(2021-05-14) Hon S09e28 Point Click Adventure

Dan Hon: s09e28: Point, Click, Adventure.

Point, click, adventure

I started reading Andy Weir’s latest novel, Project Hail Mary, which if you’re the kind of person who liked his debut novel The Martian

you’ll probably like Hail Mary. Because it is a first-person scientist doing science things

The novels have a few attributes in common. They’re mainly centered around a single character, they involve a set of escalating problems that require figuring out and there’s a narrative arc. There are also a few scene changes

Which… sound a bit like point-and-click adventure games? Or even text adventure games, to be honest. What I mean to say is that the premises and narrative in these novels easily fits into a subset of the text/point-and-click genre of videogame. (interactive fiction)

If you want to really get into the history of adventure games, The Digital Antiquarian has a great set of blog posts.

Caught my attention because: Adaptations and genre similarities, taking a linear text and thinking about whether/how it would work in an interactive context, licensed properties are always an easier bet than creating new IP, remembering that Weir self-published The Martian online and serialized.

20 Years

Cory Doctorow wrote a piece, The Memex Method that’s difficult to quote because I wouldn’t know where to start. It’s mainly about the side-effect of blogging in public for more than 20 years, and he makes a comparison of public blogging to private commonplace books. 2021-05-14-DoctorowTheMemexMethod

Tool-hand-tool

This paper, Hand-selective visual regions represent how to grasp 3D tools: brain decoding during real actions (via Twitter), ran an experiment to find out how our brain treats tools to go further than the regular (I paraphrase) “when you drive a car, you feel like your body extends to the car, which is why you flinch when a car gets near your car”. This experiment used realtime fMRI to look at what happens in brains when subjects grasped 3D tools instead of the prior research which was just based on looking at pictures of tools.