In memory of beauty and imagination

[temnix]

I wonder if it's still possible to breathe some of this spirit back into the games, or we are stuck with a Turing machine and jokes about it. That is something I just came across on the Noobermeet board, a topic. I wish I wished I could get the joke. I wish I wished I would find that sort of thing funny. Or do I? And in theory there is nothing wrong about engineering and all that, only in practice they turn out to be poison. Of course, the games are all 1s and 0s, but the fantasy isn't. To say that would be like claiming that our sight is rods and cones instead of just being made functional by them. It is not with nostalgia that I look at these very old games, before the "revival" with Baldur's Gate. Nostalgia is a lid on a lack of understanding. I sense in them a reality that has been lost. They disarm me with their supposedly outdated mechanics and pictures. Even though intellectually these skulls, maws and maidens should be insufferable, they are yet closer to the truth than the improvements on them. The isometric perspective stole the face of creatures, if you think about it, it corresponds to nothing in the real world: not quite the first person view, the great I, nor the third person, the lovely They. The book journals are gone, map-keeping has been automated by about 25 years, and I don't recognize the purpose of adventuring any more. This particular game, Savage Frontier 2, enticed the player in its first scenes not only with an opportunity to save a city, but also to find true love - perhaps. Is that on the agenda any more? Even theoretically? I should ask the Turing machine.

But speaking of machines: do you remember how in Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" the computer gives the answer to the great question, and the answer is 42? Everyone is floored. Adams proceeds, rather ceremoniously, to explain that the challenge before humanity and the other sentient species, in the aeons to come, is to formulate the question for that answer. I almost hear some kind of grand orchestra in the background when I think back on that scene, something from "Space Odyssey." Yet just as "Space Odyssey" is a movie pretty much about nothing, so a question that could be answered with 42 or any other number is not one worth thinking about, cogito. Who cares about the great causeway of Enlightenment? It has itself been enlightened away, though the eager beavers on the roadsides will continue painting up the signs. And they are a hopeless lot. But what do I like on this poster, what strikes me as true? 101000100: the red font of Advanced Dungeons&Dragons; her blonde hair, though not perfectly shaded; that jewel in her hands; the rings and bracelets - solid, firm, costly and quiet. The SSI design is also nice. Pictures like these are all alive, all people, like some kind of soylent. Every one is a dense jigsaw puzzle of packed inspiration, toil and innocence. I think it is time to weaponize the last.