Welcome to Normal Island
What does it mean to be British?
There's the stereotypes wheeled out in American sitcoms - shit teeth, weird accents, a predilection for tea and crumpets - but in actuality, what does it mean to be British?
Personally, the distinction is tied to a sort of deep, ever broadening shame as I grow and learn about Britain's colonial world tours, raping and pillaging the world over. It’s an embarrassment at the country's sense of exceptionalism, and the national psyche constantly pivoting away from accountability; its belligerence to understand that Mr and Mrs Briton are no more or less valuable than the denizens of any other country on earth.
But it's also the perverted sense of normal that sees a then-mayor, now-PM get stuck on a zip line whilst holding union flags pass with relatively little comment. The banter culture that allows an image of a football fan clenching a lit flare between his bare arse cheeks to become a more defining image of the Euros than England actually making it to the final of the competition. It's the nation's press dedicating tens of hours of media coverage to the leader of the opposition’s thoughts on an is-he-isn't-he TB infected alpaca named Geronimo whilst the country was in the midst of a public health emergency.
What does it really mean to be British? And, perhaps more pressingly, how can we document the end times cultural malaise of this stupid fucking island?
The answer, somehow, is via Duke Nukem 3D.
Dan Douglas is one of my internet heroes. Inspired by extraneous detail used in a tabloid expose surrounding the then-Health Secretary’s grubby tryst that led to his resignation, Douglas decided to learn level design in Duke’s Build engine as means of snapshotting a little smidge of Britain’s nonsense.
I have been utterly hooked at tracking the project’s progress ever since.
For all the psychic damage Twitter does to us collectively on a daily basis, I find it impossible to leave the site as it acts as both a delivery mechanism for incredibly distressing everyday headlines, and as a coping tool and salve.
The speed at which modern satirists come forever online commentators like Douglas are able to react to bonkers news of Captain Tom Moore posthumously endorsing grenade themed Royal Legion branded gin, anti-trans lobbyists losing their minds over an advert for a department store, Libertine’s frontman Pete Doherty conquering The Dalby Cafe’s Mega Breakfast in Margate, The Stone Roses’ Ian Brown going full anti-vax, perpetual social media grifter Femi Oluwole serenading a socially distanced lock-down date using a full size digital piano, or images of one of the bleakest constituency offices of all time is quite breathtaking.
And in their pixelated presentation, crunched down to fit the palette constraints of an almost 25+ year old videogame rendering engine, laid next to one another, morbid setpiece to morbid setpiece, a little bit of me is able to smile and park my entrenched frustration at our daily horseshit. Being British is seeing this stuff daily and being able to step back and maintain a sense of humour.
Who knows when the brilliantly titled Duke Smoochem 3D will launch or be completed. Douglas recently posited that "the queen’s death is a natural endpoint for the game, as everything featured so far will look laughably normal compared to what lies beyond". But even in the here and now, without a playable version of the game, what exists already via Douglas' daily captures is more than enough to make this game / digital art work / collective therapy session one of the games of 2021/2022.
Follow Dan’s progress here in this truly mad thread, here.