Solitude Adventures: a Science Fiction Novel, Chapter 1

So this is the first chapter of a new novel I've been writing, its called Solitude Adventures. I've been writing articles for two years now but I also write some fiction and I figure: what the hell, I'm going to publish some early drafts of this story to see what you think. Solitude Adventures is a science fiction novel about a bunch of youngsters living in an isolated school planet, when suddenly some fuck up shit starts to happen. Every chapter is written in the point of view of a different character, I hope you enjoy this first chapter.

Children of Bena

 

As the dwelling on the field continued, we gazed into the black heaven which was no more colorful than our years to come. The smell of failure came to me as an awaited and relaxing fragrance, destined to fail, the unknown and the nothingness unfolding in my mind and presence. Laying besides me, for her it was the same, destined to fail. Lying. As the dwelling on the field continued….

Out of the silence, while I was lost in the emptiness of it all, that emptiness got interrupted.

"You should be moving" she told me.

"I'm trying to enjoy possibly the final moments of my life, when I run I feel that I'm spilling the final moments that I'm able to enjoy" I said.

"Don't be such a fatalist Mata, you can still make it out of Bena if you wouldn't take so many fucking detours".

I appreciated the enthusiasm that she showed regarding my situation; the fact of the matter was that even if I managed to escape this goddamn planet I was doomed anyway. Those who became space nomads were forever lost in the memories and knowledge of the other ones that were able to stay together. Nobody is able to survive in the dark and cold pool of space and all the unknown nightmares that kept. In the our world, solitude kills faster than any cancer.

"What about your boyfriend?" I asked her "Does he want me dead too?"

"I seriously doubt it" she said, "he wasn't that angry when he looked at its failed results, I think that he just wants to speak with you."

"Really? Well... Net has always been a reasonable guy, it's good that you're with him."

I smiled at her, but her face was full of confusion and sadness after I uttered that sentence. I don't know if she was also in love with me but at least she cared about me.

"Mata... I can't believe that this is happening to you, I can't believe that you're in this situation, why did you accept the job if you weren't able to pull it off?"

"I WAS ABLE TO PULL IT OFF!" I shouted at her, she looked at me, biting her lips.

"Someone got me screwed, that wasn't a common preprogrammed system of security, someone knew what I was up to, that system was prepared to counter all of my codes".

I knew it from the moment that I started to enter in the first screens, I had just a terrible feeling after it was already too late to back off, I have been hacking EP systems for the last 4 years, and I have been able to hack the final exam results 3 consecutive times, the security system shows improvement over the years but nothing I can't handle, but this year, it was different, it was modified by a human.

"I was screwed before I even began the job"

"So you're telling me that someone in school set you up?"

"That's exactly what I'm saying and I want to know who, I want to know who bested my abilities"

She just stared at me more worried than ever.

"You really want to die here, don't you?" she asked.

"Becoming a nomad equals death, staying here equals death. I'm already dead" I replied.

"And you're creating paranoid delusions in the process, no one updates or modifies the security systems of Educational Palaces, the only ones who are capable of doing such a thing are the engineers who designed it, and they're long gone."

She had a point, the Educational Palaces were magnificent school buildings that were abandoned many years ago, however, we, the students, still attended to classes. No professors to be seen just artificial, holographic ghosts of them. Their systems were never updated and they always taught the same things generation after generation. The Educational Palaces remain the same with the passing of time. The technology in which they were built is almost ancient, only a geek like me has studied that type of obsolete linguistics to be able to understand them; I found the books that taught me such skills in an abandoned ship, close to the Alic Sea. I burned those books after I learned what I needed to learn. I was the only one familiar with its system, the only one capable of hacking the final test results. At least, that's what I thought but I have a tendency of underestimating people. Now that I think about it, if you would have lived my life you would have that same flaw to.

"Wait a minute" I was starting to put the pieces together. I stood up and began walking around in small circles in the grass. "Pretty much every one of my clients wants me dead, correct?" I asked.

"You told a bunch of guys that you would be able to hack probably the most important test of their lives at a ridiculously expensive price and then you failed. Yee, what is our friend Mrs. Logic telling us Mata?"

Oh!, my beloved Danna, I had just the perfect comeback to that.

"Ok, so we can conclude that everyone is pretty mad at me. Net was one of my clients for this job." She quickly stared at me, she knew where I was going. "Can you please repeat to me what was his reaction when he knew that I fucked everything up?"

She looked at the grass.

"You son of a bitch" she said laughing while nodding her head. "So you think that Net was the one who got you screwed?"

"You said that he wasn't mad at me, If I were him I would be pretty fucking mad at me."

I just looked at her while smiling.

"I'm just repeating what our friend Mrs. Logic is telling us Danna."

"Well, stop listening to that bitch!" She stood up. "Net would never betray one of his friends. You talk like if you didn't know him."

"The only thing I know is that we don't know no one at all, plus, you said that he wanted to speak with me, isn't that the case?"

"Mata, just stop that train of thought of yours. It's going to lead you nowhere."

I was starting to hear some motojets in the forest, approaching the field we were on.

"Why does he want to speak with me Danna?"

Danna listened to the motojets approaching to.

"Shit!, Mata they're coming!"

"Why does he want to speak with me, Danna?!"

"Damn it Mata I don't know!, he has been behaving so fucking strange these days, I think he wants your help."

"Strange? strange how?"

They were just a few miles away.

"Get fucking moving!"

"Where is he?"

"I dont' know"

"You're his girlfriend and you don't know?"

The motojets were about to enter the field.

"Fuck, I'm sorry Mata."

She began to run away to the opposite direction and she hid in to the woods. I did the same but I didn't stop running and I encounter a slope. It was the first time that I was running on that kind of environment. Hell, it was like the third time that I ran in my life. So, I image that you can guess what happened next. Every single and irrelevant little rock had the power to destroy the balance of my feet completely. There was a waterfall near me and I just kept rolling towards it. I was praying to the gods that I didn't believe in, to stop the fall, but their existence disappointed me once more and Mr. Gravity made me pay my lack of balance by escorting me to the lair of Mrs. Waterfall.

Thanks for reading :)

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Monster's University: The Hard work vs Talent Paradigm

Do you remember when you were a child and your parents use to read to you different types of tales every time you were about to go to sleep?  I don't. But anyway, you know which stories I'm referring to, you know these types of tales and you know that there's always an underlying lesson that you must have acquired by the end of the story. Usually , it's a lesson that you've already acquired or is something so obvious or dorky that you completely forget about it within few minutes. Classic Disney movies work the same way, hell, even the most popular and classical Disney movies are based upon these stories. Except Pixar movies, those are different. Pixar movies tend to explore themes that we don't ordinary see in kids movies and some of these themes and lessons are actually quite complex than just the classics : "The true beauty is inside", "True love conquers everything", "You're the only one holding you back", etc. Take the revolution and oppression theme that revolves around "A Bug's Life":



The middle-aged crisis and the family issues that Mr.Incredible has to endure and how these things put his family in danger, the dilemma that Woody has to face while choosing a momentary period of happiness with Andy or an eternity of fame in a museum but alone.

The conflicts that these characters face are quite complex but at the end of the day, they always learn the lesson that we expect them to learn, they always make the choices that we expect them to may. Except in this final release: Monster's University.



The overall theme that Monster's University presents us is the classic "Talent vs Hard-work" paradigm; Mike Wazowski representing the notion of hard work and determination and  Sulley (and all of the other successful monsters) the notion of talent and natural ability. You may think that this is nothing new, we have been presented with this same paradigm in a lot of different movies and what is the lesson that they always teach us? It doesn't matter if you don't have talent, if you keep on trying, you will succeed. If you show determination and hard work you can keep up with the ones with natural talent and even overtake them. Hard work is always going to defeat talent. That's the lesson that we have learned but now here it comes Monster's University and this movie doesn't come to retell this lesson, what it does is actually the opposite: this movie challenges and question this idea that we thought we have learned and in the process that teach us the true hard lesson about the "Talent vs Hard work" paradigm.

What Monster's University and Mike Wazowski's quest of becoming a "scarer" are trying to tell us is that, this paradigm is not always true, hard work doesn't always manifests in success and in some disciplines, a degree of natural talent is required and cannot be acquired through hard work.

You can try, you can be determined but hard work is not always going to defeat natural talent. Just because you desire a dream so much and you try everything to reach it, that doesn't mean that it's going to eventually come true. But when you fail you need to know that this wasn't your fault. With the other lesson, failing is such a painful process because everything is up to you, success is there and you can take it, if you couldn't take it that means that you didn't tried hard enough and your failure is completely your fault. In real life this is not true, Mike had the knowledge and determination to become the greatest scarer of them all but he lacked the essential natural talent. After learning this hard lesson, Mike modified his dream based on the realities he has faced and that's exactly what we do in real life, that is the true lesson that we have to learn about this paradigm: Sometimes we have to just accept failure, move on and try something else, if you've tried really hard there's no shame in that.

So as you can see this is not the typical lesson that you get from your typical fairy tales or your typical Disney movie, this is a hard lesson to learn but an important one and Monster's University does an excellent job in teaching it.

Thanks for reading :)

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Video Games as the Highest Art Form

First of all, I'm real sorry I haven't been writing anything for these past 5 months. Sometimes you just shut yourself down and you lose touch with the things you used to do. But I'm back once again and I'll try to become a more serious writer/blogger from now on. I won't change the direction or the things I usually talk about, I'm still going to be writing about language, philosophy, music, films and other stuff but I'll try to write more often and in a more serialized way, maybe two or three posts per month. I'm also in the process of writing a science fiction novel called Solitude Adventures; it's not the first novel I attempt to write, it's actually like the third, but I would like to publish some chapters here and see what kind of reception (if any) does it get.

This post it's going to be a little bit different from the other's I've written, because this time I'm going to be talking about video games.  This is weird because it's actually the first time that I talk about video games in this blog and I'm quite an active player, so I wonder what took me so long. But anyway, this post it's completely inspired by the whole debate surrounding the following question: Are video games art? I'm sure that all gamers would agree and I'm sure that all non-gamers would NOT agree. One of the most peculiar things about video game criticism is that people who criticize video games in the most savage of ways are people who never play them. There are people who speculate that video games are only meant to entertain and again, these are people who don't actually play video games or they are not knowledgeable players because video games have shown us again and again that they're not just about entertainment, games like Deux Ex,Grim Fandango, Journey, Mass Effect, Half-Life, Heavy Rain, Metal Gear (even tough Kojima doesn't have the same views on this) Ico, Okami, Flower,Limbo, The Last of Us, The Walking Dead, Spec Ops: The Line and many others are perfectly capable of exploring the human psych and to show beautiful landscapes and situations in which the player is not only watching but he's actually engaging with them. Of course triple A games suffer the same paradigm than hollywood blockbusters, they need to appeal to the masses ,so they have to follow a general structure and they have to stay inside the box. But for more indie or adventurous games this is not the same and they can follow or break the common gaming rules whenever they want to, they don't need to make their video games appealing to the masses, they can just use mechanics to express and create the experiences they want to. Video games like this are becoming more present because the technology is already available and accessible to different kinds of artists, that's why we are seeing all sorts of video games that seem to break the paradigm of what we previously believed in.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="550"] The Passage of an entire life time in just five minutes[/caption]

But in this post I won't be discussing this question at all because, for me this question is a no-brainer and it's not worthy to be discussed; of course, video games are art and the ones who are not able to see this are either non-gamers ,people who don't know what art is or people who don't know in which type of art to categorize it. I'm actually here to make a bolder statement. In my point of view, video games are not only an art form but they are the highest art form there is (or well, they are showing signs that they are). Of course as Dr. James Asher affirms: "Teaching is the highest art form of them all" and I completely agree but when it comes to aesthetic and visual arts; video games are the winners.



First, we need to consult our friends, the ancient Greeks, to understand what are the proper divisions of classical arts that they originally developed. Before anything else, we must understand that in the process of art there are two entities involved: The artist and the audience. According to the ancient greeks there are 2 types of fine arts: The high arts and the low arts.

• The high arts are the ones in which the audience can perceive the art only with their superior senses (which according to the greeks were sight and hearing) and there was no need to interact physically with the art. In this category we can find: Painting, Music, Architecture, Sculpture, Theater and Dancing (and I guess we could also add Film and Photography).


• The low arts are the ones in which the audience has to perceive the art with their inferior senses (which according to the greeks were taste, smell and touch) and a physical interaction from the part of the audience is mandatory. In this category we can find: Gastronomy and Perfumery.

If we are to begin to think of video games as an art form, in which of these two categories would they belong?, or maybe this distinction between art forms is already to obsolete for this era. But anyway, let's say that we are trying to classify video games in this spectrum. Soon we realize that something curious happens. Video games can fit in the category of high arts. We engage with them with our eyes and our ears but they have something different from all of the other high art forms, the audience actually engages with them, the audience has to interact with them, a feature that none of the other high art forms has. By this maybe we can consider it a low art, after all, the interaction of the audience is mandatory. But here comes another point of view to this whole "category" thing: At one point in time, people said that theater was the ultimate high art form because it involved all of the other ones such as music, dancing, architecture, painting. Then it came film, and people considered film the ultimate art form because it also included photography. Now let's look at video games, they include all of the other art forms and even more. In a video game you can find photography, music, acting, scripting, drawing/painting, architecture and also things that are not consider art forms such as programming and development of artificial intelligence. So, how can an art form (that combines all of the other high arts) be a low art? Seems like we're facing a paradox here. But this exercise makes us realize something: Video games are a complete new revolutionary art form by its own and I guess we cannot really categorize them with the old ones.

Video games are not the art of sounds, nor the art of movement nor the art of color and pigments, they are the art of experiences.



They're emulators of experiences, they create an experience and you have to engage it and live it, this is something that none other art form can perform, so why we cannot consider this the greatest art form? All art forms try to imitate or express the beauty of life, video games are capable to do this in a deeper way because in video games you have the factor of choice, you have actions and you have consequences and you have to live according to the things you've chosen, just like in real life:



And if you're still cynical about this idea, try to make a good video game yourself and you'll realize this. Or watch the process of making a good video game and you'll see everything that its require and how immensely creative these programmers need to be to work in this medium.

Video games haven't reached the goal of becoming  the greatest art form or even a recognizable one yet, but everything indicates that they're just in the right path to become the highest art form, new artist are joining this medium and creating things that we have never experienced before so the possibilities are endless and let's face it, this medium is still in diapers. I would recommend you to watch Extra Credits, it's an amazing web series that will give you a completely new perspective of what video games are and everything correlated to them, it will give you a new perspective of this entire medium.





Here's the link for Loneliness: http://www.necessarygames.com/my-games/loneliness/flash

I also recommend you to watch Errant Singnal's videos, amazing video games analyzes there:

Well, this is all that I have to say right now and I would like to know what other people think about this topic, leave a comment if you have another point of view that I'm missing. This would be all for now and thanks for reading. :)   

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