2 posts tagged “books”
I used to love playing adventure games on my Vic-20 and Commodore-64 and never really got into point and click adventure games (though some of the more mashed up games on the 64 and then the Amiga were great. I am thinking about games from Denton Designs 'Shadowfire' and ' Frankie Goes To Hollywood' or Mike Singleton 'Lords of Midnight').
Now these games still exist, though under the moniker of interactive fiction. There seem to be some real gems out there and the tools to easily author your own. What is important about them and this book is that you are in game worlds, ones with their own rules as to how objects interact. They are truly interactive and I think there is lots to learn from revisiting these and seeing what can be applied to the likes of interactive television.
I am currently reading 'The Long Summer' by Brian Fagan. It is the story of how climate change has changed civilisation.
The book is rich in story and detail, looking at the climactic changes that have affected humans since the last Ice Age. How they have adapted and how societies collapsed. Of real interest is the fact that cities grew as a mechanism for feeding and control but as such became incredibly susceptible to crop failure. Older social models, subsistance farming, hunting etc. these groups could move and adapt to changes on a yearly cycle. Not always comfortably but they could move. Cities were locked into space, they had now way of moving and thus when disasters did strike they hit cities the hardest.
It is not hard to see where we, in the west sit in this model. The whole of western, first world society is modeled on the city model. How will we deal with the catastrophic changes ahead?
This makes a great companion to Jared Diamond's 'Collapse' and in fact a worthwhile project would be to take the content from these and other books and map out in time lines and spacial visualisations the stories they tell. I was thinking about a project that Gavin Bell created, NovelContext. This project is intended to look at the links within fiction but a similar mapping for many non-fiction, pop-science books would be an exciting project.
