Constellation Games
Jun. 15th, 2012 05:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroIn the very near future, aliens arrive. They’re friendly and want to share with us and learn about us. While the world’s governments freak out and human society starts adapting to not being alone in the universe, video game programmer and reviewer Ariel Blum comes up with the crazy idea to play and review the alien’s collection of video games.
Ariel, honestly, is kind of a dick. Realistically so: He’s immature, doesn’t follow through on projects, don’t read people well, and generally acts like he’s fresh out of fucks to give. This means that he connects remarkably well to the post-scarcity anarchist society of the Constellation and makes an amusing bridge between them. (I’m reminded a bit of dating or job interviews: The people who train and train and are constantly trying really hard get trapped in awkward routines and repetitions; the people who walk in comfortable and confident, who don’t seem to care whether they succeed or not, end up knocking it out of the park. Which is, of course, a commentary on humans much more than aliens.)
This isn’t really a book about video games, of course. This is a book about sociology and culture clash, told through a metaphor of video games. On that topic: The human video games that appear are of the “no copyrights were harmed” variety. We can tell it takes place during the PS4 era, and most of the retro consoles are real, but all of the games are altered and renamed. Several plot points revolve around a Lara Croft expy and a game series that is obviously Halo-based.
I would love to see more “expanded universe” to this: How is corporate America dealing with the arrival of a post-scarcity society that can just hand you anything you want? What are the fundamentalist Christians doing in terms of either hating or trying to convert the aliens (or, more likely, both)? How does the oil lobby/climate change denialist movement react when the Constellation says, “You are fucking killing yourselves and making your planet uninhabitable, seriously, no joke,” immediately followed by, “Want some free clean energy tech? We’ve got lots of it.” This novel focuses on the political and sociological reactions, but while we get to see the US government go into a panic when the Constellation provides free, unmonitorable, paper-based supercomputers, I’m curious about what Apple and Microsoft were doing. (Smart companies learn to make apps for the new systems. Most companies would try to claim the new tech causes mind-controlling brain tumors and try to have it outlawed.)
Overall: Do you like video games? Do you enjoy amusing video game reviews, particularly the sarcastic and acerbic kind? Are you, or have you ever been, a geek? Then you’ll like this book. You can catch the tail end of the serialization (which at this point means getting the ebook compilation) direct from the publisher or just buy the paperback from Amazon.
Disclaimer: I know both the author and the publisher personally. Also, my wife had been hyping this book to me ever since she read an early draft in their writing group.
Ariel, honestly, is kind of a dick. Realistically so: He’s immature, doesn’t follow through on projects, don’t read people well, and generally acts like he’s fresh out of fucks to give. This means that he connects remarkably well to the post-scarcity anarchist society of the Constellation and makes an amusing bridge between them. (I’m reminded a bit of dating or job interviews: The people who train and train and are constantly trying really hard get trapped in awkward routines and repetitions; the people who walk in comfortable and confident, who don’t seem to care whether they succeed or not, end up knocking it out of the park. Which is, of course, a commentary on humans much more than aliens.)
This isn’t really a book about video games, of course. This is a book about sociology and culture clash, told through a metaphor of video games. On that topic: The human video games that appear are of the “no copyrights were harmed” variety. We can tell it takes place during the PS4 era, and most of the retro consoles are real, but all of the games are altered and renamed. Several plot points revolve around a Lara Croft expy and a game series that is obviously Halo-based.
I would love to see more “expanded universe” to this: How is corporate America dealing with the arrival of a post-scarcity society that can just hand you anything you want? What are the fundamentalist Christians doing in terms of either hating or trying to convert the aliens (or, more likely, both)? How does the oil lobby/climate change denialist movement react when the Constellation says, “You are fucking killing yourselves and making your planet uninhabitable, seriously, no joke,” immediately followed by, “Want some free clean energy tech? We’ve got lots of it.” This novel focuses on the political and sociological reactions, but while we get to see the US government go into a panic when the Constellation provides free, unmonitorable, paper-based supercomputers, I’m curious about what Apple and Microsoft were doing. (Smart companies learn to make apps for the new systems. Most companies would try to claim the new tech causes mind-controlling brain tumors and try to have it outlawed.)
Overall: Do you like video games? Do you enjoy amusing video game reviews, particularly the sarcastic and acerbic kind? Are you, or have you ever been, a geek? Then you’ll like this book. You can catch the tail end of the serialization (which at this point means getting the ebook compilation) direct from the publisher or just buy the paperback from Amazon.
Disclaimer: I know both the author and the publisher personally. Also, my wife had been hyping this book to me ever since she read an early draft in their writing group.
