My kind of physics!

I stumbled upon this last week and found it rather diverting.

It's a demo reel from a new software development company called BeamNG showing off their revolutionary 'soft body physics engine', which can realistically model damage from motor vehicle accidents in real time. This could revolutionise driving games (which are about the only kind of video games I ever play). Well, car manufacturers and racing governing bodies have traditionally been rather snooty about making crashes too realistic, and I suspect they will continue to be so for quite a while yet. So, we're unlikely to see the benefits of this sort of software in the F1 or rallying games I usually favour.

I imagine the next instalment of Grand Theft Auto, though, will be all over this. [More examples available to view via the BeamNG Youtube account.]

Dying by inches

Back when I was in college (way, way back), my friend Andrew had a BBC Micro, one of the earliest desktop computers. It was lodged for long periods in my room, because I happened to have a small colour TV to which it could be linked, and this provided a rather better experience for game playing than its cumbersome monochrome monitor. Hence, I became something of a social nexus, as Andrew and some of our other friends would spend hours hanging out round at my place to play games (or waiting for their turn). 

Despite my disdain for such a non-intellectual activity, I confess I did succumb somewhat to the insidious appeal of these games myself: I was for a while quite badly addicted to Defender... trying to set myself ridiculous, arbitrary targets of 'perfection' - like playing without ever resorting to the 'smart bomb', or trying to rescue all the kidnapped humans (or all but the last one) before returning them to the lunar surface in one go, or seeing how many 'baiters' (the super-fast, super-thin, super-belligerent flying saucers that would start materializing nearby if you took too long to complete a level) one could collect on one's tail before rounding on them to try to blast them all with one frenzied burst of laser fire.

The white spaceship here is about to die, because the baiter is directly above, and about to rain down fire on it

That, however, was only a brief period of weakness; I shook myself  of it after a few months - either because I'd hit a ceiling I couldn't get beyond (a little above 200,000 points, I believe), or because the pain in my right index 'trigger' finger was becoming too worrying; probably a combination of the two. Such adaptations of the plodding, two-dimensional arcade favourites of a couple of years earlier really weren't all that compelling. Defender was the only one that got under my skin; Galaxians diverted me only for a short while, and Pac-Man, Frogger, and Space Invaders(!) didn't entice me at all.

But then... along came a new, very different kind of game, a game called Elite that would soon be universally hailed as a landmark achievement in the world of videogaming. It was an open-ended sci-fi adventure game which combined 3-D space combat with an element of interplanetary trading: you could turn a profit by transporting a range of products between different worlds, and use the cash to upgrade your spaceships and weapons systems. The graphics were necessarily extremely limited, but there was an impressively detailed story scenario around the game, and a vast - seemingly almost infinite - universe to explore: hundreds upon hundreds of galaxies and planets that you could visit to do some buying and selling (although I think the fabled planet of Raxxla, ostensibly the ultimate goal of your explorations, was only a red herring; after a while, you'd just hop from galaxy to galaxy, searching each one's map for Raxxla, and moving straight on to somewhere else if it didn't appear - but, of course, it may not have been on the maps). Andrew and I - sharing a house that year - got deeply sucked into this one: we may well have spent some hundreds of hours playing it, doubtless at some detriment to our studies.

The thing that finally broke my bondage to this game was - oh horrors! - the unwinnable dogfight. 

Your ship could zap instantly across and between galaxies using some kind of stargate system, but you would emerge into regular space some way away from your destination planet and be obliged to complete the last leg of your journey at a laboriously slow pace. Sometimes, your destination would loom large on your screen as soon as you popped out of hyperspace, but at others, it would be a tiny speck on the horizon and you might have to slog across the intervening void for 10 minutes or so. If you were carrying a cargo of any value, you might be attacked by pirate ships (or, if you were smuggling contraband, you might be attacked by police ships - who were sometimes even more vicious and relentless opponents). And while involved in a space battle with other ships, the planet you were aiming for never got any closer (often, indeed, it got further away, might even disappear from view completely, if you had inadvertently started flying in the wrong direction in the midst of the melee; but even if you continued to fly directly towards the planet, it would never get any closer while combat was in progress). Such attacks, then, could become irritating, downright tedious. Once you'd got your flying skills up to snuff, they were rarely that much of a challenge, but... they could SLOW DOWN your progress towards the goal of docking and trading quite insufferably.

Eventually, I reached a situation in the game where I always emerged from hyperspace with my planet dispiritingly far away. And I always got jumped by pirates almost immediately. Worse, these were particularly canny, skillful, formidable... invincible pirates! They would attack one at a time. They would attack from long distance, approaching at speed and opening fire immediately they came within range, firing with deadly accuracy. You had to spot them the instant they appeared on your radar and take them out with your first shot; and even then, they might inflict some damage on you with their first flurry of fire. It was enormously stressful, working with such unforgiving - non-existent - margins for error. But each time I tried to get past this challenge, I got better and better. Pretty soon I was able to lock on to these incoming attackers at extreme range and to take them out with my very first shot.

But that wasn't good enough. Because another pirate ship would always appear within a few seconds. And another. And another. There seemed to be no end of them. On one occasion, I dispatched well over 200 of them, and yet more of them were coming. That must have taken me a good two or three hours, and there was still no end of the ordeal in sight.

And during this continuous, protracted dogfight, the dratted planet never got any closer! I tried ignoring the attackers, declining to engage them in combat, and just flying directly towards the planet at full speed. No good: the planet did get slightly closer, but my attackers would shoot me to pieces within seconds (if you didn't kill the first one quickly, you soon got a second and a third on your tail, and then you had no chance). I tried maintaining my course towards the planet during combat (a fully pimped-up ship boasted laser cannons top and bottom, left and right, front and rear - so you could roll or tilt yourself to an appropriate shooting angle without changing your forward direction too much). No good: it was apparently a glitch of the programming that no forward progress through space could be registered during a phase of combat.

It was, it seemed, an unwinnable situation: you might suffer through this for hours, or days, and never see off all of your enemies, never be able to make it safely to your destination. The only options appeared to be: give up on this planet and/or this trading mission (I imagine I had something particularly valuable in the cargo hold, though I can't now remember what) and try going somewhere else; or activate the Escape Pod (which saved your life, but wiped out all your progress in the game, all the fancy enhancements you'd laboured so long to purchase for your spaceship). Clearly these would have been admissions of failure, and were quite unacceptable. Instead, I abandoned the game altogether - vexed that it had thrown such a maddeningly impossible challenge at me.

The truly terrible thing about this situation in Elite was how long it took you to die. You could hold on for hours, just losing a little bit of shield strength/hull integrity/energy reserves in every few waves of attacks, your ship's handling gradually becoming more and more sluggish, the declining meters and blinking warning lights on your dashboard display reminding you of your slow decline toward the inevitable. I sometimes felt that, if I'd kept sharp and determined, I could have held on for 10 or 12 hours, for 24 hours, almost indefinitely; perhaps if I'd just driven myself that bit harder, I might have discovered that there was in fact a finite number of pirate ships to defeat and that this planet was reachable after all. The final defeat tended to feel rather like a suicide: you had accepted that you were beaten, you had to give up trying to fight any more. Putting yourself through such stress for two hours or more was acutely draining, both physically and emotionally. But it was the inescapable hopelessness of the situation, the slow and relentless erosion of the will to fight that was so utterly devastating. If it did not reduce me to tears, it must have come pretty damn close; and I recognise that I am still perhaps a little traumatised by this 25 or more years later.

Which extended reflections were prompted by my experience last Thursday. I was trying to check requirements for my new Chinese visa application online, to fill out said application online, and to complete a raft of related e-mailing, including the forwarding of a draft of the 'invitation letter' I needed from a Chinese friend to support the application (I wrote it myself to make sure it included all the required information, but needed to get his approval and signature). 

For this rather important and urgent and stressful work I was using my new mini-laptop, recently purchased in America. I had thought that I had brought a US-UK socket adaptor with me on my travels, but discovered I only had a UK-US one. There used to be umpteen shops around Victoria station (where I happened to be staying) that sold such useful traveller's accessories, but these days there seem to be NONE (well, I did eventually find one, but it had closed early, just to spite me). New computer batteries are feeble things; it takes a while for them to build up their capacity (allegedly; this sounds like bullshit to me - but my new battery was advertised as being good for 6 hours, and was starting to fade badly in less than half that time). My host has no wi-fi connection of his own, but piggybacks off that of the pub downstairs; I suppose one can't really complain about a FREE (and pirated!) service, but it was a very weak beacon, prone to crashing altogether at frequent intervals, and, of course, becoming even less stable as my own computer power faded.

That little batch of important and urgent work - which should, really, have taken me no more than 10 or 15 minutes - took me something over 3 hours. During the last hour of that, the Internet connection was failing every minute or two. Then my computer starting shutting down for lack of power. I managed to fire it up again after a short rest, but again and again it expired in the middle of my attempting to send my final e-mail (the one including the crucial 'invitation letter'). On the last occasion, I'd decided to copy the text of my letter into the body of the e-mail rather than attempting to attach it (an ever-so-slightly but very dangerously longer process). I had completed my explanatory e-mail to my Chinese friend, I had 'copied' the text of the letter from Word; I just had to hit 'paste' and then 'Send'... and the computer died on me, for the fourth and final time. The whole of my Thursday afternoon had been devoted to trying to overcome this unholy alliance of vexations, and they had finally got the better of me.

And it felt exactly like that last time playing Elite.

If I ruled the world

And I soon will.  Oh, yes.

In this doldrummy period of nothing-to-do my best friend The Choirboy has arranged another game of Risk this afternoon.

The last time we did this, it resulted in strained friendship and lost sleep.  Today, we're aiming for an earlier start - but it's likely to be a very long and bloody and boozy affair that will write off all of today and, quite possibly, a fair bit of tomorrow as well.

My Bengali nemesis will be absent this time, but a number of the finest minds in Beijing (make that Evil Geniuses) will be joining battle, and it should be.... challenging.

But I shall prevail.  Oh, yes, I shall prevail.  Unless I get too many shitty dice rolls....

Training the property developers of tomorrow

We know China started to embrace capitalism again back at the end of the 1970s, at the prompting of Deng Xiaoping.  But I don't think those ideas really start to take a hold in the mass consciousness until you're indoctrinating it into your kids from the age of four.  Where is the Chinese version of Monopoly? I found myself asking when I first came here.  Well, now they have one.  Possibly several - I just happened to come across a picture of the Beijing version the other day.

The messing around with the colours is deeply discombobulating to someone who was introduced to the game at the age of four. WHY is the 'Park Lane' space now in the yucky light blue of 'The Angel Islington'??  And the choice of district names is very, very unimaginative.  'Mayfair' is the CBD?  Really?  Maybe dubbing it Zhongnanhai would have run the risk of incurring a ban for being "too political".

However many different versions of the game I play (and I've played a fair few of them now: New York and Toronto and Sydney versions, I'm sure, and a couple more besides), in my mind's eye I'm always going to see the 'classic' London board below - the one that I started playing on at the age of four.

Ah, this is me down here: always playing with the racing car (unless my elder brother bags-ed it first, as he often would; in which case I'd settle for the old boot), always focusing my game plan on getting that expensive hotel on Mayfair - to clobber my opponents with a massive 'rent' demand just before they reached 'GO'.  

 

I think nearly all players of the game develop set patterns of play - favoured groups of properties they always pursue.  With me, the deep purply blue pairing of Park Lane and Mayfair was my priority.  I would have liked to snaffle up the green set of properties (Regent Street et al) to go with them, but they were my brother's favoured turf.  Instead I'd usually settle for tying up the top side of the board: the yellow and red groups straddling the West End.  I also liked to try and collect all the railway stations, whereas my bro favoured the utilities.  As far as I recall, I usually WON in our family games.  But after the lapse of this many years, my memory may be becoming defective.

[My (much older) brother and his teenage mates used occasionally to play for money - penny-a-pound or something.  (Probably penny-per-ten-pounds, but even that could amount to a significant sum: the winner might take away £15 or £20 or so, a lot of money back in the late 1970s.)  I learned a lot from those sessions.  Particularly the ones in later years where I was allowed to particpate, and usually haemorrhaged hefty amounts of my pocket money.  Yes, I learned a lot - not just about the playing of Monopoly, but about the psychology of gambling.  And... perhaps... about the business of property investment too.  It is a great game.]

Postscript 1:  I'm sure I read a while ago that Hasbro (who, I think, bought out the original creators of the game, Waddington's, twenty or so years ago) was developing a 'World' version of the game with countries (or capital cities?) as the 'properties'.  I haven't been able to dig up anything online about that.

Postscript 2:  I can't help thinking that an up-to-date Beijing version of the game would have every space labelled 'SOHO'.....

There's 'good' and then there's....

I enjoyed coverage of Ronnie O'Sullivan's maximum break at the 'World Open' snooker tournament in Glasgow a week or so ago.  He showed outrageous cool (some might call it 'arrogance', I suppose; wretched for his opponent to have to witness, certainly) in pausing the game for a minute or two - after his first black - to get the referee to check if there was an additional purse for a 147 break.  [Rather less impressive is how miffed he got when he discovered there wasn't.  He threatened not to pot the final black, and had to be chivvied into doing so by the referee; then put on a mighty display of churlishness in his post-match interview.  I'm not sure if he's really such a complete prick, or if it's just an act he likes to put on occasionally.  It would appear there's perhaps some antagonism between him and the game's leading promoter, the extremely dodgy Barry Hearn.]

A fantastic clearance - but I don't think anyone will ever match up to Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins in his prime, back in the early '80s, when he was from time to time playing at a frankly superhuman level, routinely pulling off shots that were jaw-droppingly superb (and, yes, unnecessarily exuberant much of the time - but that was why we all loved him).  This is the best bit of him in action that I could find on YouTube just now: not a big clearance, but the climax of his 2nd round World Championship match against Doug Mountjoy in 1982 (the year Alex went on to win his second world title), which includes some remarkable play by both players, safety as well as potting.  In fact, it includes 5 or 6 shots which are little short of impossible (I think the corner pockets were still cut a little bit tighter back in those days, for one thing), and one of the most outrageous finishes you will ever see (particularly bearing in mind the pressure of the situation: Mountjoy, also playing superbly, could have taken this frame to tie the match at 8-all).

There are a couple more truly outstanding breaks by Alex here (a 142 clearance against Cliff Thorburn in the 1985 British Open) and here (his amazing 135 clearance to take the 1982 World Final from Ray Reardon); and, unlike with Ronnie's maximum break above, he didn't have nicely open positions from the outset, but really had to work his socks off to keep the breaks going.  Alex's form in that 1982 World Championship was the most sustained display of brilliance I've ever seen in this game; well, except maybe for his performances in the 1980 World Championship, when Cliff Thorburn narrowly defeated him in the final.

The break I'd really been hoping to find was - I think - from one of the early rounds in that 1980 tournament at The Crucible.  It was perhaps the first time anyone had come close to making a perfect clearance in the World Championship.  It was certainly the first time that I saw someone take a black with each of the 15 reds.  And he didn't have much of a position at all to begin with; he had to repeatedly nudge into the pack of reds with the cue ball to try open more balls out into pottable positions.  Unfortunately, the baulk colours were all in tricky position, and he broke down on the green or the brown - although he had only narrowly missed a brilliant attempt to clear the ball from the top cushion with his penultimate shot, and then, forced to attempt a double the length of the table using the long rest, saw the ball wobble in the jaws of the pocket.  Even though he didn't complete the 147, I think that was the best break I've ever seen in my life.  I will keep on hunting for footage of it.

Futility

I don't get sucked into playing war games very often, but when I do.... oh man, can it get serious.

I probably hadn't played Risk in 15 years or so, but last week - during what was supposed to have been a restful couple of days away in the countryside - I got embroiled in a game of it that threatened to go on forever.  After 5 or 6 hours of play, at around 3.30 am, we were still nowhere near to reaching a conclusion.  I seem to recall that it is almost always thus.  You have to tweak the rules a bit to create a more playable game.  It's too easy to earn reinforcements by collecting game cards, and the size of those reinforcements escalates so rapidly that battles and campaigns soon assume enormous - and tiresomely time-consuming - proportions.  I was about to receive 80 new divisions for my next game turn, but it was almost certainly still not going to be enough for me to achieve a decisive advantage over my last remaining opponent, who was tactically in a slightly stronger position than me.  I had become the first player to wrest control of the whole of Asia, and had also won myself a valuable little enclave in Eastern Europe; but my hold over North America, with only a very thinly spread occupying force, looked tenuous.  My wily Bengali adversary was well entrenched in Europe and Australasia, and had just swept through South America, eliminating the last of the other players in the game.  Fatigue eventually won out over our competitive pride, and we grudgingly accepted a 'draw' - retiring to bed with the world divided more or less equally between us.

In fact, I was mightily grateful just to be still in the game.  I had for a long period been hanging on by my fingernails, reduced at one point to having just two or three countries and a handful of army units under my control.  Paradoxically, that made me too weak to be a priority target, as the other four players battled to stop each other gaining possession of a whole continent.  The only reason I survived, and was able to make such a dramatic late resurgence, was that during the crucial middle phase of the game I just hadn't seemed worth bothering about.

Relief and exhilaration at my lucky escape, and satisfaction in my eventual success, was tempered by a due sense of guilt about what a reckless sacrifice of a good night's sleep this had been.

I was also reminded uncomfortably of the intensity of emotion that these combat-based games can arouse, the lingering grudges they can engender.

I was reminded particularly of 'The Ontario Incident' - a truly grim example of fanatical grudge-bearing that occurred in a game of Risk I played back in the early or mid-1990s with my Indian doctor friend, The Younger Dr P (he of the notorious 'IPD Theory of Attractiveness'), and one of his old medical school buddies.  Dr P and I had agreed a non-aggression pact for three turns, to pool our resources in order to try to force the third player out of the game.  We had very nearly succeeded in doing so, and I suggested that we should extend the pact for at least one more turn, until we had finished him off.  However, I had by this point gained control of the whole of North America, with the sole exception of Ontario, which was still held by Dr P with only one or two armies.  I sought his 'permission' to attack and take over Ontario, without detriment to our pact, since the province was of no possible use to him but would  be of significant value to me in earning a bonus of additional troop reinforcements for possessing the whole continent.  He testily refused.  I tried to reason with him.  He still refused.  I reiterated the considerable advantages that would accrue to both of us if we extended our pact through another game turn.  He was unimpressed.  I think I tried to offer him additional incentives - offering to let him direct where I should attack our opponent, or 'allowing' him to take over certain weak and isolated territories of mine as exceptions to the pact.  He wasn't having any of it.  I might have refrained from attacking Ontario if he'd been a bit more reasonable about things, but he was so obstinate and bad-tempered that he turned his back on any possibility of renewing our pact.  So.... I repudiated the pact early and took Ontario off him.

He was very, very annoyed at this "betrayal".  He made it his primary aim through the rest of the game to recover Ontario, and then take the rest of the Americas from me as well.  He concentrated all his efforts against me, almost completely ignoring the third player.  North America became a scene of internecine strife.  I lost count of the number of times that Ontario changed hands between us.  And, of course, the third player quietly rebuilt his position and eventually prevailed over both of us.

There's a lesson or two in that, I fancy.

[I suspect Dr P, like me, occasionally recounts this story ruefully to others.  But we dare not raise the topic with each other.  Our friendship barely survived this savage 'virtual' dispute.]

An embarrassing admission

I have never been much of a fan of computer games. However, I confess I have occasionally succumbed to their allure, and found them as dangerously addictive as much of the rest of the human race. Luckily, I have the strength of will - and the breadth of other interests - than I can fairly readily step back from the addiction. And I do not expose myself to such temptations very often.

I think their particular attraction for me lies in their challenge to my analytical and creative powers. I have gone through brief periods of similar obsession with board games - particularly with the more elaborate military strategy games that attempt to recreate famous historical campaigns. I would spend hours reading and pondering the rules, working out how to win (and only rarely feeling the need to play a 'practice game' or two against myself, to test my theories). It wasn't usually all that hard, since game designers seem to be focused more on throwing in as much historical detail as possible, rather than considering the statistical significance of the weightings of the various factors at play in the game. (I recall once playing a representation of The Peloponnesian War, in which it soon became very apparent that the only possible winning strategy was to throw all available troops against each other outside Epidamnus on the Adriatic coast - because control of this city secured a huge trade revenue stream, far more than could be derived from any other colonial possessions, and could thus rapidly secure a massive dominance for the side that managed to hold on to it. This was not how the real war played out, but in the game.....)

Computer games, I suppose, have the added draw of a highly adrenalised real-time experience that sharpens up your co-ordination and reflexes. Also, they tend to offer rather broader and more flexible environments and scenarios, where there is more scope for your imagination: I quite enjoy thinking up improbable or outlandish stratagems to try; and I am, as often as not, disappointed when I discover that the game's designers hadn't thought to accommodate them.

Anyway, as I say, I've never really spent much time on computer games. But, when I first moved to China, I was worried that my extreme penury would leave me with not much to do in the evenings. And I had recently become the owner of a laptop computer for the first time. So, I did buy a few computer games to bring with me. One of them was Return to Castle Wolfenstein (then, a relatively recent release, I think), a canny blend of the original classic sci-fi demon shoot-em-up Doom (which I'd spent many an unhappy hour puzzling my way through on my first desktop computer, when I was a law student) and the hugely successful WWII Normandy landings game Medal of Honor - Nazis and demons: a winning combination!

Furthermore, I discovered, there was a titillating infusion of sex appeal in this game: the eponymous fortress/secret weapons lab/portal-to-the-evil-dimension where most the action was set was guarded by a troop of slinky, leather-clad maidens known as 'The Elite'. Yes, you could get your arse whooped by a couple of dozen Nazi Emma Peels - how exciting is that?!

I perused the instruction booklet in some detail (a habit I suppose I'd carried over from my earlier experience with board-based strategy games; although, in fact, computer game booklets rarely tell you anything of any use at all in playing the game, outside of the basic control functions).

In the course of this reading, I noticed that a "motion-capture actress" was credited - presumably the model for the dangerously acrobatic Elite guards. I was sufficiently intrigued to do a little Googling, and.....

Yes, it was none other than last weekend's 'fantasy girlfriend', the dauntingly sportif Danelle Folta - willowy Playboy model and endurance athlete.

That is how I became aware of the very striking Ms Folta, a lady who would otherwise have passed completely under my radar.

Funnily enough, I never did get around to playing the Wolfenstein game (although you can find more information about it here, if this is the kind of thing that interests you.)

Reading the traffic

I've just been for the LONG run that I've been putting off for the past few days. (On Friday and Saturday mornings the rain provided a convenient excuse; but on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning clear skies had returned; so it was procrastination, pure and simple. Shame on me!)

Luckily, the end of the holiday week and the arrival of chillier weather mean that the crowds around the small lakes where I run were much thinner this afternoon than they have been for any of my previous runs in the last 6 or 7 weeks since I got back from my summer break. I seem to have lost the knack of psyching myself up to make an early start for these runs. Dawn is much the best time to go; but really, any time in the morning will usually do; the tourist situation doesn't start getting really crazy until after lunch.

Running in crowds is never fun, in any country in the world. It's particularly not fun in China because Chinese pedestrians (and cyclists and motorists) are so particularly selfish, inept, and literally short-sighted.

And I fear that I was today more-than-usually intolerant of this obstructive blundering. I fear I brought with me some of the pent-up frustration and aggression that that sodding Formula 1 driving game has been arousing in me all week. Perhaps I brought with me also some of the ruthless - reckless? - weaving-through-traffic skills that this game has cultivated in me.

On my first lap of the lakes today, I found myself stuck behind a tricycle rickshaw which suddenly, for no apparent reason, slowed down from 8mph to about 3mph. I was just about to overtake it when another of these tourist-conveying contraptions came up suddenly outside me at a much higher speed, and then...... slowed also to 3mph, just as it had started to draw level with the first tri-shaw that had been blocking my path..... leaving me no gap to pass through between the two vehicles: he had completely boxed me in. Un-fucking-believable!! I gave the second tri-shaw driver one of my most savage scowls. I gestured to him as if to ask, "Hey, are you going to let me through here, or what? Just speed up or slow down for a few seconds? Is that so much to ask?" He looked back at me with obstinate incomprehension.

Naturally, I soon lost patience with this. And, as in my Monaco Grand Prix simulation, I braked for a moment, drifted round the back of the second obstructing vehicle, and then sprinted around the outside. Of course, at Monaco at least there's never something coming the other way. Now, in this instance, the oncoming traffic was a slow-moving geezer on a bicycle, and he was a good 30 or 40 yards away. And he did, in fact, still have plenty of room (well, OK, maybe not plenty, but some - enough) to pass both the rickshaws and me to our left.

However, he seemed determined that he wanted to continue calmly down the middle of the lane, and was highly alarmed when he suddenly noticed that three relatively fast-moving objects were approaching him in line abreast. Now, in any other country, the cautious cyclist would brake to a halt, pull over to the side of the road, and let us pass; the bold cyclist would maintain his speed and steer confidently for the remaining gap on the right-hand side of the road (which is the side he should have been on anyway!); and the competent cyclist would probably both brake (moderately) and steer around us.

But this is China. Bicycles here appear not to be fitted with brakes; or not with very good ones; or the cyclists decline ever to use them on some obscure point of principle. So, the use of braking is not an option here. And, for a nation which has more bicycles per capita than any other, where most people spend a substantial part of their lives, from childhood to old age, on a bicycle - well, the people here do seem to be remarkably incompetent in controlling their bicycles much of the time. So, steering tends not to be an option either.

No, what cyclists do in this country when faced with an obstacle in the road ahead is the weave-and-wobble. This appears to be the only technique they know for trying to lose speed. It's not terribly effective. And, of course, it does make them even more difficult for you to avoid. And sometimes, it results in the rider falling off his bike - which makes him even more difficult for you to avoid. At least that didn't happen in this case - but it was a damned close-run thing.

So, we had a slow and very erratically moving bicycle carve right through the middle of us. I was able to alter my course just enough (it's really not easy to change speed or direction quickly when you're running; non-runners never seem to appreciate this!) to allow him to pass between me and the rickshaws, but the doddering, wobbling cyclist very nearly collided with the second of these.

I threw a stream of invective at the guy as I passed. I couldn't help myself. At least it made me feel slightly better that the two rickshaw drivers gave him even more of an earful.

Yep, I have become very good at 'reading' the road ahead and charting the best course between obstructions on my little Monaco game. But it's 10 or 20 times harder to do when you're running around Houhai because the Chinese are just so random, so dumbfoundingly obtuse, so gobsmackingly oblivious at times even of their own safety.

You just never know what they're going to do next. Well, no, after a while your powers of prediction do get quite highly attuned to the prevailing conditions. A good general rule of thumb is this. Ask yourself: "What is the most stupid/inconvenient/dangerous thing this Chinese pedestrian/cyclist/motorist could conceivably do in this situation? What would be absolutely the worst time for them to do it?" And then assume that the worst-case scenario will happen. 8 or 9 times out 10 you'll be right.

Dangerous obsession

I was commenting over on AKA:omg the other day that I am not afflicted by computer-game addiction.

Perhaps that proud claim was tainted with hubris.

I do have one terrible weakness with regard to this sort of pastime - I'm a sucker for driving simulations.

For the past several months, I have been playing only a PS2 Formula 1 game. Not every day, nor even every week - but once or twice most weeks, and usually for at least an hour or two at a time. Rather more than is healthy or useful, I fear.

However, I was proud of my progress. On the 'arcade' level, I was now able to win short races on almost every circuit, even starting from the back of the grid (as I always do: overtaking is most of the fun!) and using only a middle-ranking car. I thought I was ready to graduate to the 'simulation' level, which has much fiddlier car control, cumulative tyre wear, and the likelihood of sustaining terminal damage to your car if you hit anything with it. That makes it a whole different game.

And of course, since I always like to set myself the toughest possible challenges ("standing up in a hammock"), I have determined to win a full-distance simulation race..... at Monaco.

This was perhaps a foolhardy choice. The Monaco track is famously difficult: narrow and twisting, with steep hills, adverse cambers, and low road-surface grip. Oh, it's fun - I love trying to drive on this. But damn, it's hard. Whereas on just about any other circuit I can hook up a near-perfect lap pretty routinely after a few days of practice, it seems as though at Monaco every lap is a new challenge - I never quite manage to get everything right. Even after a couple of months of plugging away at it now.

And, since it is a street circuit with unyielding crash-barriers directly at the roadside all the way round, whenever you get something even slightly wrong, you tend to break your car. GAME OVER. On any other circuit when you stuff up, you usually just run wide over grass or gravel and have a chance to recover without doing yourself any serious damage. But at Monaco.... every little slip can be fatal.

Damn, it's infuriating.

I have reached a point where I can regularly muscle my way past all the other cars from the back of the grid inside the first couple of laps or so. I have reached a point where a recognition of the best overtaking places and the biggest danger spots is second nature. I have reached a point where I can consistently lap 5 seconds or so faster (sometimes even 6 seconds faster) than any other driver. But I can't finish the bloody race. Every single goddamned time, something bizarre and unexpected goes wrong to spoil my race (back marker suddenly weaving all over the road for no good reason, just as I was passing him, nudging me into the wall; car exiting pit lane at a crawl, and hogging the middle of the road into the Ste Devotte corner, forcing me to drive around the outside - which I did, rather beautifully, but just creased the outer wall on the exit and broke my front left suspension).

At least these cruel blows of Fate usually befall me relatively early on. So I can go back to the beginning and try again......

But on one occasion, I was nearly half-way round Lap 74 (of 78), and was 2 or 3 laps clear of everyone else, when...... well, I suppose my tyres were going off a bit, and a I just ran a little bit wide out of one of the corners. No big deal, I thought: plenty of time to correct. But the worn tyres were giving me a lot of understeer, and I just brushed against the barrier as I exited into the next straight. It was really a very light impact: relatively low speed and a very shallow angle of contact. And these barriers are unrealistically forgiving most of the time: you can survive quite hard bumps against them at many points on the track, and you do get tempted to just deliberately bounce off them at times, especially through the slower corners. Yes, a very light impact indeed. I was hard done by. I was flabbergasted when my front wheel fell off!. Only 4-and-a-half laps from home. Tears of rage and disbelief!

I am ashamed to admit that I have been playing this game almost every day this week, often for 2 or 3 hours at a time. And I have still got nowhere near to finishing the race.

I should just pack it up and walk away from it for 6 months. Heck, I have even been tempted to frisbee the game disc out of my window into the park

But it's starting to annoy me now; I feel strangely compelled to prove that I can conquer it.....

Addicted? Well, just a bit. Oh god!