Futurismic

My life is fairly crammed, and writing time is hard to come by. Today I got one of those precious blocks of time in which I could write for several hours almost without interruption, yet as I fired up the computer, I felt not excited about the prospect, but worried and on edge.  I also felt a little unsure: I had several projects I could be working on and was waffling on which one to choose. Continue reading “Better Writing Through Writing About Writing”

Not over coffee and cakes, sadly, but you take what you can get in this crazy world, AMIRITEZ?

So when I got the chance to email Eric Drexler – yup, the nanotech guy – with some follow-up questions responding to his inaugural lecture at Oxford Martin College last month, I jumped in with both feet… and you can see the results over H+ Magazine, who very kindly ran the piece despite a bout of rather unprofessional behaviour on my part, for which I publicly extend further apologies. (No big story, beyond yours truly acting like a precious and short-tempered dick. Who’d have thought, eh?)

So, yeah – been a bit quiet here of late, hasn’t it? That’s rather unavoidable, as my workload at the moment is every shade of insane, but things should settle down a bit in the next few months. In the meantime, I’ll see if I can’t find some interesting people to take the mic every now and again; if you think you should be one of them, use the form on the contact page to let me know why!

Stay well, folks…

1. Lithium

I’m old enough to remember when video games were comparatively simple things. For example, I remember the side-scrolling video game adaptation of Robocop (1988). Relatively short, Robocop had you shooting and jumping your way from one side of the world to another. Once you got to the end of one world, you moved to another, and then another… and then the worlds started repeating themselves in slightly different colours. These games were simple to understand: you immediately knew what you were expected to do and what constituted victory. Nearly twenty-five years on, video game technology has advanced to the point where games are beginning to acquire the complex ambiguity of the real world — and with this complexity comes difficulty. Continue reading “Skyrim and the Quest for Meaning”

Last month, I wrote about the government. I asserted that we need to get business interests out of government or we’ll keep making decisions based on next quarter’s profits instead of the health of the next decade. This month, I want to talk about a whole industry that seems to be falling victim to short-term thinking, at least in America and Europe.

Space. Continue reading “Long Term and Long Distance Thinking”

1. Bad is Good and Good is Bad

The problem with video game writing is that it tends to be written by fans of video games. The corruption and stupidity of games journalism are not isolated quirks of the system but symptoms of a flawed approach to the medium. Fans, by their nature, approach their choice of medium wanting to fall in love: Good games are filled with good things; bad games are filled with bad things. Love the good things. Hate the bad things.

While I think that this approach to art can be intensely rewarding, I also think that it has its weaknesses and the most obvious weakness is a failure to recognise that bad things can sometimes be good.  They can be good because these bad and un-fun things make the good bits glow that much brighter, and because even painful and unpleasant experiences have meaning and importance. This is a column about the role of death in video games and how a more sophisticated appreciation of one of the least fun aspects of the gaming experience might unlock the door to a world of new themes and experiences. Continue reading “Demon’s Souls and the Meaning and Import of Virtual Death”