A book and two games
Jul. 25th, 2022 12:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearThis week, I finished Green Valley by Louis Greenberg. I can't remember how it ended up on my reading shelf, but I mostly enjoyed it.
It's a detective story, set in a future where the majority of people have rejected technology, surveillance, internet, social media, etc - while a certain subset have retreated within a giant warehouse, where they live with a virtual reality system built into their brains, which shows them different surroundings and controls both their senses and their emotions.
The VR enclave is called Green Valley, and kids from there start turning up dead in the city outside.
Our protagonist is Lucie Sterling, who works for a secret department within the police force, which still has access to various bits of technology, to track suspects, search electronic records and do electronic surveillance. Her niece, who lives in Green Valley, disappears, which is why Lucie gets involved in the case.
There's a sense of Stalinist dystopia about the world outside Green Valley, but there's also evidently corruption and deception within the enclave too. So, neither system is presented as being the 'right' one - both have problems, with the authorial view presumably being that neither extreme is the right way to go in society.
There was a *lot* of exposition at the start of the book and it was presented quite clunkily. I've also always had issues with the concept of 'physical' VR, whereby you move around an actual space, but just see a different reality overlaid on your senses. It works to a certain extent here, but I don't see how people could actually live that way, rather than the other option of being 'plugged in' to a different reality and having their body be suspended and maintained in some way outside.
Anyway, those issues aside, I liked the protagonist, the world was well realised, the plot kept me engaged, and the writing was generally good. Anyone who like detective stories and speculative fiction about where certain aspects of our society might be headed will likely enjoy this book.
I have also been playing two very different video games recently.
Stardew Valley is a combined farming/RPG game where you take over your grandfather's run-down farm in a remote town. You have to grow crops, cultivate animals, build relationships, explore the monster-infested mines, do unnecessarily large amounts of difficult fishing, and help restore the town by delivering sets of objects to the friendly spirits who live in the community centre...
It felt very overwhelming to start with - you can only save at the end of each 'day', which lasts 15-20 minutes, but the time seems to tick by extremely fast and there doesn't seem to be much opportunity to achieve any of the multifarious things that need to be done.
I used the vast amount of online information, guides, reviews, etc, to get more of a handle on how to play and what to focus on. And I quickly became very invested in my life as part of Pelican Town! I'm currently nearing the end of Year Two in the game - I'm already married and have completed quite a few of the larger objectives (though I'm still working on the fishing).
The gameplay is quite relaxing, the levelling up is reasonably swift, and you can basically pick and choose what you spend your time on, as nothing really has a hard deadline or is actually required in order to progress. I'm already thinking about starting a new farm with a different character, so I can focus on different things and make friends with different villagers... Though I could just carry on playing my initial game and gradually tick everything off over time.
Lots to do, but not in a pressured way, once you get over the initial overwhelm!
Earlier in the week, I also played Reigns: Her Majesty for a bit. It's a simple mechanic, where you get a series of cards showing a particular decision to make as queen, and you choose one of two options, in order to progress. There are four indicators of your success - church, populace, army and finances. Each decision affects one of more of those categories, and you can see which ones they will be and roughly how much they will change - but not in which direction (though it's generally reasonably easy to guess that).
To begin with, I found it extremely entertaining. My first reign ended after only three years, with the church burning me at the stake as a heathen... But my third reign lasted 41 years, only ending when I could no longer balance the needs of the church and the desires of the popular pagan cult. I played through about fiften queens (or perhaps a few more than that...) before the endings started repeated themselves, but the ongoing plot threads and continuing list of tasks kept me playing through a few more reigns before I decided to stop. That was over the course of about 24 hours, which isn't a lot, but the game was cheap, and I could potentially have played more over a longer period, if I hadn't binged it quite so much at the start.
And interesting format, and quite fun for a while.
It's a detective story, set in a future where the majority of people have rejected technology, surveillance, internet, social media, etc - while a certain subset have retreated within a giant warehouse, where they live with a virtual reality system built into their brains, which shows them different surroundings and controls both their senses and their emotions.
The VR enclave is called Green Valley, and kids from there start turning up dead in the city outside.
Our protagonist is Lucie Sterling, who works for a secret department within the police force, which still has access to various bits of technology, to track suspects, search electronic records and do electronic surveillance. Her niece, who lives in Green Valley, disappears, which is why Lucie gets involved in the case.
There's a sense of Stalinist dystopia about the world outside Green Valley, but there's also evidently corruption and deception within the enclave too. So, neither system is presented as being the 'right' one - both have problems, with the authorial view presumably being that neither extreme is the right way to go in society.
There was a *lot* of exposition at the start of the book and it was presented quite clunkily. I've also always had issues with the concept of 'physical' VR, whereby you move around an actual space, but just see a different reality overlaid on your senses. It works to a certain extent here, but I don't see how people could actually live that way, rather than the other option of being 'plugged in' to a different reality and having their body be suspended and maintained in some way outside.
Anyway, those issues aside, I liked the protagonist, the world was well realised, the plot kept me engaged, and the writing was generally good. Anyone who like detective stories and speculative fiction about where certain aspects of our society might be headed will likely enjoy this book.
I have also been playing two very different video games recently.
Stardew Valley is a combined farming/RPG game where you take over your grandfather's run-down farm in a remote town. You have to grow crops, cultivate animals, build relationships, explore the monster-infested mines, do unnecessarily large amounts of difficult fishing, and help restore the town by delivering sets of objects to the friendly spirits who live in the community centre...
It felt very overwhelming to start with - you can only save at the end of each 'day', which lasts 15-20 minutes, but the time seems to tick by extremely fast and there doesn't seem to be much opportunity to achieve any of the multifarious things that need to be done.
I used the vast amount of online information, guides, reviews, etc, to get more of a handle on how to play and what to focus on. And I quickly became very invested in my life as part of Pelican Town! I'm currently nearing the end of Year Two in the game - I'm already married and have completed quite a few of the larger objectives (though I'm still working on the fishing).
The gameplay is quite relaxing, the levelling up is reasonably swift, and you can basically pick and choose what you spend your time on, as nothing really has a hard deadline or is actually required in order to progress. I'm already thinking about starting a new farm with a different character, so I can focus on different things and make friends with different villagers... Though I could just carry on playing my initial game and gradually tick everything off over time.
Lots to do, but not in a pressured way, once you get over the initial overwhelm!
Earlier in the week, I also played Reigns: Her Majesty for a bit. It's a simple mechanic, where you get a series of cards showing a particular decision to make as queen, and you choose one of two options, in order to progress. There are four indicators of your success - church, populace, army and finances. Each decision affects one of more of those categories, and you can see which ones they will be and roughly how much they will change - but not in which direction (though it's generally reasonably easy to guess that).
To begin with, I found it extremely entertaining. My first reign ended after only three years, with the church burning me at the stake as a heathen... But my third reign lasted 41 years, only ending when I could no longer balance the needs of the church and the desires of the popular pagan cult. I played through about fiften queens (or perhaps a few more than that...) before the endings started repeated themselves, but the ongoing plot threads and continuing list of tasks kept me playing through a few more reigns before I decided to stop. That was over the course of about 24 hours, which isn't a lot, but the game was cheap, and I could potentially have played more over a longer period, if I hadn't binged it quite so much at the start.
And interesting format, and quite fun for a while.
