{"id":7884,"date":"2016-06-23T22:07:21","date_gmt":"2016-06-24T02:07:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=7884"},"modified":"2016-06-23T22:07:21","modified_gmt":"2016-06-24T02:07:21","slug":"the-longest-journey-ends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=7884","title":{"rendered":"The Longest Journey ends"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ever since I first laid my hands on INFOCOM&#8217;s legendary titles like\u00a0<em>Zork<\/em>, <em>A Mind Forever Voyaging<\/em>, and <em>The Hitchhiker&#8217;s Guide to the Galaxy<\/em>, I&#8217;ve been a sucker for high quality computer adventure games.<\/p>\n<p>Over the years, the genre evolved from text-based games to point-and-click graphical adventures, often set in freely explorable worlds. <em>Myst<\/em> remains a perfect example.<\/p>\n<p>And then came <em>The Longest Journey<\/em>, one of the most epic adventure games ever created. Sure, its graphics and user interface are somewhat primitive by present-day standards, but the game was exciting, interesting, and\u2014not unlike the best science fiction stories out there\u2014it also served as a cautionary tale.<\/p>\n<p>Then came its sequel, <em>Dreamfall<\/em>; a strangely flawed game with a moving storyline but stupid quirks like ill-designed action sequences that were more frustrating than enjoyable. Still, it was a great game because its story was great. But it was also unfinished.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, after a successful crowdfunding campaign, came <em>Dreamfall Chapters<\/em>. Among other things its title reflects the fact that the game was released in five installments, or <em>Books<\/em>. The latest, <em>Book Five: Redux<\/em>, came out just a few days ago.<\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/tlPYMW4OdIQ\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>I now played this game to the end, and I remain deeply moved by its ending.<\/p>\n<p>Yet I am also creeped out by the extent to which elements of the game\u2014elements first released almost two years ago!\u2014resemble present-day politics. Most notably, a political election campaign fought between a xenophobic populist whose party promises a new dawn, and a female center-left politician whose campaign turns out to be rather more corrupt than many thought. Sounds familiar? I emphasize, this part of the story was written in 2014 or before. Life imitating art? A mere coincidence? Or prophetic vision?<\/p>\n<p>Cautionary tales are the best that the science fiction genre can offer. <em>Dreamfall Chapters<\/em> certainly did not disappoint.<\/p>\n<fb:like href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=7884' send='true' layout='standard' show_faces='true' width='450' height='65' action='like' colorscheme='light' font='lucida grande'><\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ever since I first laid my hands on INFOCOM&#8217;s legendary titles like\u00a0Zork, A Mind Forever Voyaging, and The Hitchhiker&#8217;s Guide to the Galaxy, I&#8217;ve been a sucker for high quality computer adventure games. Over the years, the genre evolved from text-based games to point-and-click graphical adventures, often set in freely explorable worlds. Myst remains a <a href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=7884' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,35,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-games","category-personal","category-politics","category-64-id","category-35-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7884"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7886,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7884\/revisions\/7886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}