Writing Exercise - Jamie Sieber's "Unspoken: The Music of Only Breath"
I love Jamie Sieber - her music is featured heavily in one of my favorite games, Braid. Braid is one of those fantastic indie games that really pushes your concepts of how games are meant to played. On the surface it's a linear platform puzzle game, but the player can, and must, manipulate time in order to progress throughout the game. It's a really fun play, as well as a beautiful one.
Anyways, onto the writing portion of this entry! I tried to imagine what sort of resolution my game narrative would have. I came up with a sort of cheesy "everything will be okay" one, but if there's anything a game like Braid has taught me, it's this: You can take a done-to-death idea (princess must be rescued from a monster) and twist it up to make it interesting and new again. It's this lofty goal that I am setting for myself with this game.
I've said before that I'm a gamer. I've also said before that I don't really have a cohesive online identity. I think I need to change that statement - I do, it's just not that different from my realworld identity. There's a lot of discussion these days about people spending too much time online and disconnecting from reality. I think the real problem is about having two identities and being an unified person - the trick is to try and be the same person online as you are in real life, and not to lose your identity in the information of the internet. The only way that I know how to do this is to try and balance my life between the fun escapism of games and the internet, and the fun things in the real world too. Time needs to be taken every day to go outside and glory in the sun, and the wind and so on. The real world shouldn't be a bad place with bullies and boring jobs - we should work to make it as attractive as an online existence, not just decry the internet and virtual realities.
It's this sort of happy, and utopic, medium that I think I would like to leave the players of this game aiming for. I'm not interested in making a game which portrays the internet as bad, or games as bad, but one that shows that consumerism interplaying with online identities can lead to some pretty negative stuff, and that there shouldn't be the massive separation between online and real world existences as there is right now.
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Somewhere, there's got to be a happy medium. A way to live with the net, the addons and the programs, and not let them overcome you. Escaping commercialism is a good way to start the journey, and it's with this aim in mind that I step back into the spotlight. I begin the push to create a free net, easily accessible by all. Oh, I know it's not possible to create a completely free net - certain addons and apps are always going to be pricey and signs of status. There's no real way to combat that. But in today's world, it's fair to say that a great equalizer will be the access to the net. Freedom of information, to access it and to create it, is my main goal right now.
Luckily, this scandal with the corrupt government has opened up a lot of people eyes (both online and in reality) to the fact that the system is pretty rotten. Something needs to be done, and the corporations are realizing that they have a lot of power. I heard this morning that one has already begun offering a free information, no fixed plan option. It's a slow connection, and no equipment is included, but once the new government comes into office and starts offering basic equipment for free it's only a matter of time before the competing companies start offering free data packs. The competitive nature can only serve us well in this instance, as each company will compete to attract the largest clientele, knowing that they can at least control the advertisement spaces inside those VR channels.
So, slowly, we're pushing forwards. Some day we'll reach an equilibrium, a happy medium between living in the dirt and living in the wires. I just hope that people don't forget why we're doing it.
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