Programming / Video Games Links
I don’t know why, but today it was Robinson that came to my mind.
This story had enchanted me – to find myself there, all alone, lost, with nothing but my hands and my few acquaintances, and to stay alive. A totally impossible bet – but behind the character of Robinson Crusoe, totally realized.
It was this point that impressed me the most: how did he not give up?
Not to ask God for thanks and stop the adventure there?
I had followed step by step this character so far away from me: how he recovers some tools. How he does it when he understands that nobody will come to save him. How he doesn’t let himself be discouraged when his first constructions are destroyed. How he manages to eat – to sleep peacefully.
And I, like all readers, got caught up in the story of this man who, all alone, gets back into life and builds himself a small haven of peace and abundance. I will never be able to have his constancy and strength. But I know that I will always keep in the back of my mind the memory of a man who did not give up.
It is true that this problem concerns me more particularly. But each one of us, we find in the stories we hold dear a resonance with our ways of approaching life.
It is simply the sign of a great story.
So then – as the text has aged – as it is long and so difficult to read, Madame (yes, I have taken back my costume as a literature teacher -it’s my big trick to manage the ups and downs of the entertainment world and it allows me to keep a very close contact with my favourite audience- & my students do not like to read …. ), it is necessary to find a way to give it to love, in spite of everything – to pass the terrible bar of all these pages, of all these words.
The ones that have been most successful in conveying the spirit of Robinson are video games.
There is an incredible amount of games directly inspired by this story: I remember, on my island, chasing chickens, trying to find something to build an oven (an oven: but why build an oven when you can’t catch a chicken?), hanging around in all the thickets looking for seeds, collecting wood – and of course – otherwise the game is not a game, being attacked by monsters ten times my size, with just a small knife. Mode: almost realistic.
This game, The Forest, is still very, very, very well known – and very, very well played: well, you get attacked by cannibals and you miss the sea.
It’s not a question for the developers to copy Daniel Defoe, but to be inspired by him.
The worst of all these games (in my opinion) is undoubtedly Subnautica. It’s an atrocious game. Atrocious because we are in the open sea and that apart from an island, we stay in the water. And that it is necessary to go to seek everything at the bottom of the sea. Obviously we lack oxygen and we end up drowned without any stop.
There have been adaptations of Robinson Crusoe to the cinema – to television
What about the Living Show ? Well…. Yes there was.
And … then I haven’t liked any of them yet – I probably missed The Pearl –
I’ve seen “young audience” shows where …. …. so the adventure, it went down the actors’ socks.
Puppet shows where Robinson is five years old.
…..
Avant-garde Shows where I stopped watching very, very quickly – since they are shows where there is nothing to see.
Which begs the question: why is there so little adventure on our stages?
And this leads me to propose a solution.
As you probably know, performance companies have as much funding as I do, so nothing at all.
They go in blind and propose a project. It is taken or not taken by the theatres. If it is taken, they get the funding. If not, nothing.
And that’s the other part of Altair that is very important to me: the production of shows.
We can expect proposals – yes, that’s true.
But if we want to have a bizarre theatre adapted to its audience, we’ll have to reverse the game.
Adventure, and this one in particular, is a great component of video games. So we need a theatre that commands truly beautiful adventure shows.
And if I manage to get my adventure show – I have a whole bunch of excerpts for the Extreme Virtual Reality version, by the way.
I can’t pretend to have interesting content for that if I don’t have shows on stage that match.
Isn’t it logical ?
Featured Image & all today’s images : from Stranded Deep, by BEAM Team Games ( another Indie Game) 2015 – yes, it’ s my favourite, all right – it’s beautiful, isn’t it?
ALTAIR - Concepts 