Orson Scott Card on Games, 21 Years Ago

MilenCent writes "Long long ago, Orson Scott Card wrote a game opinion column for Compute! Magazine. In the November 1983 issue, he had some interesting things to say about the essential ingredients of a great game, all arguably still important today. He picked out one company that, at the time, consistently excelled in most of these areas--try to guess which one! Additional commentary over at Curmudgeon Gamer."

Comments

osc

[j3rryh]

OSC has quite the pr engine, digging up 20 yr old articles to hype the Enders Game movie. verrrrry sneaky

Re:Orson Scott Card's predictions

[AlterTick]

I've re-read Ender's Game lately (written in 1985), and was amased by some of the predictions Orson made in just one book.

Really? I saw nothing particularly insightful.

The "network"

Gosh, he envisioned a worldwide network only only 15-20 years after the creation of early world-wide networks like compuserve and the internet.

online news and bloggers

'cause no one was doing anything even remotely like that which could be fictionally extrapolated, like USENET of BBS's.

hand-held devices used for education (we only start seing them now)

Yeah, unprecedented. Those hand-held slates and chalk children used in the 19th century bear no resemblance to tablet PCs. No writer but the most visionary could predict hand held computers in 1985, when every high school student had a scientific calculator, and computers had (over the previous 10 years) shrunk from room-sized to desktop sized. Every kid with a Commodore 64 and half an ounce of imagination envisioned a future where computers were the size of an Etch-A-Sketch

Card's sci-fi was pretty pedestrian in the visionary sense. Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) was far and away more visionary. The fact that Card didn't even bother to imagine the worldwide network being anything but text-based is pretty telling.

Re:Orson Scott Card's predictions

[AlterTick]

The internet was only opened to the public in 1990's. Nobody could tell then what it would look like and how (if at all) it would be used by wide public. As to blogging, it only gained public awareness in this millenium.

Card's "Locke and Demosthenes" bit could hardly have been described as a blog. It was public message boards, exactly like those found on CompuServe and scores of public and private BBS's. From Ch 9, Valentine to Peter on his plan to go on the net and manipulate public opinion:

"On the nets we are clearly identified as students, and we can't even get into the real discussions except in audience mode, which means we can't say anything anyway."

Sounds more like a moderated newsgroup discussion than a "blog" to me.

The internet was only opened to the public in 1990's. Nobody could tell then what it would look like and how (if at all) it would be used by wide public.

I don't understand. Are you now saying he's a visionary, or that being a visionary would be impossible?

And where the heck did you come up that he only thought the network would be text-based??

From the complete lack of reference to digital images or video outside of Ender's little video game perhaps?

Anyway, you missed the whole point. It was concievable that the technology would be developed to the stage that we see now (although the amount of small details that turned out to be correct is surprising). It is much more difficult to predict how the technology will be used, to what extent it will be part of our lives, and its social impact. The technological "atmosphere" described really captures the essence of what we only begin to experience today.

I don't think I did miss the point. The description of "the nets" exactly fits a USENET or networked BBS message bases (e.g. FidoNet), the former being familiar to most university students of the time, and the latter being downright common and publicly accessible to boot. It wasn't particularly visionary, it was a weakly extrapolated mirror of existing things.