Gaming
Spent much of winter break playing games on my PS3. Two games in particular: Dragon Age and Fallout 3.
I slip into game mode from time to time. And the games are getting better and better. Not only on the technical front--they're really well-written, too.
Like genre novelists, authors of these games need to find an original way to re-create old standards, like fantasy and post-apocalyptic worlds. Both games I played did so with smashing success. In Dragon Age, elves have been reduced to the house slaves of humans, while dwarves adhere to a strict caste system that removes the rank and status of any dwarf who dares leave the underground to mingle with the rest of the world.
They're kind of like Lindbergh's Noninterventionalists, only funny (quips about getting dizzy the first time laying eyes on the sky, need to grip the ground with their toes or they'll float away, etc.).
Fallout 3 is probably the most socially critical game I've played. The US prepares for preemptive nuclear war by building underground vaults for a select population (it's strongly suggested that qualification is based mostly on financial status), then they launch against China. Armageddon follows. Two hundred years later, your character walks out of a vault and into the ruins of Washington D.C. (impressively rendered).
There are of course mutants and zombies to battle, but the most nefarious faction is the remnants of the US government. They'll stop at nothing to halt your effort to set up a water purification system that will give clean water to the masses (or what's left).
Ten years ago, I figured if you wanted to write big stories, you had a choice between novels, movies, or ghost-writing non-fiction for megalomaniacs.
After I've witnessed what has become of television (The Sopranos, The Wire) and computer games--there's just more options out there.
It might be a good time to be a fiction writer.
