IFComp 07!
The 2007 Interactive Fiction Competition is open and the games have been released. I guess I ought to start playing them, with a twinge of regret that yet again I'm not among them. My own stupid bloody fault. I hate implementer's block. Lots of game ideas in my head, nothing that seems to gel. Or not enough time given to the hobby or something.
I walked around the streets tonight and found myself noticing how hard-wired my imagination is for 'heroic' interpretations of images. Which is to say: I walked past a park, saw an otherworldly glow and just had to go see what it was, even though I knew it was a streetlight shining on a cluster of trees next to a climbing frame. But they were Narnia trees, and the light was an eternal flame. Or at least out of the corner of my eyes it was.
I walked past the CityCare truck depot and the lights were on inside: stark blue-white fluorescents, vehicles and oil cans and hoists glowing under glass. And my imagination goes: robot exoskeletons in a five storey high spaceport.
It does this all the time. This, plus my painful sense of reality, is probably why I'm drawn to science fiction as a genre. I can't cope with things just being ordinary, but I need to be able to believe in them.
But an odd thing has been happening to science, since WWII. As technology expanded, the frontiers of science have been shrinking. Up to the 1930s, it seemed like science was all about finding whole new universes of possibility. Since the war, it seems to have been more about finding out - in great detail - what's NOT possible any more. No life on Mars, no life anywhere in the solar system (except maybe some bacteria on Jovian moons), no warp drive, no pocket atomics, no sentient computers. No WWIII, either, which overall is a net win.
That's where I get stuck. Where is there space left to dream? How can we even think, how can we live, without a frontier of some kind? But space isn't it, the ocean isn't it, the Net's just a big blog, and in our cities we're elbow to elbow with people we don't get along with.
If this is it, this is as good as it gets, why am I so dissatisfied?
Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave
Woohoo! A serious article about the history and influence of the first-ever Adventure Game, Colossal Cave!
And discussion on the venerable rec.arts.int-fiction .
I did some web-digging a year or so back about the real Mammoth/Colossal/Bedquilt cave system. It's Pretty Darn Interesting.
Settling back to enjoy a good read.
