Religion, Myth and Games

As expected, Bill Maher’s new documentary Religulous is stirring up strong reactions from supporters and opponents of religion alike. I probably won’t watch this movie because it seemingly aims to prove a predetermined point: that religion is ridiculous. A more bipartisan effort might have tried understanding why people subscribe to a religion, and what the religious belief adds to their lives.

But I don’t think that a discussion of the validity of organized religion will lead to a fruitful result, anyway. As game developers, understanding why religion plays such an important part in many people’s life can help us, though! Because religion is myth. And understanding myth can help us to create games that connect with the audience on a deep emotional level.

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Rating “Cyberfilms” (Part 4)

Cyberfilms is a collection of 11 sci-fi short stories that were turned into movies at some point. Movies that, with the exception of Total Recall, I have never seen. So I cecided to review each story on their own merrits, and let you know if I could see a movie in each story. Today we have two rather well-known entries: Johnny Mnemonic and Enemy Mine. I didn’t end up liking either one too much, though To read about some stories that I did like, I suggest visiting parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series. Or wait for the weekend, when I will review the final two stories from this book. Anyway, on to this week’s reviews!

Johnny Mnemonic (William Gibson)
1981
Score: D

Johnny Mnemonic was adapted by the author and turned into the film of the same name, directed by Robert Longo, and starring Keanu Reeves, Dina Meyer and Ice-T.

Yep, that’s me giving William Gibson’s story a D. I didn’t understand it. It might be a great tale, but the density of information that Gibson crams into every sentence and description is staggering. And unfortunately, it is done in such a way that my brain can’t follow. Gibson’s writing just doesn’t create any images in my mind, and an entire action scene might be over before I even realized it. Or understand what just happened.

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Page Navigation Improvements

A few weeks ago, I invested some time into making the breadcrumbs on top of every page a useful navigation tool to browse my page. That made matters much better – but when looking at image attachments, the trail was missing a link back to the parent post. Which made it a pain to go back to the actual post, and made it impossible for Google image searchers to refer to the post at all. Not anymore, though! I coded up something that includes the parent post in the breadcrumb trail:

Of course you’ll need to be in an image gallery to see this small, but important change (at least to me ). I don’t have any good new images to upload right now, so I copied over a cool post from the last webpage instead: “It’s Alive!”, the animatronics exhibition that Victoria and I visited a couple of years ago. Head over and see what Gizmo, Harry (without the Hendersons) and the American Werewolf in London look like without makeup on!