Culture

The Loss of Cool Futurism: Disunity

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Serdar and I were recently’ discussing the revival/return of Omni magazine. If you’re not familiar with Omni then you’re . . . probably younger than I am.  So stop playing your music so loud and get off my lawn.

Anyway, Omni was one of those publications that had a theme of what I call “cool futurism”, of the amazing stuff we’d see, of soaring cities and great technology and a better world. It was hip and happening and often positive. Cool futurism is the kind of thing you see in Star Trek TOS, in speculations on future architecture, on imagining how we’ll solve disease or poverty – not naive, but, well, “Cool”.

It’s cool to make things better. Cool to imagine awesome things we can make.

It just doesn’t seem to be that popular anymore in America. So I began asking what happened, and you’ll be utterly shocked to hear there’s a blog post about it to follow. Probably several.

First of all, I think Cool Futurism is gone because there’s no sense of unity or potential unity.

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The Three Sides Of “Making Something” and “Making It”

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Earlier this week, Serdar explored the difference between Making Something and Making It. The two aren’t necessarily connected, and an attempt to Make It can mean doing things that go against your talent, skills, ethics, and good taste. Doing something well and getting recognized aren’t always the same thing, but seeking the recognition can distort your efforts further.

In fact, I wanted to take up the torch (and perhaps the pitchfork) and cover something related to this that faces us in our careers and our lives: Making It and Making Something are not just different, they also represent different skillets – Three of them.

Yes. Three. Let me go on.

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Gaming’s Tower of Babel

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A few weeks ago I discovered Rogue Legacy, a brilliant indie game that instantly became a time sink for me over vacation. I even reviewed it at NerdCaliber. No, I haven’t finished it – yet – but it is a fascinating study in getting a game “right” in a way where people “get” it. Also I want to finish it but I started a new job . . . and Cubeworld.

Rogue Legacy is a fusion of several elements:

  • Roguelike randomness (deriving from the early random-dungeon game Rogue).
  • Sidescrolling castle exploration of the “Metroidvania” type (reminiscent of some Metroid games and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night)
  • Brutal difficulty common to both of those games and popularized in the hardcore games Demons’ Souls and Dark Souls.
  • An aesthetic reminiscent of other hardcore games, Ghosts and Goblins and Ghouls and Ghosts.

Basically you go into a randomly generated castle, explore, die, and then a randomly generated set of ancestors are available for you to take on the journey again to get far enough to win – usually after a lot of descendants.

Now if you’re a gamer like me, you’re already responding to rods like “Roguelike” and “Metroidvania” and “Hardcore.” My choice of words – and Rogue Legacy’s ancestry – speak to powerful and popular concepts in gaming. In short, Rogue Legacy’s designers speak the language of people like me, and a language with years of history. They know what some of us want and how to do it and communicate it.

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