Books + Covers + Judging = Well-known phrase

I'm just going to go ahead and say it: I'm a sucker for good ("good" obviously being entirely subjective) design. Hold up. Not just good design. I'm a sucker for clever design. For design that has been thought-out with its intended audience firmly in mind. For design that is unabashedly there as a marketing ploy, whether it is an idea that's being sold, a message, a product, a service.

The best illustration of this that I can think of can be found in my book-buying behaviour.

I believe I'm on the verge of a bank-destroying book-buying binge.  Emails confirming the dispatch of goods bought are popping up in my inbox. Padded envelopes have started appearing on my frontdoor mat. And after the initial cheeky grin that accompanies the opening of the envelope, which is swiftly chased by surprise at the book that's now in my hands ("I do not remember ordering this. Someone's sending me books through the post in a passive-aggressive manner, surely? I've obviously picked up the world's nicest stalker!"), an inevitable sinking feeling hits as I remember the night three days before that found me entering my card details for this object. Do I really need this edition of Romeo and Juliet, which was bought purely because the design included laser-cut images of key scenes? What precisely am I going to do with a copy of 100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design? On which Sunday afternoon am I actually going to sit down and read Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda, and Art? This isn't healthy, surely?

My bookcase has actually become unusable, with books haphazardly stacked in front of and on top of books. I'm not entirely sure of the contents of the case anymore, and any attempt to mine a particular vein will undoubtedly result in a collapse of horrific proportions. And I'm not ready to be crushed by a pile of books of which the majority have not even been read yet.

They're obviously organised using the standard Dewey Decimal Classification system.

There's a deeper issue at stake here, to do with buying physical books to simply own them, and the comfort of having your books around you as a projection of who you are, what your interests are, what you want your interests to be. I'm sure this is how Nick Hornby's protagonist Rob feels in High Fidelity, surrounded by his categorised vinyl records.

But the reason I'm mentioning this behaviour is that, because I can now recognise the beginnings of a binge, I have determined to avoid all book shops for the near future. I know that if I find myself making my way into one of these havens of temptation whilst in the grips of my fever, I will inevitably be making a furtive exit half an hour later, with a heavy bag accompanying me. In that bag will be books that I either already own but have now bought in a well-designed edition, and/or books that I have never heard of and had no intention of buying, bar from the fact I was drawn to them by their cover and then convinced by the blurb that they are books that I should own and read.

And this is the crux of it: I reckon you can judge a book by its cover (and here's an article from 2011 agreeing with me; hooray for validation). Those covers have been designed with a set audience in mind. There's a language of book covers, just as there's a language of film posters. In the colours chosen, the fonts, the imagery, the publishers are saying that the contents will appeal to a particular demographic. The dozens of copy-cats that emerged after the success of Fifty Shades of Grey all had a *very* familiar style to their jackets. Those adventure books, fantasy series, romantic stories, all of them use a very particular design vocabulary to communicate their genre in a blink of an eye to those that speak the language.

So, here's to the artists who so callously lure us in with their limited edition covers for books we already own. Here's to the publishers such as Foyles who provide heavily bounded books at a purse-busting price. And here's to those bibliophiles who will continue to binge buy their books, no matter the Kindle that is our more common travel companion.

Getting back in touch with a long-forgotten part of myself

An inordinate, embarrassing amount of my time is increasingly being spent on a pastime traditionally associated with teenage boys.

I sit in my room, the screen glaring at me, my hands and fingers feverishly working away.

I think I have a problem. It's affecting the way I see the real world. I find myself thinking about it at inopportune moments. I wonder if I can make excuses to slip away from social situations to continue.

In my defence, it's a pastime that legitimate, intelligent grown-ups also partake in. And women have been found to make up at least 48% of the population who admit to spending their time this way, in one form or another.

I'm not sure it's even my fault. I blame my other half (who shall henceforth be referred to as Thing Two). He's the one that reintroduced me to the pleasures and pains of it.

He is the one who so nonchalantly suggested he leave his Xbox 360 at my place. And he is most definitely the one who introduced me first to Fallout: New Vegas and then, after a long period of negotiation, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. (Not Pacific Rim, as he so plaintively told me when I informed him nowhere had a copy of it.)

I also blame one of my brothers (Thing One), who lent me his copy of Arkham Asylum.

I had my revenge. It was Thing Two who had to watch on - a resentful and exasperated mother vulture who has to teach her vulture chickling how to scavenge, after finding out said chickling has grand notions of vegetarianism - as I became reacquainted with gaming and tentatively took my first steps into the world of modern RPGs (role-playing games).

It had been a long hiatus. Memories of Goldeneye on the N64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Gamecube, and earlier still Tomb Raider on the PC, came flooding back as we exchanged our respective gaming histories. Others soon emerged from the darkened folds of rememberance: Croc: Legend of the Gobbos, Burnout, Gauntlet Legends, Championship Manager, a whole host of other games on various consoles. I remembered treating myself to a copy of Forza 4 one birthday, a racing game that tapped into a latent desire to be a boy racer. I remembered playing Hover! on our Windows 95 PC. Even further back than that was Granny's Garden, on the BBC Micro off of an 8" floppy disc. Played as a kid, I was in constant terror of making a wrong move and stumbling across the wicked witch, with her terrifying soundtrack.

And then it hit me: I've always been a gamer. I'd just forgotten.

Goldeneye's pimp slap; for the gentleman gamer. 

Two things that I'd never truly conquered, however, were the sandbox environment, and the first-person shooter. As the technology developed, another source of frustration had emerged: I'd never managed to fully grasp the concept of moving through a 3D environment, where you have to control camera angles with one thumb and movement with the other. Aiming to shoot became an exercise in "spray and pray".

And so I had never felt like a trueblood gamer, particularly when I had found myself failing with simple tasks such as walking up stairs in BioShock. This was all much to the distress of Thing One, who had mastered stairwalking and quickly progressed to stealth killing very early on in his gaming career.

It was not he, however, who had to sit by watching whilst I tried to overcome these brick hurdles as I fumbled through Arkham Asylum. The initially linear storyline was a blessing in disguise, hand-holding me through the process of learning how to control Batman to do my bidding, without having to worry about which quest to do or how to navigate. (Yes, my poor sense of direction transposes to the digital world.) With Thing Two's guidance and show-and-tell method of passing the controller between us, I slowly got to grips with manipulating the camera angles, and how to fight without relying on button mashing. Okay, with a minimum of button mashing.

It was like learning to drive all over again. It was reminding me that with practice, improvement comes. And it was satisfying, oh so very satisfying. The storytelling was pulling me in (for people who have played it: that Scarecrow sequence), and I was finally playing instead of watching with envy.

And then came Fallout: New Vegas. Thing Two knew me too well, and picked his weapon with care. From the moment I was able to build my own character (an awesome lady for whom I still hold an affection), I was hooked. If Arkham Asylum was my gateway drug, it was Fallout that finally pulled me in for good.

And now. And now. There's Skyrim.

And oh what a foolhardy kill it was.

I realised the extent of my addiction when the two of us suddenly found ourselves on a bug-ridden quest that culminated in having to abandon our lovingly-crafted 30+ level character (also a kick-ass lady). We went through the full five stages of grief, at first denying that we were stuck, then cursing Bethesda for creating such poor quality games. We mourned having spent so much time (75+ hours) on something it was progressively looking like we were going to have to abandon.

Eventually, after trying everything we could think of - which included deleting previous save points before realising we were no longer able to simply reload from an earlier stage - we declared ourselves defeated. A new character was crafted. A new game approach was adopted. We learned from the mistakes of that first. And we're once again at a point where we'll be engaged in productive, worthwhile endeavours, will catch each other's eye, and whisper guiltily and furtively to each other, "Skyrim?".

This new character isn't as beloved as that first, despite the fact his considerable skill with a two-handed weapon is far superior to the stealthy bow-and-arrow-wielding character I'd initially created. The recent death of a companion was possibly a little too keenly felt (Armoured Troll, we hardly knew ye), suggesting we've not fully learnt how to emotionally detach ourselves. And an article on the pleasures of wandering through terrains and exploring made me realise that I've begun zipping between locations and quests a little too quickly, and have stopped revelling in the pure scale of the game. But despite all these things, it's just as enjoyable as the first time round. Perhaps even more so, as I'm that much more experienced. And am now find fighting dragons an exasperating experience, rather than one of terror.

A small part of me wonders if I'm wasting an unhealthy amount of time on something that is ultimately just video games. But then, these new games are increasingly crafted in a way that brings them more in-line with Hollywood blockbusters and films and, to a lesser extent, the TV series so many of us are now hooked on. For example, Skryim is slowly becoming inexorably intertwined with Game of Thrones in my mind, as I watch and read the series in parallel with playing the game; the two feel so similar in story and experience (incest and the wonderful Peter Dinklage aside). The virtual environments we find ourselves in whilst gaming are becoming more and more beautifully rendered, making it an experience of appreciation and wonder at those that have created these behemoths.

And you find yourself making dubious moral choices. The things I've done in Fallout and Skyrim are unmentionable, fodder for those who blame video games for real-world violence. But being confronted by those choices are exhilarating in and of themselves, done within a safe environment that allows you dabble in playing 'the bad guy'.

We spend untold hours on TV series, reading, films, and consuming other cultural artefacts. Video games have a legitimate place to take in amongst all that.

And so the guilt doesn't last for too long. Thing Two and I are now in a constant state of negotiation, involving whether we're allowed to play Skyrim outside of each other's company, in a mirror image of negotiations involving various TV boxsets. If I was seeking to convert, I'd urge the non-gamers out there to consider giving it a go, in much the same way as I did for comic books back in 2012. But be warned. You may find yourself being pulled in to this sordid world, and finding you have no desire to turn back.