Escapism

Thanks to credit cards and underwater mortgages and union busting cheapskates in Hollywood and New York, TV is mostly bad reality programming. The few written dramas are often about murder or misunderstandings. These days, all I care about watching from broadcast is either travellogues or food or both. I still watch Top Gear and Doc Martin, but that's pretty much it. Most of the movies that come out I don't care about because the youth I was 15 years ago is long gone and while he would have been curious about some of these popular Scifi or Hero stuff, mostly for the special effects, I have an Xbox which can do that on the fly. And that's where Hollywood's attack on writers is really killing them. They keep union busting writers because their egos don't allow writers, the creators of ideas and dialogue, to share any credit for movies. The producers barely give any credit to directors, which those in the know admit are the artistic vision behind how a story is depicted. The film is from the Director, all responsibility falls on him. But the director needs a script go create anything, and Hollywood refuses to pay its writers, so they keep quitting, going into video game design because its better money, they can live wherever, and no more catering to balding Jewish producer egos, Scientologists, or Kaballah cultists in LA. They can email the script, talk on the phone, review some of the designs as attachments. Way easier. None of this kowtowing. I've looked into it. It DOES pay better than a movie option. If I were serious about it, I could probably get a modest salary out of creating scripts for video games. I don't really know it well enough.

Considering the event driven aspects of gaming, and how they tend to build and change, I can see a market for exploration games, actually. There are a ton of combat games and dungeon crawlers, but what if games were built to focus on the exploration and less on combat, or remove that altogether. A treasure hunt with interesting environments would be something pretty awesome. Imagine if there was an Appalachian trail backpacking game, or one that lets you climb from India through the Nepalese Himalaya to the top of Everest, on foot? Few people get to do that in the real world, and most don't have the time. Do this for a few hours with a pause button or save points? I could see clerks an executives wanting that. Same with hiking the Pacific Crest trail, or racing the Dakar, virtually. A lot of the things that adventurers do and try to film, write about, or describe in interviews would make a good video game on a modern system. Imagine a game where you can sail around the world, a simulation which includes port cities you can visit. Hella cheaper than the real thing. And you won't get food poisoning. Take a first person shooter technology and offer a walk through San Torini in Greece, or Istanbul.

Why would anyone want this? We're all becoming peasants. Sure, peasants with smart phones, broadband, credit cards and cars, but still wage slave peasants. We aren't land owners or landed gentry. Few people can afford a world tour, even on a budget nevermind first class accomodations. We can't afford to really go there. We have day jobs and bills to pay.

A virtual interactive landscape you can explore in simulation is relaxing. Watch the dawn sunrise over the Smoky Mountains from a campfire. See the play of colors and listen to the birds call. Something you're missing in the morning rush commute.

Offer a virtual jeep drive into northern Canada on dirt roads, where Great Slave Lake is the size of most Eastern states, and the herds of caribou drift across the Tundra. I'm still a little shocked that there's no Flight Simulator for Xbox, since its ideal hardware for it. They can code for the setup so it always runs smoothly, unlike a PC. Imagine if you could puddle jump around the lakes in Alaska as a bush pilot. All that fantastic landscape, but you can have a real job at 7/11 or crunching numbers at some Escrow office. Actually living up there is really expensive, after all. We're a post oil civilization. Digital fuel is cheaper.

More than sailboats or motor yachts, jeeps and motorcycles, there's a lot of virtual vehicles an exploration simulator can offer someone who wants distraction from shelf stocking or counter work in their real job. There are already virtual racing games with all sorts of cars and sometimes realistic physics and handling. I'm pretty sure there are games where you can download the Top Gear test track and see what kind of lap time you get in the Reasonably Priced Car. In that vein, it should be possible to do all kinds of rally stages, including vintage cars.

You can offer historical exploration, like the Conquistadores or Marco Polo. What would the West have looked like when Lewis and Clark were exploring? This would be virtual living history, so a player would be sufficiently immersed to actually understand what it was like to BE there. Seeing Asia by horseback as a Mongol Raider would be very interesting. Virtual Sahara, showing how it looked when it was grassland during the Pleistocene? Fascinating. How about seeing the Flood Events first hand? Watch the Black Sea fill in. Watch the Mediterranean fill in. It used to be a desert. Watch the North Sea flood from the shallow grassland it was. It is all very interesting and virtual history tourism can be made into a game. I happen to think this is the direction Google Earth is going, though they aren't saying. They already offer 3D cities you can explore, though its not at the scale of a person, more like a helicopter overhead.

These interactive environments are far more interesting than watching angry fat women in New Jersey try to sleep with each other's sleazy boyfriends. That crap is on TV because Hollywood refuses to pay writers so they find someone who will. That's led to video games so immersive they have value for pure exploration and that path leads to virtual tourism.

I am sure there are lonely working women who would enjoy a romance novel that takes place in a virtual town they can interact with on their own schedule, and get the satisfaction of a well written romance they can see and hear. That's a huge market. The Japanese already have this. Its just a matter of time before we do too.

Men trapped in unhappy lives would love to explore mountains and sail the seven seas. Its manly stuff we don't get to do because we killed all the dangerous animals, fought the legitimate wars, and now we're stuck with a dead end job, 2.4 kids, and a wife that's getting fat eating bon bons and complains about our receding hairline because she never loved anything or anybody, ever. Exploration games would be great for us.

That's why I like the Long Way Round so much. Its all about problem solving, being in the now, in the landscape. None of this drudgery. I think Hollywood avoids travelogues because its not as cheap as crappy physical games on sets, fake drama in New Jersey, and throwing money at people for stupid game shows or filmed "challenges". That stuff is why TV is dying. Why Movies are getting low attendance. They want to pretend they haven't failed by firing their writers until the reputation for Hollywood is the same as a sewer if you're a writer. You can't go any lower. Everywhere else is better. Writers are doing better things with our time than help Hollywood get a single dollar or scrap of work out of us. We're starving them out.

Video game escapism works better. All the different kinds of games, all the interactive wonder and storytelling being done there has financially eclipsed Hollywood trash. Instead of insisting on the Trite Repetition of Hollywood, video games let you tell far more interesting stories. And they don't have to end with Religion, or have a Jesus Figure, something Hollywood can't stop mocking. Killing the Hero's best friend? Gosh, I think I've seen that before! How many times before I don't wanna pay good money for that at a theater? Duh! That's a big part of why I stopped going to movies. I'm finding more interesting video games are comparable prices. And since others are too, the games keep getting betters. I hope to see more of them in more interesting directions than the Pinata variety (smack the monster till it explodes and the money and toys come out). Thus my points on Exploration as a genre. For now, I poke around in Google Earth and trick the 3D functions into working by tilting my viewing angle. Not interactive enough, but still has value. And I can eat my own home cooked meals and don't have to avoid drinking the water.