/lit/ - Literature

[Algernon Blackwood No.609988]

I just had a simply enlightening discussion with our friends on the video games board. They are positively enthralled by the concept of literature!

Conversely, we are somewhat lackluster. Are there no examples of classical or modern literature that would make for good immersive experiences?

[Algernon Blackwood No.609989]

I had noticed that their materials, where not directly taken from literature itself, were indisputably inspired by literature.

I must believe that books would make better experiences than the secondary interpretations put together these days....

[Algernon Blackwood No.609991]

The "survival horror" genre, for example?

Who would not enjoy switching places with the protagonist of my work, "The Wendigo"?

Or assuming the role of Golden John from the Manly Wade Wellman works?

How about becoming Shelley's doctor, Frankenstein, and working to wit's end to track and stop your own creation while wrestling with guilt all the while?

[Anonymous No.609992]

Iam monitering both the vidya thread and this thread

[Algernon Blackwood No.609994]

>>609992
You chaps were certainly more lively....

[Anonymous No.609999]

>>609994

Such is the way of the vidya

[Anonymous No.610002]

DUDE I TAKE A BREAK FROM DWARF FORTRESS AND THIS GUY IS ALL LIKE "Chaps care for an enlightening discussion?" AND I'M ALL LIKE O_O OH SHIT SKELETAL YETI!

[Anonymous No.610007]

I plan on writing video games of literary quality, just as soon as I have improved my writing and knowledge of literature.

[Algernon Blackwood No.610008]

>>610002
a yeti? or a WENDIGO?!

[Anonymous No.610014]

>>610008
A Yeti! A Skeletal Undead Yeti! Came out of the woods and killed a child dwarf who went to far from the fort. The other dwarfs are to afraid to leave the safety of the walls to get the body. They are shooting their crossbows at zombies that are trying to get inside!

[Algernon Blackwood No.610017]

>>610014
Do you see /lit/?

The possibilities are endless! Imagine if this poor miserable chap, no doubt being rent asunder by skeletal horrors as we speak, was instead a gentleman from an Oscar Wilde invention, or a Jules Verne novel?

He would be having an INFINITELY more enjoyable time than being devoured by godless bony terrors.

[Anonymous No.610020]

>>609988
Cities of the Red Night would make a great immersive experience given all the gay sex, .30-06, .30-40, heroin addiction, ejaculation caused deaths, hanging, investigations, time travel, cowboys, genetic feminazis.

[Anonymous No.610022]

>>610014
>to far
>to afraid

[Joseph Conrad No.610031]

I am inclined to look kindly on these computer-games. I have not played them myself, but by the kind favour of my friend and rival Mr. Wells I have had the use of one of his remarkable machines, and thereby been permitted to read the testimony of future times.
Are we asked to recommend those works which will entice the players of games towards our sphere? If self-promotion is permitted - which, judging by the example of Mr. Blackwood, it is - I would observe that my own modest work is well suited to a reader accustomed to the experience of 'immersion'. I have ever strived and always will to impress upon my readers the intimation of insight into the inscrutable darkness of which our world and our fellow men are composed, for if as I have said we dream alone (and what is a computer-game but a dream?) then only art's shared dream stands a hope of establishing and defending symbols and particulars which throw a little light (if only one to be drowned by) on our deepest selves and our relations with our neighbours. Two things I take as my idols: art, and labour. What is a game but labour as art?

[Joseph Conrad No.610033]

I and the makers of games share a parity of labour: our task which we are trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word or the ‘coded’ world, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see. In a world clogged with empty journalistic prose and public wittering – this is my world and the world of the video-gamer – I maintain that only direct vision of the phenomena is capable of rousing us and awakening our sympathetic imagination to each other. Writers of books and of games must simulate that vision, and if their readers are not roused, must fail.

For the game-player, all my works (if I may be so bold) arouse excitement, and the descriptive technique which my critics have short-sightedly labelled as ‘literary impressionism’ is well suited to immersion in a foreign and exotic world, whether it is the South American state depicted in ‘Nostromo’, the infinite horizons of the far east in ‘Lord Jim’, or the monstrous gloom of London in ‘The Secret Agent’. The fancies of ‘pulp’ literature, of gun-fights, great voyages, foreign adventures, revolutions, hostile natives, terrorist bombs, and foreign spies, I take as the material for my project, but in my hands – I hope – they are moulded to make a thing of more complexity.

[Joseph Conrad No.610035]

Without any intention of condescending to – I mean patronising – either such literature or the game-players, I venture to suggest that many might well be enticed into appreciation of that complexity by the adventurous elements I have outlined.

Moreover I have always been concerned in all of my writing to demonstrate the unfailing reach of moral problems into the most ordinary of lives. Game-players fresh from the dilemmas of ‘Mass Effect’ or other works of the Bioware studio will surely appreciate this dimension (although since computer-games allow them to experience such problems for themselves, to make a decision, and to bear the consequences – like any ‘hero’ of my novels – I fear they may have an advantage over we writers).

My time runs short even as art lengthens. I must return to writing my Napoleonic novel, on which my progress is so slow I fear it will never be completed; writing is always difficult and this is only what the 21st century will call ‘procrastination’. Nevertheless, if you are all amenable, I may return tonight and make some recommendations from the field of ‘modern’ literature (published after my own death! Strange world).

[Anonymous No.610540]

Marlowe's 'Tamburlaine' is like a videogame - it's glorious. Contemporary audiences loved it for how it took them to a faraway exotic mileau and impressed them with strange sights, and the warrior hero just ascends through level after level of progressively more badass villains until he becomes the ultimate badass. Of course, then there's part 2...

[Anonymous No.610563]

>>610031
>>610033
>>610035


This is incredible.

[Anonymous No.610570]

Conrad- fucking great

[Anonymous No.610579]

>>610031
>>610033
>>610035
how the fuck do you people come up with this

[Anonymous No.610589]

>>610579
he's at Oxford, this is expected of him

someone cap it

[Anonymous No.610635]

posting after epic posts.