teenage years and twenties, I was a very lucky man.  Despite having some minor ailments, not being sporty; appearing very freckly, and gangly in how I walked, and having my self-confidence blown apart by my parents telling me I looked as if I was mentally disabled, girls/women of my age would ask me out on dates.  These women were certainly not desperate for male companionship and when rebuffed by me, as was usually the case, went on to have other relationships.  My fear that somehow they were doing it for dishonest motives or simply as a joke, was insulting to them but also meant I ended up lacking the experience of having youthful relationships which then meant I had little chance as a man in his late twenties and into his thirties to engage with these properly.  Part of the problem stems from how I perceived relationships between young people should function and for this I have to blame, in large part, what was my favourite movie for many years: 'A Room With A View' (1985).

I was 17 when I first saw 'A Room With A View', so had already been making many of the mistakes I have listed above.  However, at that stage things remain retrievable in a way they are not when you are 34.  To put the movie in context, it was one of the most successful in the UK produced by the Merchant Ivory partnership (formed in 1961 of the two lovers, producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory) working with screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.  With 'Heat and Dust' (1983), 'A Room with a View' (1985), 'Maurice' (1987), Howards End (1992) and 'The Remains of the Day' (1993) at the time of the TV series 'Brideshead Revisited' (1981) and 'The Jewel in the Crown' (1983) [not made by them but of a similar genre], movie culture in the UK was defined as being focused on the period of the late 19th century to the 1930s.  Subsequently with the very successful television version of 'Pride and Prejudice' (1994) for the following decade the focus stepped back to the late 18th/early 19th century.  Perhaps in the grimness and rioting of the 1980s we were looking for escape to an apparently nicer middle class existence in which manners and behaviour were more refined, though certainly in many of these movies not all behaviour is like that; homosexuality, in particular is suppressed and women are fitted into rigid roles, though this was a contributing factor to the rise of Post-Feminism that personally I began to detect from 1988 onwards.

With my parents away on holiday I began going to the cinema alone to escape the tedium of what was on television, a habit I was to continue more vigorously from when I finally left home and lived alone, 1987-2005 .  This was my first foray into that kind of activity, that you did not have to be with anyone to watch a movie, and, in fact, it could be better that way if the movie was what had drawn you rather than the social experience.  I watched 'Mona Lisa' (1986) the week before seeing 'A Room With A View', so it must have been still doing the rounds from the previous year.  'Mona Lisa' is an unpleasant British movie, well made, but it left such a bitter taste in my mind that I wanted to blot it out with something more refined, hence going to see 'A Room With A View'.  (I was to do something similar the following year, going to see 'Poussiere D'Ange' ['Angel Dust'] (1987) deliberately after being unsettled by 'Angel Heart' (1987)). 

Of course, I was utterly swept away by 'A Room With A View' with its stunning scenery of 19th century Florence combined with stirring music which I have written about before.  It is a funny movie in many parts but also a lovely romance.  The hero, George Emerson (played by Julian Sands) sweeping the heroine Lucy Honeychurch (played by Helena Bonham-Carter) off her feet in a wheat field and them later sitting in the window with Florence in the background, kissing while Lucy reads a letter, were scenes that I loved and wanted to replicate in my own life.  The tension comes around Lucy being unwilling to admit her passion for the unconventional young man who is of a slightly lower class (he works for the railways and his widowed father is a thinker and politically interested), but ultimately does.  There is a wonderful range of quirky English characters played by skilled performers such as Denholm Elliot, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Daniel Day Lewis and Simon Callow which charm you too.  I have always liked women with long dark hair and Bonham-Carter fitted that perfectly.  She went on to appear in other period movies, notably 'Where Angels Fear to Tread' (1991 - from another Forster novel also set in Italy);  'Howards End' and 'The Wings of the Dove' (1997).  Once I had the video I would watch it on my birthday and dream of such a romance.  I could clearly post myself in the rather awkward, public servant, intellectual role of George Emerson and somehow anticipated women would love to be swept off by me even if I was not a fraction as handsome as Julian Sands.

Of course, I knew I was not living in the 1890s (and the director seemed to set it back in time a little from the 1908 source novel by E.M. Forster which features electric trams in Florence that do not appear in the movie), but had a belief I would meet a woman who would be intrigued by me and would not scream if I swept her off her feet in an Italian field.  At this time, I did envisage travelling around Europe far more than I was ever in fact to do.  My mother had always said that when she had been a teenager in the 1950s the way young people 'learnt' how to have relationships was through watching the movies which would show them how to behave and even how to kiss.  She felt that the trouble with the 1980s was that too many movies showed abusive relationships in which sex was the key focus and so men in particular did not learn how to behave around women.  In fact, for her son, the complete opposite happened and I ended up having my approach to women set by 1980s visions of late Victorian behaviour.  This was exacerbated by my friends all being of the 'Dungeons and Dragons' types and not having relationships with women until they had passed thirty and by the fact that by the time I reached university it was beginning to fill (especially in my accommodation hall) with Post-Feminist women actually seeking not even a Forster-style relationship but an Austen-style one. 

The trouble for me was that I knew that women did not want you to assert your desire for them and increasingly if you did, then you risked being charged with assault.  We were advised that touching or kissing a woman even innocently, in the times of increasing litigation, was hazardous and there was talk of signed permission before sexual intercourse (I do not think some universities know how much they screwed up their students' lives).  I mixed with too many people from private schools who were only encountering the opposite sex for the first time on a regular basis and who like me expected it all to proceed as if it were 1887 rather than 1987.  I had no appeal for them, being from the wrong background and too politicised and yet I lacked all the tools to engage with the kind of women who might have liked me.  There were no wheat fields, there was no time for walking in lush landscapes working up to ask permission to kiss the woman and yet, leaping in was clearly ruled out by what we had been told.  Consequently years went by with no relationships and now that women expect a man to have a sexual CV by the time he reaches 21, I was increasingly ruled out on that basis.

Hampered by the Victorian approach that had shaped so much of the end of my teenage years, the relationships I ended up in were increasingly termed as 'Victorian', i.e. very chaste.  I would go shopping with the woman, have tea with her, go and see a movie, but nothing else happened.  I wanted to kiss her, but the chance never came up and the women themselves seemed to expect me to make a move and yet I feared they would then cry assault.  Ultimately I ended up as almost a female friend, they would do domestic stuff with me then go off on dates in the evening with their boyfriends.  They would come and tell me about all their difficulties with these men who were clearly so much more exciting than me, when in fact I wanted to be their lover.  It took a woman who wanted me as 'the other man', i.e. to have an affair from her own marriage and was very straight forward about asking for sex, that managed to shake me out of the situation and get the tools to be more proactive.  Though I did continue to have some Victorian-style relationships, funnily enough until I left London.

I suppose the lesson of all this, is do not live your life by how it is shown in movies.  Perhaps we have gone to the opposite extreme from that period of the late 1980s/early 1990s when behaviour of the previous century seemed to be returning; the internet has had a huge impact on this both in terms of what you can learn and who you can meet.  I have lost my affection for 'A Room With A View' though I still would recommend it because it is an enjoyable way to pass the time.  I am angry now that I let it shape my expectations far too much, though I recognise it was not helped by having such critical parents and ignorant friends.  The visuals and the music are engaging but it was a mistake for me to be seduced by them and then hamstrung in thinking that such a fictional approach would work in the late 20th century for real.

Me and the 'Total War' Series of Computer Games

In a recent posting looking at my favourite computer games of the past decade: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/04/my-favourite-computer-games.html  I mentioned that there was one set of games that I would leave for a separate posting of their own.  These are the 'Total War' series of computer wargames.


Shogun Total War
The first, 'Shogun Total War' was launched by The Creative Assembly in 2000.  In many ways it owes a great deal to the board game, 'Shogun' (released in 1986; new version 2006; also known as 'Samurai Swords') which allowed up to 5 players to take on the role of one of the Japanese samurai clans fighting for dominance in the Sengoku period ('Age of War') between 1467-1573 CE.  The victory of the Tokugawa clan in this conflict led to the establishment of the Shogunate which ran until 1868.  The aim was to conquer territories and eliminate opponents either in battle or through assassination.  It was often difficult to get together a group of five players, so the appearance of a computer version in which you could play one of seven clans, fighting against the computer, was ideal.


'Shogun Total War' was never a mainstream success, but gathered a very loyal fan base, many of whom who have continued to buy all the Total War series in the following decade.  One reason why it was never going to be a mainstream success is that it is very involved, like any wargaming.  The game spreads over decades and it combined strategic planning on a wonderfully rendered map of Japan on which you could move soldiers representing your armies (so replicating the board game) with three-dimensional real time battles when your armies came into conflict with other. As with many strategic games, provinces you controlled varied in terms of resources and the types of troops that were the strongest recruited from there.  You could develop your tax revenue, harvests, trade, and troop training and equipment by constructing various buildings, so you had to balance the economic as well as military aspects.


The province-running had been seen in many games before, but the use of three-dimensional battles was what really marked a leap forward in computer wargames. Previously you had to settle for static icons or at best the small animated sprites of the kind used in the Talonsoft wargames.  The battles were real-time rather than turn-based, as all the other computer wargames of the time used.  In 'Shogun Total War' you got three-dimensional units moving independently across the landscape.  A huge reason for the success of the Total War series is that the game controls become intuitive allowing you to fight a battle effectively even when you have hundreds of soldiers on various parts of the field.  There are factors like tiredness, experience, morale, running out of ammunition, to take into consideration. You did not have to play the full campaign, you could play sequences of reconstructions of historic battles or create your own if you just wanted to concentrate on fighting rather than management too. Those facilities would appear in all the other Total War games. 


Alright, each soldier looked the same, but you could zoom down to their level and 'march with' them across the landscape, a huge leap forward. These days the graphics might look a little simplistic, but still hold their own against many other games.  The varied landscapes of Japan which impinged on your troops, (i.e. one column in your square could move slower than the rest if it went into the trees or a slightly steeper slope) and the very varied weather made the game all the more engaging.  The attention to detail of the troop types, assisted by the highly renowned historian of medieval Japan, Stephen Turnbull appealed to gamers like me who were looking for an authentic experience.  There is historical reference to things such as the arrival of the Portuguese and Dutch in Japan, and the appearance of firearms and Christianity. Of course, the minute you start playing you are moving into counter-factual scenarios, but it is nice to have that in a genuine context.


One flaw in the game that was not a big issue in this one but would become so later, was the strength of 'special' units. In this game, the key unit type was the Yamabushi, Buddhist warrior monks. They were a strong unit that could easily defeat others though were not invincible, especially if outnumbered. Conversely, there is no point recruiting arquebus or musket carrying troops in the game as they are so weak; it is better to stick with archers. In reality by the time of the Battle of Sekighara in 1600 the one commander who brought archers was laughed at for being so behind the times. Saying this, as late as 1815, the Duke of Wellington noted that his troops would have had more effect if they had carried bows rather than muskets. However, it must have been more than fashion that led daimyo to abandon bows in favour of guns by the late 16th century. In this, however, game you are lucky if a whole unit of musketeers can kill a single infantryman or cavalryman.


The styling of the game was important in adding to the engaging experience.  Things like the style of the frames, the shouting of the soldiers in Japanese and especially the music and incidental sounds gave the game a real flavour.  Unlike the following games in the series, this first one made great use of mini animated movies, notably when you are approached by the representatives of other daimyo (provincial rulers), the Portuguese or Dutch and when you launch an assassination attempt against a general or daimyo.  Ninja feature in the game as do other strategic characters like ambassadors.  After a while the movies became a little repetitive but were great for adding flavour.

The cut scenes at the climax of the game had an approach I would love other wargame programmers to copy.  Assuming you are victorious, a little movie plays outlining what happens in Japan after your faction has won.  Even if you have been a Christian faction you end up kicking out the foreigners and banning Christianity in the way the Tokugawa did.  However, the final scene is of a precinct in modern Japan at night and the camera goes past a statue of whichever leader you picked to play the game as.  As a counter-factual fan I just loved seeing an Uesugi or Mori or Imagawa shogun being celebrated at the end because of what I had done.


One of the advantages of battling in medieval Japan is that it is finite.  Though you could easily spend weeks playing the game, the conquest of Japan could be achieved in a few days' worth of hard gaming covering a few decades of conflict.  This is in contrast to subsequent games in the series in which you can be battling over four centuries to conquer the whole of Europe or North Africa, fun, but a different experience.  The Total War series has evolved in sophistication since 2000 and it is nice to see that a sequel 'Shogun 2: Total War' is planned for 2011 with you able to play one of eight factions in the years following the Onin War of 1467-77 CE.


The success of 'Shogun Total War' led to the release of expansion kit in August 2001.  This added extra troop types and historic battles to the original game and altered the representation of the maps, doing away with some of the movies too.  However, the game now opened with a extract from the movie 'Ran' (1985) by Akira Kurosawa which certainly got you in the mood for gaming.  The expansion allowed you to start you campaign in different periods rather than always starting from the same year as in the original game and it was interesting to start in an era when each of the factions was much weaker.  The big new opportunity was to play in the 13th century facing the Mongol invasion of Japan, which they attempted to do in reality in 1274 and 1281.  The Mongols had a whole different set of troops and the challenges of being an invading rather than an indigenous force.  The Japanese still had crossbowmen, a unit that had gone out of style by the 16th century.  It was interesting to play a different type of army and at least in this game the Mongols can be beaten.  A new ending was added for if the Mongols won which showed a statue of Kublai Khan in the precinct, talking about Japan as just a province of the great Mongol empire, very nicely counter-factual.


Medieval Total War
The release of 'Medieval Total War' in August 2002 by The Creative Assembly and Activision was as much of a step forward in computer wargaming as the release of 'Shogun Total War' had been two years before.  This game also won mainstream appeal and topped the charts for sales.  You did notice though a lot were dumped onto the second hand market pretty quickly as a lot of gamers more used to first/third person shooting games sold off their copies pretty quickly.  'Medieval Total War' needed real commitment.  Its scope covered all of Europe and North Africa in the period 1087-1453 (i.e. the fall of Constantinople to the Turks) and evenings could go by and you would find you had only covered a couple of years in the game.  It could take months to complete a whole game, though you could start in 1205 or 1321 if you preferred.


The approach of the game was similar to 'Shogun Total War' combining the strategic map divided into provinces on which you moved the tokens representing your armies and then the three-dimensional battles.  In 'Shogun Total War' there had only been one battlefield per province.  In 'Medieval Total War' the battlefield you came onto in a province depended on the direction you had marched into the province from.  There was again a variety of weather, everything from snow and thunderstorms to desert sandstorms.  Sometimes it was almost impossible to find your opponent in the fog or whirling sand.  There was a huge range of factions, covering the leading powers of the time.  A lot of actors were employed to give appropriate voices to the different nations which varied from England, France and the Holy Roman Empire right over to the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires and the Egyptians.  There was a huge range of different troops, some unique to particular factions.  Covering such a time period there was evolution in weaponry as the years passed.  Religion also played a part with priests, imams, crusades and jihads, all available.  You could win by achievements such as building a particular cathedral or holding specific provinces but the usual way to victory was conquest of the whole map.  I found when I travelled to the countries concerned, and in this period I went abroad far more often than now, I would come back wanting to play the state I had visited.  In this way played 'Italy' after visiting Venice and the Holy Roman Empire after travelling around Germany, France after a holiday in Normandy, then Spain after going to Barcelona.


Again, there was attention to historic detail (though in some cases playability meant conflating some things, such as having an 'Italy' rather than a multiplicity of states) and the landscapes and buildings were a delight to look at.  The atmosphere was assisted by the voice acting (even the sounds of camels were used where appropriate) and the music was different for the location you were battling in.  There was also a greater role play element as different rulers, generals and agents developed different characteristics and could become more or less loyal to their faction, offering the chance for rebellions and civil wars. 

This was an immensely engaging game.  You could play the same faction and have completely different outcomes.  Developments could be happening in other parts of the world without you being aware of them.  I remember realising when playing 'Italy' that history had diverged greatly when the 'Earl of Wessex' turned up in a battle and he was from the Egyptian faction.  You could award your generals various titles adding to their management or command abilities, a nice feature that was dropped in subsequent games.


'Medieval Total War' had a siege function which allowed you to attack castles and forts.  It was seen as rather simplistic and the catapults wrecked castles in minutes rather than the days or weeks it took in reality (even when cannon came in), but I suppose that was a compromise to playability.  The problem of special units began to be very apparent in this game.  You would see a single Kataphrakt cavalryman (a heavily armoured unit from the Byzantine Empire) managing to battle off two hundred spearmen for ages, inflicting a numerous casualties.  While the special units should have been tough, in this game they became superhuman.  In such a situation the Kataphrakt would have probably been crushed by the crowd let alone pierced through with numerous spears.  The Mongols appeared in this game and were hard to defeat even in circumstances that they were defeated in real life, i.e. fighting in forests or over ploughed and hedge-rowed farmland.  I know that the Mongols were a potent force and drew on sophisticated Chinese technology to successfully besiege cities and it was more luck that spared Europe from them, but they were certainly not immune to damage and coming up against longbowmen, the Mongols and their horses would certainly have suffered far more casualties than the minimal ones they do in this game. 

Rebellions and civil wars are always a challenging aspect of wargames with a strategic aspect, but in 'Medieval Total War' they were particularly troublesome.  The key difficulty was that the rebels and groups, such as returning factions that had previously been eliminated, would have such strong armies suddenly appearing meaning that you could do nothing except flee the province.  These armies were often far larger than the province could have sustained, and yet, even holding a single province these rebels did not lose troops over time in a way you would have to do yourself with such a small territory as you would not be able to fund the upkeep of the troops and would soon face bankruptcy.  I can accept that medieval rebels often had noblemen and knights at their core and that they could often draw on foreign forces and mercenaries, but certainly they could not draw people from the future.  Often you would find the rebels with far more sophisticated weaponry than the highest level available anywhere in your empire or those of your neighbours, making it very hard to raise an army well enough equipped to defeat the rebels.  I am glad to say that this aspect was rectified to a large extent in the following games.


Another difficulty which would increase in subsequent games was using strategic agents.  These were people like princesses, ambassadors, spies and assassins.  In the latter case it was almost impossible to build up their expertise as their death rate when carrying out the first few missions was prohibitive and it was pretty much pointless spending money to recruit these agents.  Despite these flaws, this game kept me entertained for years.


In January 2003, the expansion 'Medieval Total War - Viking Invasion' was released.  It added some new factions to the original game and things like flaming arrows.  Importantly you now could line up the order in which different reinforcing troops would arrive on the battlefield rather than having them coming randomly as before, which meant often your weakest, smallest units would appear and soon flee, just when you needed the best troops to tip the balance of the battle. 

The expansion also introduced a whole new campaign, purely focused on western Scandinavia and the British Isles 793-1066 CE, i.e. from the start of the Viking raids to the Battle of Hastings.  In this era, generally the technology was less advanced; in particular it took longer to develop farming.  As the game wore on some units appear which really belong in later centuries, but given that it is counter-factual if the Vikings had gone to war in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland as they tend to do full scale in this game, then new types of force may have developed.  The Viking expansion campaign is one of my favourites.  I liked turning the whole British Isles into a Pagan Viking kingdom, though you can convert to Christianity if you like.  You can play as Saxons, Mercians, Lancastrians, Welsh, Scots and Irish too, each with distinct units. For the first time, rebel factions were named and would collaborate with other rebels rather than just clinging to a single province.  I think, as with 'Shogun Total War', the finite nature of the game focused on one region adds something.  Again, the early medieval music and styling of the game really contributes to your engagement with game.


Rome Total War
'Rome Total War' was released in September 2004.  It is probably the most seen game outside the gaming community as it was used as the basis of the television series 'Time Commanders' (2003-5).  In the programme teams of non-wargamers had to command a particular force in an Ancient battle, sometimes doing surprisingly well, for example, defeating the Germans trying to kill Varus's legion in 9 CE and other times failing very badly.  The graphics were of a standard deemed good enough to use on television so it is unsurprising that we waited with anticipation for the game to be released.

The game covered the period from the 4th century BCE in the preliminary stage and then 270 BCE-14 CE in the main part of the game. Now, rather than having a map of provinces into which tokens representing your armies were put, the armies actually walked around a relief map and would often struggle to find a fast route or get backed up behind other armies.  The computer-run factions never made such errors, always moving the armies precisely which put humans at a disadvantage and needed you to make regular saves when trying to assemble a sizeable force just in case your army decides it wants to walk to the target location by a very round-about route.

Conversely the ships that your opponents use are far better at tracking down your fleets than even modern day warships are with all their radar and other equipment.  I found it galling that, given even in the 1800s, Lord Nelson had to chase the French fleet back and forth across the Atlantic before bringing them to battle, in this game I found that whenever one of my ships or a fleet set out it was immediately intercepted by my enemies, no matter which route it took.  As with the agents, this made it very difficult to build up an experienced fleet which meant that even if you came up against a weaker fleet you would often lose.  Given that much of the game is around the Mediterranean, again this made it far harder for human players.  In contrast to the computer-run factions who always found you straight off, as a human you would often spend ages sending your ships back and forth trying to find the elusive enemy fleets, just as Nelson was to do 2000 years later.


Though the graphics had been improved and the successful mix of strategy and three-dimensional battles was continued, during development, playability seems to have won out over historical accuracy.  The attention to detail in terms of armour and weaponry was excellent, the key problem was in the political set-up.  Rather than having most of Italy under the rule of the Roman Senate, in the game this only controls the Rome itself and much of the peninsula is divided into three Roman factions: the Brutii, the Julii and the Scipii.  Annoyingly it is as one of these factions that you have to complete the preliminaries before unlocking other factions.  The Gauls are shown as controlling less of Italy than was the case in reality.   A key problem for all the Total War games from this stage on is that there are really too few cities on the game (this is often one of the first thing fan-created modifications alter) and, with your armies having to tramp between them, it can be very frustrating.


Another flaw is the portrayal of the Egyptian forces.  By the time the Romans interacted with the Egyptians they were under the control of the Ptolemies, a Greek dynasty, who had been in power since 305 BCE.  Alexander the Great had conquered Egypt in 332 BCE and, after Alexander's death, Ptolemy, one of his companions, took over running Egypt in 323 BCE, ultimately establishing a dynasty.  Whilst the later Ptolemies (the last of the dynasty was the famous Cleopatra VII, lover of Mark Anthony and Julius Caesar) tended towards Egyptian dress and style, the earlier ones had been clearly more Greek or, at least, Macedonian in culture.  Thus, it is anachronistic to see the Egyptian forces in chariots and with axes of a style that was centuries out of date by the time this game begins.  Their forces should look more like those of Macedonia or the Seleucids, another successor kingdom to Alexander's empire, controlling modern Iran.  The game developers apparently did not want another phalanx based army and felt mainstream gamers would prefer the traditional Egyptian forces.  They are fun, the chariots are unstable but deadly.  However, it would have been better to have an expansion or something that went back in time to before Alexander if they wanted to include these.  That would have been interesting as you could have also had the tribes of Italy such as the Samnites, Latins and Etruscans battling for dominance of Italy.


Obviously the game allows lots of nice counter-factuals such as Carthage being victorious and the Roman Empire being destroyed by the Gauls or even the Macedonians.  As in all the Total War games, the scope for shaking up history is immense.  What I also like is that the Marian Reforms kick in at a different period each time you play the game.  In our history these were introduced to the Roman Army by Gaius Marius in 107 BCE and transformed the leveed, three-line structure into the legion system with the armour and weaponry that we generally think of as being the classic Roman Army.  In the game, these reforms can come earlier or later, because some other general introduces them instead.


I enjoyed 'Rome Total War', but, like many players, was irked by the anachronisms and lack of historical accuracy.  This is when I was told about how fans were developing their own modifications to games.  This has always been the case with strategic games, it was a phenomenon I noticed as far back as the days of 'Caesar III' (1998) a classic city-building game set in Roman times.  On the internet you are able to find tens and tens of new scenarios, some historic, some fantastical (e.g. Romans in China or in a chequer-board land-lake country) developed by fans.  Strategic games requiring months of work to play attract attentive people often with the computing skills to develop modifications.


For 'Rome Total War' the modification which stands out above all others is 'Rome Total Realism', released in 2005.  It made the game into what it should have been.  It has an immense attention to historical detail and more complex development in terms of building up your territories.  There were a great deal more cities which made the game more engaging and playable.  It also stretched the map East as far as India allowing much more involvement of the Seleucids and the Bactrians. Development has gone on to the stage that we are now at Version VII with sub-sets such as battle for the western Mediterranean and the Carthaginian invasion of Iberia.  I never went back to the original game.


There were official two expansions to 'Rome Total War' and the first of these 'Barbarian Invasion', released in September 2005, is probably my favourite of all the Total War settings.  It covers the period 363-476 CE when the Roman Empire had split into two and Europe was facing 'hordes' of steppe peoples, notably the Huns and people they had displaced, such as the Goths and Vandals, coming into the continent.  In this game, when rebellions break out, especially in the Roman empires, new factions can appear which is a nice aspect rather than having generally nameless rebels to oppose.  You can actually enter into diplomatic relations with these rebel forces.  In previous games you could only bribe them to join you.

It is a difficult game, because if you start as a settled faction or are one of the nomadic ones which settles (as happened with the Goths in Spain and Vandals in North Africa in reality) you have these immense hordes to contend with and it is difficult to bring sufficient forces to bear on them.  However, this is an era which is less well covered in popular histories and elements such as the nomadic peoples, the competition between Christianity, Zoroastrianism (practised in the Sassanid empire of modern day Iran/Iraq) and Paganism is interesting.  Within Christianity some individuals follow 'heretical' views too, such as Arianism or Donatism.  The troop types are very varied, being the link between the classic Roman legions and more medieval style units.  I ended up playing a modification which started in 420 CE but allowed you to play more factions and gave the Sassanids some half decent infantry for the first time.  Playing as the Romano-British restoring the empire is fun, as is playing as some of the horde factions.


The 'Alexander' expansion set came out in the Summer of 2006, but I was deep in 'Barbarian Invasion' still and though I bought it, I have never played it.  It covers the brief period of Alexander the Great's conquests 336-332 BCE.  Rather than encompassing a season or a year as in the previous Total War games, each turn in this one covers 7 weeks.  It allows you as the Macedonians (the only playable faction) to fight some of Alexander's greatest battles.  This kind of approach was not followed up with other generals, it would have been good to follow Julius Caesar or as with the latest Rome Total Realism expansion, Hannibal.  Despite the timing I wonder if the release was triggered by interest in Alexander following the 2004 movie.


Medieval II Total War
This was effectively an update of 'Medieval Total War' introducing the relief map approach pioneered in 'Rome Total War' to the medieval period.  It was released in November 2006.  Though The Creative Assembly developed the game, the publisher was now Sega rather than Activision.  Sega also took over publishing the previous games and the various bundled packs that included them.  It maintained the mix of strategic turn-based and tactical real-time battles.  It covered a longer time period running from 1080-1530 though in 2-year turns.  Of course, many of us added on a modification to return this to single year steps.  The longer time period allowed the introduction of the discovery of the Americas and the chance to build an empire there, fighting groups like the Aztecs.  This opened up wonderful counter-factual opportunities such as an Almorad empire in Mexico.  Gunpowder units also got to play a larger part by the end of the game.


Many of the flaws I have noted above, continued, for example the fleets able to flawlessly track you down.  In this game the Mongols were even tougher than before and it was basically pointless playing eastern states such as the Poles or Novgorod after the Mongol invasion of 1240.  Interestingly, given that the Mameluke Egyptians were able to defeat the Mongol forces in reality, they find it far harder to achieve that in this game.  In addition, forces such as the Timurids with elephants carrying cannon on their backs (a historically authentic force) are again almost impossible to defeat.  The only way to see off such forces is to jam them in the streets of a fortified town.  Even here the Mongol cavalry are far more effective than they would have been in reality.  The overwhelming nature of the Mongol faction totally imbalances the game and makes it pointless to play some of the factions.

The use of catapults on the battlefield was ridiculous.  Siege weapons were wheeled and as a Channel 4 programme proved a few years ago, trebuchet actually work better when on wheels rather than fixed.  However, never in human history were catapults able to move around the battlefield like armoured vehicles of modern day.  Even a ballista, effectively a huge crossbow would take time to move into place, let alone to get it firing accurately.  However, in 'Medieval II Total War' you can have your troops aligned at a top of a hill and find they are being shelled accurately from the first shot and at angle that would be challenging even for modern day artillery.  Try doing the same in reverse and you find your catapults drop rocks everywhere else but on the enemy.  I know they are supposed to build up experience and become more accurate over time, but it proves very difficult to gain experience as you only get that when your missiles kill enemy soldiers, not from breaking down walls which was their prime purpose.  This is a terrible imbalance between the human players and the computer ones.  The sight of catapults trundling around the battlefield (even in Napoleonic times cannon were hauled by up to 16 oxen) and firing so accurately up hill, would be comic if it was not frustrating.


The problem with agents was increased.  The introduction of merchants who could be sent to exploit particular resources was a nice addition.  However, they were driven out of business almost immediately by more experienced computer-run merchants.  This meant your merchants could never build up the experience to see off such challenges.  As with other agents in the previous game, this left you feeling there was no point in recruiting them. 

Inquisitors sent by the Papacy or other factions could also make your life impossible, especially if the Papacy, as a military power, turned against you.  When playing Spain I could not move any of my generals out of cities without them being seized by an inquisitor and being immediately executed.  Despite diplomatic efforts, I could not win the Papacy back over and so was doomed as my dynasty was steadily wiped out. 

The capricious nature of the diplomatic system was also frustrating.  However, hard you worked to build up alliances and good relations, it only needed one state to decide to attack you and generally you found all your allies deserted you immediately and you were almost instantly against the bulk of factions.  On one hand diplomatic relations were hard work, that was proper, but the way the systems crumbled as a result of nothing you had done, was frustrating and again made you not bother to engage with this aspect.  Given that the game designers had balanced playability against historical accuracy, you think they could have better balanced these aspects too.


Ulitmately, of course, I turned to modifications which better balanced the game play and also introduced far more cities and allowed you to play different factions.  The amount of work amateurs put into these modifications is astounding.  Some simply produce new 'skins' e.g. so that the soldiers appear in particular armour; some introduce new factions, I remember Portuguese and Swedish players providing modifications so you could play their countries, others bringing about an overhaul of the whole game.  Being able to tweak the game because of these modifications has certainly allowed me to enjoy it more and be able to overcome the flaws that the game designers seem unable/unwilling to tackle.

The game producers are a very defensive bunch and the official online discussion fora, though very active, are strenuously policed and anything which is critical of the game is shut down.  I believe this comes from the corporate culture of Sega which, in line with many other Japanese corporations, is happy to elicit fans support but is unwilling to stomach any, even mild, criticism.  This kind of attitude in the software/media context was well characterised by the cyberpunk author William Gibson in his novel 'Idoru' (1996) though interestingly he overlooked internet-based updates of a bought database.


In August 2007 the expansion pack was launched called 'Medieval II Total War - Kingdoms'.  This unfortunately did not update the Viking Invasion expansion of 2003 but provided four new regional scenarios.  These were Teutonic campaign set along the Baltic coast in the 13th century allowing you to play the Teutonic Knights, their opponents the Pagan Lithuanians and other regional powers such as Poland, Novgorod and Denmark.  Obviously the Teutonic Knights with their overblown armour and their bullish approach are an attractive force to play.  Playing as the beleaguered Lithuanians is a real challenge, especially if you remain Pagan.  An interesting phenomenon are the crusading 'tourists', European nobles who pay to fight with the Teutonic Knights and reward the faction depending on how much action they see.  This is based on actual historical developments.  The Mongols appear, and whilst a challenge are not unassailable, as they are in the original game.


The Crusader States in the the 12th century, provide another scenario,which is very enjoyable and opens up wonderful counter-factual opportunities.  Of course, if you do not behave as foolishly as some of the crusaders did, you can hold on to Jerusalem far longer.  You can play as the Principality of Antioch (encompassing the County of Edessa and its specific troops too), a state which has always fascinated me (though in the game they speak French rather than Occitan) as well as the Kingdom of Jerusalem (including the County of Tripoli), the Turks, Egyptians or Byzantines.  There are interesting units and it is good to have a finite space in which to operate without the game going on for centuries.


The Britannia campaign is set in the mid-13th century when part of the British Isles was controlled by Norway.  The ability to build forts across the map had been available since 'Rome Total War' but in this game they can be developed further freeing you a little from the established geography.  This is a pretty straight forward campaign good if you like the standard game but want to play something a little quicker.

The Americas campaign is the most exotic allowing you to play the Spanish settlers in Central America and various tribes, not only the Aztecs and Mayans but also lesser known ones such as the Chichimeca, Tlaxcalans and Tarascans.  Aside from the Spanish, no-one, bar the plains tribes you later encounter, has cavalry, so it is a different form of warfare with specialised troops, wearing outstandingly colourful uniforms, in some cases.  It is again a great opportunity for counter-factuals, especially playing an American tribe pushing the Spanish back into the sea or ruling an Aztec empire running from Florida to Venezuela.  The Kingdoms games all seem pretty balanced and whilst you face different challenges when playing different factions, these scenarios seemed more rounded in the way 'Shogun Total War' and to a great extent, 'Medieval Total War', had been.


Empire Total War
The Total War series has always demanded the latest specification in computers.  I had to delay playing 'Medieval II Total War' until I bought a new machine.  With 'Empire Total War' I had to wait from March 2009 when the game was released until November when I got a job that gave me a powerful enough laptop to play the game.  Unfortunately, having been laid off, my second redundancy in 12 months, I had to give it back and currently cannot play this game. 

'Empire Total War' marked a change in the way you access the game.  Up until now generally people bought the CD/DVD-ROM and loaded the game that way.  Being able to purchase it and download had come with 'Medieval II Total War'.  However, with 'Empire Total War' even if you bought the game on disk you still had to access the game via the Steam website.  This did enable updates to be installed more easily an aspect which was more important after the huge patches such as the 1.2 patch of 613MB for 'Medieval II Total War'.  It did mean, though, that if playing on a wireless-equipped laptop in a town with erratic coverage (as I did), you would often find yourself unable to play whereas before being able simply to stick the disk in and play had been a benefit of the earlier games.  To some degree it may have also been a way to draw some attention away from the modifications provided by amateurs, because these days 'Rome Total Realism' is a bigger draw than the original game.  By letting out new troops and other upgrades at regular intervals, it keeps the interest of the core fans of the Total War games coming back and raises revenue as though reasonably priced these upgrades are not free.


I had long been awaiting a game set in the Napoleonic period and had had my hopes dashed by 'Imperial Glory' (2005) with its pathetically small units and repetitive missions though with surprisingly excellent naval combat that 'Empire Total War' seems to have copied, and 'Crown of Glory' (2007) which was fine on the economic management but weak on the battles.  However, 'Empire Total War' just covered the 18th century.  Again, as with 'Barbarian Invasion' it was a bold move to focus on a less well known period and actually makes for a very interesting game.  There are three zones: Europe/North Africa, the Americas and the Indian subcontinent, though, in fact, you can walk from that zone into and out of Europe/North Africa.  With gunpowder weapons being dominant the gaming is different to the previous titles.  The muskets inflict what seems to be an accurate amount of damage rather than being underpowered as had been the case from 'Shogun Total War' onwards.  You can play a whole host of factions and states like the United Provinces and Poland-Lithuania turn up.  I also like the fact that you can play the Indian states of the Maratha Confederacy and Mughal Empire and can kick the Europeans out of India (and, in fact, out of Europe).


The big jump was in terms of naval battles which is appropriate for the era.  On previous Total War games naval battles were resolved without you participating.  This meant that as a skilled commander you could not pull off a clever victory over a larger force in the way you could on land.  Having been playing these games for a decade now, I imagine if I dropped through time to one of these periods, my experience in fighting hundreds of battles from 240 BCE to 1800 CE would allow me at least to make a good showing with any army I commanded, but that may just be an illusion.  Anyway, the naval combat, dependent on winds and capabilities of the ships, is very interesting and needs you to develop a whole different skill set to charging a group of concealed cavalry in to save the battle.  You can see your powerful fleet outmanoeuvred by a weaker force with wind on their side.


Many of the flaws of the past seemed to have been rectified.  No faction is so powerful that like the Mongols it wrecks the game.  Agents still seem difficult to keep alive, but there are more chances of escape from a failed mission than there have ever been before so you are not getting through spies on a turn-by-turn basis.  You can also control members of your government too, though you naturally have less power in a democracy than those factions with an authoritarian government.

The technological developments are interesting, fostered by 'gentlemen', 'scholars' or 'brahmin' at your universities.  Ironically, the political gains make your population restless for more and you can find yourself demolishing universities to keep down clamour for reform.  Weapon developments have a real impact on the battlefield, for example having bayonets.  They also allow the recruitment of specific units and types of ships.

What is nice is how many factions there are and it is interesting dealing with small states like Bavaria or Savoy.  The diplomacy is rather cranky.  States make unreasonable demands, such as demanding you giving them all your American colonies and they get aggressive if you refuse.  However, if you want to try to swap technology even to get one advance, you have to bribe them with money and a whole slew of technological advancements. There is a real imbalance here.  I accept that states will work to get a good advantage but they seem unwilling to compromise, asking repeatedly for very generous offers even when you are far more powerful than them.  Why does Denmark demand Virginia, steam engine technology and 2000 gold in exchange for just telling me about field enclosure?

The real let-down of this game for me was the 'Road to Independence' section based on the Thirteen Colonies and the American War of Independence.  I had hoped to fight the war in its own right, but rather you get almost a training series of connected missions, the early ones of which are very easy.  You can only get to play the colonies, not the British.  I imagine this is a sop for the American consumers, who, as I have noted here before, are always unhappy with any game that allows players to overturn the 'manifest destiny' of the USA and let another country win. See my posting: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/11/denying-counter-factual-issues-around.html  This is a shame because the British could have won the war so changing US and British history.  In the main game, if you rule the Thirteen Colonies well, then they remain a British protectorate and the USA (or another grouping of American states with a crown in the place of the ring of stars on the flag) only appears through rebellion.  As the British in the main game, I never let this gain ground so never effectively has a war of independence.  This element of the game, is not really, as suggested on Wikipedia, an expansion, it is there in the original game.

The real expansion for 'Empire Total War' is 'Napoleon Total War', rather than this being a separate game as Wikipedia suggests.  You need the former game installed in order to put 'Napoleon Total War' on.  This came in February 2010 and finally allowed the playing on the Napoleonic Wars one of the most popular settings for wargamers whether with figures or on computers.  Aside from simplistic, though interesting games of the late 1990s, computer wargamers had been denied a decent Napoleonic set game. 

This game adopts a mission-focused approach with Napoleon's fight at Toulon then his campaigns in Italy and Egypt to get through before you can begin conquering the whole of Europe or playing one of the states opposing him.  This is great fun.  I managed to conquer Russia by 1808 and launch a successful invasion of Britain after the inconclusive Battle of Portsmouth of 1805.  Alternatively, you can unite Germany under Prussian dominion 70 years early.  You do not have to conquer every territory, you can create protectorates which retain their identity but work with you.  This nicely reflects how Napoleon ran his empire, for example creating numerous Italian and German republics and a Polish kingdom rather than ruling them from France.  An expansion kit focused on the Peninsular War 1808-14 is promised.  This would be good, as if you play well in the main game you can have victory by 1808 and so miss out on the Spanish and Portuguese resistance, backed by Britain, which, second only to the Retreat from Moscow, was a key factor in bringing down Napoleon.  I just have to see if I can get hold of a powerful enough computer by the time it comes out.

I have no idea how many hours/days of my life have been spent playing the Total War games.  Some would say it was time wasted, but it has been a key aspect of my leisure time for the past decade and I expect it will be well into the 2010s.  I am not alone in my dedication to and enjoyment of the games, there are thousands of us out there.  Probably many are those men of a certain age who once would have played figure-based wargames on tables, though despite the complexity of the games I know younger people who enjoy the games too.  The combination of wonderful graphics and audio with interfaces which quickly become intuitive and the combination of strategy and tactics are what make these games so easily engaging.  They are not without their flaws and these can be incredibly frustrating at times.  Fortunately modifications produced by amateurs, but as good as much professionally produced work, can overcome these.  The community of Total War fans is an added strength of playing these games and for me has continued my engagment with them when I might have turned away a little exasperated.  As I have noted above, this is pretty common for strategy games, as the woman in my house has found when digging out modifications and additional scenarios for 'Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile' (2005) city-building game.  While the companies may be ambivalent towards fan-produced material, they should see it keeps a base of support alive which is liable to snap up their next official product.  Over the years I have thoroughly enjoyed turning history on its head and I have no doubt I will continue to do so, returning to these games even when they look terribly dated.