Desert Diving in the Summer
Hello everyone!
So, I did not mean to take a months long break from writing, but summer + small kids + life = Homer go something something.
I have, somehow, managed to keep up a bit with games, or at least the habit of playing games. In particular, I have played a lot of Dune: Awakening this summer.
I had hoped it would be good. I like Dune. Not enough to read the sequel things, but certainly enough to get through the novel about a giant worm in love and keep going. Despite my rejection of the Brian Herbert novels, I am not a purist. The recent HBO show is perfectly... okay. I guess I am in this tricky enough little place where I don't mind reading stories set in a wider Dune universe but I'm not terribly invested in it. I am not going to get super excited about a Fenring showing up, just, you know. Don't overdo it.
I'm 80+ hours into Dune: Awakening which includes a lot of ferrying around for aluminum (I like this kind of thing, don't judge me) and so far, the game has not overdone it. I mean, it has the odd, quasi-Islamic desert people spirituality stuff that you find in the original novels, and that Kim Stanley Robinson somewhat revisits in his Mars trilogy later - but all in all they successfully cloak that stuff in good old fashioned video games vibes and a story that both goes hard into nerdy Dune lore and then does its own thing.
It gets away with this by setting the entire game in an alternate timeline from the actual Dune novels. This is announced basically immediately, in the opening cutscenes, and off we go. In this fictional world Paul Atreides was never born, and so you get to run around looking for spots to build a base on an Arrakis feuded over by the Harkonnens and the Atreides. Everyone believes the Fremen have been destroyed in a Sardaukar-executed genocide, but the game hints very, very strongly that the Fremen have survived.
Could I teach with this game? Oh God, no. I could certainly see myself reading an essay on it by a student. But although this game has grabbed my interest with some of its depictions - of genocide, of Herbert's interpretations of a future feudal empire - everything just takes too long. Like the Paradox games, you get a lot of interesting ideas from hours and hours of gameplay, but I couldn't begin to recreate this in a classroom. I spend most of my time in Dune: Awakening gathering materials and occasionally building. Am I a weirdo? God, yes. But the game doesn't really work as an interesting historically-influenced take until you've lived in the game world. So, if I get a student who loves the game I can advise them on writing on it. But that's the best I can do.
As a game, I think it works very well actually. Time and time again, developers made decisions to just make your life easier. There's a mechanic whereby if you're in the sun too long you get a debuff. This makes sense, and making a run for the shade is more fun and involving than you might think. When I get on my sandbike - major milestone early on - you are just... impervious to the heat? Because it would just be a pain to manage that stuff on your bike. Good choice.
My ornithopter, similarly, can take hilarious abuse when I screw up landings. They just made it doable.
When I first started playing the game I was rather taken aback by how empty this supposed-MMO was. But now that I'm regularly ferrying supplies between bases and flying over the landscape, I get it. The sparse population allows people to just build: cool, ornithopter-access-only bases on the top of massive rock pillars, incredible demesnes just outside trading posts... the world feels lived in despite the lack of early 2000s WOW-style rubbing up against strangers. I think it's exactly my vibe.
Long time readers will be surprised I haven't written about Death Stranding 2 yet, several times. I have obviously bought Death Stranding 2 and I am working on it. I am going to wait a while, or try to contain myself at least. I will just say that based on the early hours if you liked Death Stranding or, like some people writing this newsletter, found it incredibly moving and a Rosetta Stone to understanding why people like Hideo Kojima so much, you will definitely really like Death Stranding 2.
More to come, for sure.
Thanks for bearing with me, all. I hope you're having a great summer!
Oh, one more thing. A few months ago I got back into photography, a hobby I was very much into twenty years ago and then forgot about. It's a long story, maybe I'll share some day. Anyway, I am enjoying myself, and I've gone ahead and opened an Etsy store, which you're welcome to visit and/or tell friends about. I'm also going to blog about photographs (less frequently than I write here) on my website.