Blogging & Musing...

Video Games—as good as books? Part 2

Saturday, 16 October 2010 14:00

In my last post, I raised the issue of whether video games might someday inspire book-club-like-groups. Here’s a follow-up…

Jeff, my nephew showed up at our house (after I’d written the first post) with “Rain,” an adult mystery video game. As I watched him play, I found myself caught up in the story—unable to pull my eyes away from the screen, let alone leave the room to fix dinner.

The graphics were good, the storyline engaging, and the interactive nature allowed Jeff to make decisions on the part of his characters. And different decisions led to different outcomes.

What was surprising was how invested I was in the characters—yet I wasn’t the one holding the joystick!  Jeff was the one holding the joystick—and he clearly cared about his people. After all, they could act only through him.

It's a bit like writing and reading a novel at the same time. Playing these games, you're both author and reader of the same work. How cool is that?

Prediction? I bet 10-15 years from now people will be meeting to talk about video games—just as we do about books. Given time, the plots and characters will grow more sophisticated and complex—with rich possibilties for discussion. We’ll talk about why we made the choices we did, why we developed the characters we did … and how outcomes varied from member to member.  

Exciting but worrisome. One wonders about the future of BOOKS—stats on the number of folks who read them is increasingly dire. So one asks (well, I do) as wonderful as technology is, is it leading us backwards?

Video Games—as good as books? Part 1

Monday, 21 June 2010 10:02

Tim Bissel is a grown man—a writer and professor of writing—who's obsessed with videogames. In fact, he considers them a budding art form.

In his new book, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, Bissel says the games are “as gripping as any fiction" he's come across”—and, get this—that Grand Theft Auto IV is ”the most colossal creative achievement of the last 25 years.” That's quite a claim.

What excites Bissel, really excites him, is the interactive nature of games, the idea of...

turning narrative into an active experience,
something which film [and literature] is
unable to do in the same way.

So it got me to thinking about the history of the novel and film, both of which were once were considered upstarts—having to prove their artistic worth to skeptics. Right now, Bissel isn’t impressed with the “literary” skills of the video game designers. But given time, won’t those skills—dialog and characterization—develop just as they did in fiction and film?

And consider this—literary fiction is the only art form that allows us to slip the boundaries of our own skin and enter another’s. When we identify with literary characters, we think and feel as they do…we BECOME those characters for the duration of the book. But we’re still passive participants, only along for the ride.

Now think what it might be like, say 10-15 years from now, to enter into a book or film’s action … to particpate actively … to affect its outcome. How will that work? I don’t know, but … I’m getting out my daughter’s old joypad to practice!

Questions for Book Clubs
Have fun—consider what a book club might be like 20 years from now. Will we all come with our little laptop video games? Will we discuss what actions each took…and how we changed the direction of the plot?

See Part 2 of this post.

The Novel is Dead?

Sunday, 06 June 2010 12:05

Jeeesh! Long time since I posted anything on this poor lonely blog. Why so long? Turns out, I’ve been reading...a lot.

Which brings up an intriguing comment by Jonathan Franzen in the Sunday New York Times Book Review (6/6/10).

Haven’t we all secretly sort of come to an agreement...that novels belong to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster?

As an old English professor friend of mine likes to say, novels are a curious moral case, in that we feel guilty about not reading more of them but also guilty about doing something as frivolous as reading them…

Okay, so it’s tongue-and-cheek. Or not. Still, I’m wondering...

Questions for Book Clubs

1. Who’s “we”—as in “haven't we all secretly"? And why is it a secret agreement? Because nobody wants to talk about it?
2. Does he really think the novel (printed and digital...or just printed) is on its way out? If so, what will replace it: graphic novels...or the Internet...or video games?
3. Are novels "frivolous"? Has anyone told book clubs yet?
   
   

Flashlight Worthy Books—cool new website

Thursday, 08 April 2010 12:34

If you love books on a certain theme…you’ll love Flashlight Worthy Book Recommendations, a new site that lists books thematically. So far the site has 370 different lists, in 50+ categories, with nearly 5,000 books.  Here’s a tiny sample:

Flashlight Worthy Lists 

Books About . . .
Families in Fiction and Memoir
Women of Another Era
Abraham Lincoln
Dystopia
Crime Fiction–About Women By Women
Love–That Your Club Probably Hasn’t Read Yet
African-Americans–Not Just for Black History Month
WASPS
Madness We Can All Relate to
With the Sea in Sight

So head on over to the website to find some great ideas and recommendations for your book club…or just for yourself.