Computer Games and Stories 2

Some computer games use the medium to tell a story with flair, I’ve covered some of those. Other games take a different tack. They allow you to write your own story, while playing the game. Some of these games give you unlimited parameters, other limit you to telling your own version of a particular story.

The games with greater parameters are often referred to as sandbox games. Civilization is among the better known of these. Civilization allows you to re-write the history of the world, telling the tale of how the Egyptians rose to conquer the French/Indian alliance and dominate the world. Or whatever you are able to achieve.

Alpha Centauri continues the story of Civilization, with groups of colonists attempting to make a permanent home on an alien world. This game has its own storey too, and in a further twist factions are divided along philosophical, rather than national lines. Factions that value harmony, or the collective, or science, or religion, al clash as they pursue their own vision of what it means to establish a thriving new colony.

Medieval 2 concentrates the story into Europe and the Mediterranean, allowing you to control various nations throughout a four-century period. The English might win the Hundred Years’ War and go on to conquer Spain, or else Poland might rise to become a pre-eminent crusading power, or the Turks might conquer Europe, or the Mongols. This game offer many hours of intense diplomacy, including the diplomacy of the sword.

Into the second type of game fall most of those referred to as CRPGs, or computer role playing games. Some of these are better than others, and they are often judged, fairly or not, on how much freedom is given to the player. A good central story is one thing, but when it’s just you and your computer, people like to explore every odd passage and remote village, and tend to dislike it if it turns out those are just painted backdrops with no substance.

More recently games such as Age of Conan have allowed each player to write their own book of ‘feats’ showing the various things they have achieved. These games write the story for you as you play. Automation, I like that.

Myself I’m more into the sandbox style game, Alpha Centauri and Medieval 2 both hold a permanent place on my hard drive. The others tend to be more transient. Once their story has been told, I don’t need to hear it again. It takes longer to play a CRPG than it does to read a book, so the story needs to be at least as good as the average book.

I might give that books of feats thing a look, though.

Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett

The ninth Discworld novel, in a series that is now over thirty books long, collides with Hollywood. Terry Pratchett is a master at taking an everyday phrase that we might use but never think about and say, ‘yes, but what does that mean? In Moving Pictures, it is the wild idea.

Ideas come and go, but wild ideas need to be kept under confinement, because if they break loose, anything could happen. One wild idea escapes from a place out in the wilds, a place called Holy Wood. Soon after, one of Ankh-Morpork’s alchemists makes an… enlightened discovery. Soon all manner of people are congregating around Holy Wood, making moving pictures. Unfortunately, this is making reality unstable (not that reality in the Discworld was ever that stable to begin with) and unspeakable creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions are waiting for their chance to come through.

I think this book also marks the first appearance of Ponder Stibbons, the nerd wizard. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Like a lot of Prachett’s early Discworld books, Moving Pictures makes a fine entry point, no previous knowledge is required to make this book enjoyable. So enjoy it.

True Stories

Non-fiction. It’s the only place in which it’s ok to be awesome and do good things. Success and altruism are great in real life, dull as dishwater in fiction.

I’m glad of the fiction/ non-fiction divide. Each has things the other cannot do.

This story at the Guardian struck me today. Several times. About the face. These people are mega awesome. Opening their house to troubled teens, over a twenty-year period, and turning their lives around (mostly). They did it because it was the right thing to do.

Fantastic story, just as well its real and not fictional though, otherwise it would be boring.

Computer Games and Stories

At first glance, computer games might not seem the best place to look for stories. Surely a music video or even a nearby wall would have more chance of containing a decent story?

Well, Yes and No.

Many computer games don’t have any story, because they don’t need one. Some just need a premise (the princess has been kidnapped! rescue her by jumping over a series of moving platforms!), some don’t even need that. Tetris is its own device.

Other computer games do have stories, poor ones. Stories that would ill grace the backs of cereal boxes pass muster too often in the industry.

However, others do tell good stories. The best use the medium to tell stories that wouldn’t be possible to tell elsewhere.

I’m going to list a few here, but I must warn anyone below the age of 20 that you might not recognise any of the titles here. There’s nothing wrong with today’s games, but the stories that gripped me are all from last century.

Half-Life was an important game, not just for the strength of its story by for the game genre (that word again) in which it took place. For whatever reason, prevailing wisdom in the 1990s was that you can’t tell a story through the medium of a first-person shooter. Valve proved that to be wrong, and did it in style.

The Last Express was a good mystery, done in vivid style.

Starship Titanic and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream are both examples of science fiction authors trying their hand at the medium, with mixed results. The first was Douglas Adams, the second Harlan Ellison.

Wasteland (and this is going back a ways – to the 1980s) told a grim tale of life hanging on in a post nuclear Nevada.

Of more recent games, there is little to tell. First-person shooters rarely rise to the storytelling heights of Half-Life, Bio Shock and Mass Effect are two recent efforts that may entertain.

Role-playing games, what you might think of as the natural home for stories in computer games tend to be a little stunted. Either the story is truncated and used as something to give your mouse of joypad hand a rest between combats, or else you spend your whole time squinting to read reams and reams of text – that is for books people.

Don’t dismiss computer games as a storytelling medium. A closer look can reveal some real gems.

The Case of the Mummy’s Gold by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik

The grand titles are back for the 5th Penny Arcade collected edition, and long may they remain.

Highlights of this year include Twisp and Catsby (my favourites), the excellent Wandering Age excerpt (“before this moment, did I ever see the world?”) and the expereince of queueing to buy Halo 2 (“quick! find a teacher!”).

When excellence is the general standard, it leaves a reviewer with very little to say. Yes, this collection contains some excellent webcomics. I’ve listed my favourites above. There’s little more to say. See? Excellent.

Whys and Wherefores by Brian K. Vaughn

With this, the 10th Y: The Last Man collected edition, the series ends. For those just joining here, Y: The Last Man is a graphic nivel series written by Brian K. Vaughn. It begins with a mysterious plague that wipes out every male mammal on the planet.

As societies fall and reform, Yorick Brown, one of only two surviving males, must find out what caused the plague and why he and his capuchin monkey are the only males alive.

Now survivalist literature like this is hardly new, neither is the ‘world as run by women’ scenario. Vaughn adroitly avoid the usual geek misogyny of this story type through great characterisation and storytelling.

Yorick becomes fixated on reuniting with his girlfriend, who was holidaying in Australia when the plague occurred. In this, the tenth book, that reuniting finally takes place. I’m giving nothing away.

The story culminates, not with a bang, but with a bullet. A very important bullet. I’ll say no more. Well maybe a little. The whole Miss Haversham thing was disappointing, but otherwise it was a fitting end to a great series. If you haven’t tried this saga yet, I recommend it.

The Mystery Box

I haven’t spoken much about television here so far. At all, really. Music videos sure. But not the TV.

Television has a bad reputation, but it’s not a lost medium, just a terribly misused one. TV has a lot of untapped potential, but a few series and shows are able to tap into the potential for using television to tell incredible stories.

The Documentary which has taken over the movie theatres in recent years has its home on television, And what is a documentary other than the telling of a true story?

Fiction shows also have their home here. I must now declare myself a fan of Buffy. So it goes.

This TED link is JJ Abrams, creator of Lost and Cloverfield, talking about what he does. This was posted five months ago, but better late than never right? Enjoy.

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/205

Oh, and the title isn’t allegorical. He really has a box.

A Wonderful Company At A Fair Price by Brian McNiven

McNiven has read Warren Buffet and been profoundly affected. I read this book expecting to find a straightforward guide to valuing a business effectively. Unfortunately that is not what I got.

Instead I had to read through pages filled with statements falling into two main areas; how Brian McNiven thinks companies should be valued, and what Brian McNiven thinks companies should be forced to do, to make it easier for him to value them according to his own way.

As a reader you don’t find out too much about how McNiven would value a company, he has a program to sell you that will do that for you. So, this book does not really set out to instruct, which is a great disappointment.

Where some cursory valuations are looked at, the examples used are so straightforward and unrealistic as to remove any meaning from the methods presented. Not a great touch there, Brian.

Rather than making statements about how the world ought to be, it is more constructive to create tools to handle the world as it is, while making positive changes where possible. That’s what I think anyway.

Value investing is all about the art of buying a dollar for sixty cents. A good book on value investing should help the reader towards a valuation methodology that will help him or her tell whether what is being valued at sixty cents by the market really is a dollar. This book does not do that.

McNiven has a more recent book than this, about value investing. Perhaps that does a better job than this.

The title suggests a comprehensive guide to valuing companies, and the book does not deliver.

Stories from Science – The Fermi Paradox

The Fermi Paradox is an interesting problem from science. In the 1950s the scientist Enrico Fermi simply asked “where is everybody?” The question and the resulting paradox are simple enough. Given the age of our own galaxy, using conservative estimates, even one self-sustaining, expansionist alien civilization should have colonised the entire galaxy by now. But it hasn’t happened. Not only that, but there is no sign of it having happened anywhere else either. No observations of this or any other galaxy have found anything artificial.

So, where is everybody? If the aliens existed we would be able to see them. We can’t see them, therefore they don’t exist. And yet…

The universe is so vast, so immense that it is unthinkable that no advanced species other than ourselves could exist. Earth is not especially noticeable to anyone other than our near neighbours who happen to be listening on the correct radio frequencies. We’ve never detected anyone else.

There are several posited answers to the paradox, and here is where stories step in to help us understand a mysterious universe.

One possible answer is that all civilizations self destruct. Pessimistic, but also note it would only take one, somewhere, anywhere to survive and expand, and we would be able to detect them. This answer also notes that outside influence may be responsible for the destruction. Gamma ray bursts, for one.

Another is that the universe is filled with killer robots, extinguishing life wherever it is to be found. Well, I’ve not yet been murdered by killer robots from space, how about you?

Of science fiction books, Space by Stephen Baxter takes the Gamma Ray Burst theory forward. If a GRB is periodically responsible for eliminating all life in a given region, then presumably life would re-emerge in that region at around the same time. In Space, the aliens come to us, not to bring knowledge, but to seek answers, before it is too late.

Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds takes an interesting look at the Killer Robot scenario. If such beings did exist, they might live in hibernation, emerging only when life, spacefaring life, appears. So these robots would set clever traps to force this life to reveal itself to them…

I happily recommend both the above books, though be aware Revelation Space is the first in a trilogy.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

I had never read this book before. I’ve seen the BBC TV series, I’ve seen the movie. I’ve read the third and fourth books in the series, but never the first two. I can’t explain why, it just worked out that way.

The Hitchhikers Guide is a lot more serious than I had expected from the other media adaptations. Especially the character of Zaphod. The man who is an enigma, even to himself. That really didn’t come through in television or movie. Funnily enough the Zaphod who did come through was the same as the one I encountered in Life, The Universe and Everything, and So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

Not here, though. In the first book, the character of Zaphod… jarred. Jarred with my understanding of who this character was. It was odd to be surprised in this way. Zaphod – serious and introspective.

On the other hand, Marvin had a lot less time in the book than I had expected. Maybe there is more of him in the second? I don’t know, I’ve not read that one either. One day I will remedy that too, no doubt.

For now… this is odd. I find it difficult to recommend this book. The others, no hesitation. This one… I’m not so sure.