Books versus Computer Games

The game and the book are like peas and corn. They are similar in some ways, very different in others, but both are favourite vegetables of mine. Although their growth habits are quite different, both are the seed of their plant. Preparing them as food requires differing techniques, but both taste great with a little melted butter. I do like a little salt as well with my corn-on-the-cob.

Games are a form of story-telling that can be extremely compelling when done well, but it is difficult for the game to give the detailed perspective offered by a book. While reading a book you do not have the sense of being involved that comes from controlling your character in a game. Both have the capacity to leave me wanting more.

Halfway through the novel, Metro 2033, Artyom has only once fired a gun. In the game he had fought monsters and killed men by this stage. While the game focusses on weapons and fire-power, the novel is a horror-story, creating a picture of a world where the boundaries between normal and para-normal may have been broken down by the very force of the holocaust. The game has simplified and changed the story, but I have walked every step of the way on Artyom's life-saving mission.

I suppose it's obvious that a game is going to lack the subtlety of a book, but to be honest I just don't care. My slippers and my walking shoes have very different functions, but I want to keep them both. When I'm awake at four in the morning I want to play a computer game that will keep me absorbed and fill the lonely hours until dawn. In the afternoon when my legs hurt, I want to lie on the couch and read a book that takes me away from the worries of the day.

Games and books - both have a valued role in my life.

Metro 2033

My daughter and I have an on-going discussion about the relative merits of books and computer games as the means for story-telling. I visited Cally yesterday and was talking about the game I was playing - Metro 2033. (Yes! I'm a middle-aged woman who plays games on her PC. Forgive me for being a sell-out but my children made me do it. When they taught me the card game "Magic - The Gathering" I found it to be enjoyable. So I let them introduce me to computer games and found that I enjoyed being immersed in the experience. I understood why they played these games. Have you ever tried them? Perhaps you should. Apart from my own enjoyment, I discovered a new avenue of conversation with my teenage son.)

As I explained to Cally that I was playing through the game again to try to see the alternate ending, her house-mate picked a book from a shelf and handed me a copy of "Metro 2033" by Dmitry Glukhovsky, the novel on which the game was based. I was stunned and grateful at the kindness in this house full of gamers, and pleased to know that books are still valued.

I've begun reading it. Twenty pages in and I am relishing the detail as the novel tells me more about the creaking, desolate tunnels of post-apocalyptic Moscow's underground railway. As I read I can see the figures from the game, huddled around fires for warmth as they guard their outposts against the mutant hordes.

I've enjoyed playing the game. Figuring out how to survive in the harrowing holocaust landscape was great fun.  But now I have to read and find out the details that wouldn't fit into the game.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

When Shakespeare described how our lives "creep in this petty pace from day to day" there was high drama at the Macbeth castle.  There is no high drama in my life.  Instead there is a sense of days stretching on to no purpose.  Taking a "break" from teaching, I suddenly find that my hours are not consumed by the need to prepare and correct, to spend time trying to figure out how better to reach my students.

Perhaps I should put on a pair of sandwich-boards and hit the streets shouting, "The end is nigh"?  But who would listen?  Record temperatures, extreme weather events, ice caps melting, oceans rising - why aren't we listening to the scientists?  The greatest disaster our society is facing is creeping ever closer, but we consistently fail to act.

Is it because power is controlled by the wealthy who have benefitted most from the violation of our environment?  Because vested interests are greedy for more?  Even though it may kill us all?

I just don't understand that any-one could be so blinded by self-interest.  Profits will mean nothing when crops fail and economies collapse.

But how do we change the way the world is run?