Fantasy is always going to be more popular than sci-fi because of the implied sense of things past and the past is always a golden age in the human psyche. Sci-fi tends to imply the future which is just too difficult for most people to even visualize. Successful fantasy settings are all pretty much the same medieval time frame and everyone knows all about that. Sci-fi settings can be anything and good luck getting a group of people to agree on anything.
Shouldn't the trolls all be turning to stone in daylight? In FOTR Bilbo tells his troll story to the kids and later we actually see the troll statues after weathertop. Why then are trolls running around in broad daylight in ROTK? Sunblock perhaps...
My high school had a rival school called Cox and we were regulary called upon by the pep squad to "Beat Cox Good! Beat Cox Now!" I still laugh my ass off remembering that.
An interesting parallel to the whole video game/violence argument is to consider the older comic book/violence argument. This link is an interesting read: http://www.psu.edu/dept/inart10_110/inart10/cmbk4c ca.html
And here's a good quote from the article:
"Badly drawn, badly written, and badly printed - a strain on the young eyes and young nervous systems - the effects of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant. Their crude blacks and reds spoils a child's natural sense of colour; their hypodermic injection of sex and murder make the child impatient with better, though quieter, stories. Unless we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one, parents and teachers throughout America must band together to break the `comic' magazine."
What's truly sad is that as a culture we have not grown past this idiotic tendency to pass the buck. Surely the next generation will look back on our current fear and loathing of video games with the same bemused confusion that we now have for the last generations fear and loathing of comic books.
Slashdot Mirror
Fantasy is always going to be more popular than sci-fi because of the implied sense of things past and the past is always a golden age in the human psyche. Sci-fi tends to imply the future which is just too difficult for most people to even visualize. Successful fantasy settings are all pretty much the same medieval time frame and everyone knows all about that. Sci-fi settings can be anything and good luck getting a group of people to agree on anything.
Shouldn't the trolls all be turning to stone in daylight? In FOTR Bilbo tells his troll story to the kids and later we actually see the troll statues after weathertop. Why then are trolls running around in broad daylight in ROTK? Sunblock perhaps...
My high school had a rival school called Cox and we were regulary called upon by the pep squad to "Beat Cox Good! Beat Cox Now!" I still laugh my ass off remembering that.
An interesting parallel to the whole video game/violence argument is to consider the older comic book/violence argument. This link is an interesting read: http://www.psu.edu/dept/inart10_110/inart10/cmbk4c ca.html
And here's a good quote from the article:
"Badly drawn, badly written, and badly printed - a strain on the young eyes and young nervous systems - the effects of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant. Their crude blacks and reds spoils a child's natural sense of colour; their hypodermic injection of sex and murder make the child impatient with better, though quieter, stories. Unless we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one, parents and teachers throughout America must band together to break the `comic' magazine."
What's truly sad is that as a culture we have not grown past this idiotic tendency to pass the buck. Surely the next generation will look back on our current fear and loathing of video games with the same bemused confusion that we now have for the last generations fear and loathing of comic books.