Having finished reading George R. R. Martin’s “A Game of Thrones” (finally!) I started thinking about all the many many people who are spending vast amounts of time reading just this one series of fantasy novels — let alone all of the time that been collectively spent reading fiction by Stephen King, Georges Simenon, J.K. Rowling and Harold Robbins — or Leo Tolstoy for that matter.
And I fine myself wondering, why is there so much worry about people spending hours and hours playing computer games?
After all, both activities are pleasurable immersions into fictional worlds. What makes one sort of escapist activity inherently more valid than the other?
Reading (of any sort) seems to be considered more intellectually respectable than other escapist activities. I can see how this might be true compared to watching video (TV, movies, etc). At least subjectively, reading seems to require more active thinking (attention, imagination, visualization) than passive watching does. That’s not to say that there aren’t intellectually challenging videos. But on average, I would guess that most escapist video is less intellectually demanding than most escapist reading. (How’s that for a completely unsubstantiated, over-generalized, data-free assertion? 😉 I’m not sure how true it really is compared to computer games. I guess it depends on the game, but some of them seem quite complex and require problem-solving, attention, imagination, dexterity, etc.
Would you recommend the George R.R. Martin book? I’m not usually that big on fantasy, although I did enjoy the Harry Potter series, and some other sci-fi/fantasy.
Most video game characters are more psychologically shallow than characters in a novel. You don’t learn anything about human nature from them. There are exceptions, of course, and it’s not inherent in the medium (though it would be hard to have a psychologically rich character you could chat with like a chatbot.) It’s still a young medium, though.
Sharon: Personally, I would not recommend “A Game of Thrones”, but it seems I’m in the minority. As Abraham Lincoln once said: “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”
Doug: Two reactions: (1) Having read the first book of “A Game of Thrones”, I can’t see how any characters could be more psychologically shallow. Everything and everybody in the book is a by-the-numbers type, as though they are all wind-up toys. (2) You can’t chat with characters in novels either.
Thanks. Just as well—my list of enticing escapist activities is already quite long 🙂
Of course that’s true, but the difference between a game and a movie is the control of the action that the player has. I think if you could get interactive characters to react to unexpected events in the appropriate way for their stereotypical persona, it would be a major advance in the state of the art.
Perhaps there could be a game where you’re a ghost– unable to speak and able to interact with the physical world only rarely and in restricted ways, so that the story continues mostly along its own plotline, affected at a few key points by your actions.
Another option is something like Eve Online, where other real people provide the drama.
Total agreement here. I’ve long wanted to make a game where you are a ghost for exactly that reason.
But Warren Spector beat both of us to it, with his very popular series of “Thief” games (starting with “Thief: The Dark Project” in 1998). In those games your character is a thief, so part of your job is to lurk around and eavesdrop on conversations to gather information, without interacting with anyone.
I asked Warren whether he had come up with this structure so that you could have interesting characters without running into the limitations of human/npc chat, and he confirmed that this was precisely what had led him to that game idea and design.
I was just thinking about blogs as they relate to this discussion. Reading and commenting on blog posts as they occur is a little like an interactive book. The author provides the outline of the story (discussion) and the comments of the readers and author shape the direction that the conversation takes. After a while, older blog posts become more like books. The discussion is over. The text is available to read, and maybe you send a note to the author if you are moved to share something you’ve gotten from it, but it no longer has that interactive feel.
Now, I’m not sure where commenting on 3-day-old blog posts fits on this continuum 😉
I wonder whether there is any way to keep these topics going longer, perhaps by periodically bringing them up again in the main post. I certainly agree that the discussion is a very exciting part of the process, and that it’s a shame that these discussions seem to “age” so quickly.
Another idea along those lines– you could play a young unspeaking child in a house full of adults who are going through a crisis. Most ways you could get someone to pay attention to you would just result in a quick “taking care of the kid.”
Or you could be the family dog or cat. In either case, you’d be more intelligent than people generally realize (like dogs and cats in real life), which makes for interesting game play possibilities.
The nature of the game would be highly dependent upon whether you are canine or feline. See, for reference, the following:
http://www.goodeatsfanpage.com/humor/otherhumor/dog_cat_diary.htm
🙂
One of the problems with keeping the comment thread going from the reader’s side is knowing when there are new posts in the thread. I haven’t figured out how to set it up to automatically get notified when comments are added to a thread that I’ve commented on. I know that there are individual RSS feeds for comments for individual blog posts, but it seems to require explicitly subscribing each time. I wish it was more like Facebook where, when you comment on a post, you automatically get emails any time anyone else comments on the same post. Right now I just check back periodically to see if there were comments. Am I missing some existing capability?
Yes, I agree that would be great. Alas, I don’t see any WordPress controls that would allow me to enable that. If somebody out there knows how to enable what Sharon is describing, speak up!
I would even be happy with an RSS feed that gave me all the comments posted on any of your blog posts in one feed (whether or not I commented)
Love the dog/cat diary! I grew up with cats and now have a dog. Sounds exactly right 🙂
To answer my own question, there is a feed of all comments. It is, in fact, linked at the bottom of every page as “Comments (RSS)”.