I have discovered the worst possible way to watch the World Cup. I wasn't planning to touch on the subject; it was all I could do, I figured, to provide a respite from the wall-to-wall media coverage, the unending noise outside. Alas, I've found a way to drag the World Cup down to my level. It seems that somebody has decided to stream the World Cup live, over the Internet . . . in ASCII.
ASCII art is the Internet's own traditional art form. If the Internet had a tourist centre and gift shop, it would be selling genuine ASCII art, right next to the little bits of souvenir smut. ASCII artisans would be tooling around the back door. Unfortunately, in real life, ASCII art is electronic, and real ASCII artisans don't like the sunlight.
The craft dates back to the days before the Web put a point-and-click face on the Internet. (ASCII, by the way, is usually pronounced "ah-ski," and it refers to a basic set of letters, numbers and symbols.) Before the mid-nineties, there were precious few pictures on-line, only rows and rows of text. When a page needed to be livened up, the only recourse was to arrange those letters, numbers and symbols to create crude illustrations.
There are a couple of ways of doing this. In its most basic form, ASCII art works like the little smiley faces that we still use today, whereby the symbol :-P seen sideways represents someone sticking their tongue out at you. Usually, though, it's an elaborate multiline affair, using dashes, slashes, underscores and greater than or less than symbols to create contiguous shapes or stick men. A lower-case 'o' becomes a stick-man's head; an asterisk becomes a photon torpedo, which comes up more than it probably should.
But the height of ASCII art is reached when its creators stop working with the shapes of characters and start working with their weights. In the days of typewriters and old Internet terminals, most fonts were monospaced, meaning that every letter was the same width: Four m's in a row would occupy the same horizontal space as four i's. (This had the side effect of allowing characters to be arranged in a neat grid.) Obviously, an 'm' crammed into the same space as an 'i' would represent a denser, darker form.
Character artists found that, arranged into big enough grids, these letters will be read as shades of grey. And so ASCII art made the leap from sketching out starship battles to creating recognizable, full-screen portraits of Cindy Crawford. Most of these, however, are computer-generated rather than hand-drawn; this may or may not represent cheating.
Which brings us to the World Cup. At http://www.ascii-wm.net, some wags have taken the live TV feed of the championship, and are converting it, live, into a real-time ASCII movie. A word of warning: The ASCII video doesn't appear in your Web browser. True to its roots, you'll need to connect to a Telnet server; Telnet was the text-only interface that the whole Internet used to use. It's painless and the site has instructions.
Does it work? It definitely sort of does. The problem with televised footie is that so much of it plays out in top-down shots of a massive field filled with tiny little figures. It doesn't offer the distinct shapes that ASCII art thrives on.
But as soon as the camera switches to a close-up replay of someone kicking a ball or slapping a someone's back or honking a car horn (the soul of the game), then, good gracious, there's real soccer players, and they're made entirely of little letters and numbers! The World Cup final is scheduled for Sunday at 1:30 p.m. on CTV. Cast your protest vote. Spoil it for your family. Watch it in ASCII.
If you still haven't had enough, there are ASCII art sites galore. I heartily recommend http://www.asciimator.net, which lets you create your own ASCII animations. Wikipedia has a most illuminative entry on ASCII art, as well as a comprehensive history of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange itself, and, if you hate life, other character encoding technologies. Finally, http://www.asciibabes.com features cheesecake in alphanumeric form -- as authentic a piece of on-line culture as you're ever going to find.
