http://www.richardhofmeier.com/bootlegs/index.php Bootlegs & Jpegs - An online account by Richard Hofmeier en-US hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 Nicholson Baker on Games http://www.richardhofmeier.com/bootlegs/index.php/2010/08/04/nicholson_baker_on_games 2010-08-04T13:44:42Z Richard Games From this podcast at The New Yorker, we have fiction writer Nicholson Baker putting it elegantly: “I like (a video game), and I think everybody likes it because it feels real, but it feels real and thought about. In a strange way. If you’re making a movie and you go on-location in Borneo, you may get beautiful leaf shadows and wonderful sky effects and cloud effects. But it’s a matter of luck, and the camera is picking up what’s there, for the most part. But everything in these games has been thought about by a human being. Those plants have been placed there, and the actual angle of the sky has been the subject of discussion at a meeting. The whole thing is constructed. It’s a human creation that ends up looking real and chaotic and random, and yet beautiful. That is something new, I think.” Also, this: “I fantasize about a video game that is truer to real life. Not just the leaf shadows, and not just the realistic, splashy water effects, but truer to the way people live and what they actually think about, and what is truly at risk in their lives. The challenge would be to write a video game that is, I guess, more novelistic. More like an Anne Tyler novel, or something. What I fantasize about is not necessarily writing a video game, because I don’t want to presume that I could do a good job at that. I’d like to touch-up some dialog sometimes, but… What I would like to do is be one of those lucky people who figures out how the light would hit the ledge. […] The desire that is seems that video game designers have to really pay homage to the real world thrills me, because it’s very similar to my own desire to describe something in words. To say, “Oh! Nobody’s seen that! I will wrap a sentence around it. I will make sense of it, in a paragraph.” And they make sense of it with some sort of elaborate lighting algorithm and a texture mapping protocol. I mean all of that is exactly what we want. We want people thinking about how the world actually works, because it’s so complicated and interesting.” These quotes are from a phone interview done with Baker to go along with an article on game which he wrote for the august New Yorker. You can read it here if you have a subscription (I don’t). The abstract is available online for the rest of us. Baker at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholson_Baker Books by Nicholson Baker: http://www.j-walk.com/nbaker/books.htm From this podcast at The New Yorker, we have fiction writer Nicholson Baker putting it elegantly:

“I like (a video game), and I think everybody likes it because it feels real, but it feels real and thought about. In a strange way.

If you’re making a movie and you go on-location in Borneo, you may get beautiful leaf shadows and wonderful sky effects and cloud effects. But it’s a matter of luck, and the camera is picking up what’s there, for the most part. But everything in these games has been thought about by a human being. Those plants have been placed there, and the actual angle of the sky has been the subject of discussion at a meeting. The whole thing is constructed. It’s a human creation that ends up looking real and chaotic and random, and yet beautiful. That is something new, I think.”

Also, this:

“I fantasize about a video game that is truer to real life. Not just the leaf shadows, and not just the realistic, splashy water effects, but truer to the way people live and what they actually think about, and what is truly at risk in their lives.

The challenge would be to write a video game that is, I guess, more novelistic. More like an Anne Tyler novel, or something. What I fantasize about is not necessarily writing a video game, because I don’t want to presume that I could do a good job at that. I’d like to touch-up some dialog sometimes, but… What I would like to do is be one of those lucky people who figures out how the light would hit the ledge. […]

The desire that is seems that video game designers have to really pay homage to the real world thrills me, because it’s very similar to my own desire to describe something in words. To say, “Oh! Nobody’s seen that! I will wrap a sentence around it. I will make sense of it, in a paragraph.” And they make sense of it with some sort of elaborate lighting algorithm and a texture mapping protocol. I mean all of that is exactly what we want. We want people thinking about how the world actually works, because it’s so complicated and interesting.”

These quotes are from a phone interview done with Baker to go along with an article on game which he wrote for the august New Yorker. You can read it here if you have a subscription (I don’t). The abstract is available online for the rest of us.

Baker at wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholson_Baker

Books by Nicholson Baker:
http://www.j-walk.com/nbaker/books.htm

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