Book, to movie, to video-game / MMO to VR

How the media / re-mediation of a storyline impact the story?

Thinking Lord of the ring and Game of thrones

The only VR device I really need is a book

I love to read, so much so that I would disappear for hours into books as a child. Deep in a book, you could call out to me, I wouldn’t hear you. The room around me didn’t exist, no more than the words on the page really. I lived immersed in the imaginary world co-created by the author and my imagination. Finishing a book left me feeling disoriented, having to re-inhabit a world I had completely forgotten. I now think of it as a kind of self-hypnotic trip.

I watched movies, I played video-games, played in VR, including social VR. I never had this level of immersion. Maybe because I’m too old now, but more likely because these media don’t engage my imagination so much, or at all.

The quantity of information, the depth of analysis, level of empathy that a book offers to its readers is without comparison to what can be conveyed in a movie or a game.

Think of the best cinema adaptation of your favorite novel: even if they are excellent movies in their own right, they can’t possibly retrace all the narratives, all the interior thoughts of the characters, etc.

This is not to de-value movies compared to books. Movies have their own devices and power, better suited than books probably to describe grand battles, to engage spectators through aesthetics, frame, camera movements. Spectators are no more passive than readers, but the engagement is different. As a spectator, you wonder about the motives of a character, you imagine what could be hidden behind this door or speculate on what is going to happen. But you don’t really create the world: it is given to you in its completeness through the moving images.

Same is true for video-games or VR.

Video-games engage the player deeply in the action. When playing some hard dungeons with my friends, my cheeks are flushed, my body is tense, even though I’m still seated in front of my computer. Clearly the body is more engaged in video-game than in books or movies. Even more so in VR, where literally your movements are part of the story.

What we gain in body and emotions, I’m afraid we lose in imagination and intellectual depths.

We’re transitioning from a mode of knowledge to another, it might even be from a mode of being to another.

Books and writings of all sorts are not dead, far from it. I don’t think they will die any time soon. However, it seems that a sizable portion of the population will not have the same familiarity with complex written language as in the past.

For someone whose perspective / understanding of the world has been shaped by books, it’s hard for me to imagine how you understand the world when your main frame of reference is moving images. I do believe this is the medium of choice for many people. Not only for their consumption, but also their thought processes and their mode of expression: see emojis and meme.

I worry that images, even moving images, are not a suitable medium for deep understanding and analysis. I don’t think anyone has ever produce a dissertation using purely images. I don’t think it’s even possible. They are art forms, I don’t dismiss them as unneeded. But I don’t think they can support further intellectual inquiries, whether it be in sciences or humanities.

I worry that the works of the past could be forgotten, are already forgotten by an image-centered generation. Not in science, as new discovery always have to be built on the shoulders of past scientists. At the same time, you don’t have to go through all the errands of alchemy to understand the latest discoveries in chemistry. If anything, science tends to simplification and unification of theories (quest for the theory of everything), even they are incredibly complex.

It’s different in humanities and social sciences. Knowledge in these disciplines have being accumulating since Ancient Greece, India and China. Current theories and school of thoughts, however, don’t erase the relevance of past philosophies. Sometimes it seems like each new generation rediscovers things, re-invent ideas and concepts that had already been thought and explained.

We have a transmission and quantity problem in humanities and social sciences.

So many of the works of the past are relevant to any research project, a lifetime would not be enough to cover them all.

Even if one person was able to read them all, I wonder if the human brain has the capacity to synthesize them all.

I have the intuition that our trouble comes from the fragmentation of knowledge today, high-level of specialization that requires time investment in a very narrow field, and consequently very limited understanding of disciplines that are unrelated.

See the lack of ethical knowledge and social perspective in Zuckerberg and most tech companies built by engineers, see the same lack of considerations from business managers and CEO and CFO, with MBA from prestigious schools. (aggravated in this case a study show that economy and business studies significantly changed moral attitude of their students compared to any other discipline)

Few try to bridge the gap, among them Damasio and Harari. Even so, their work doesn’t feel complete. There are gaps.

I have the dream, if only we could have an overview of all existing knowledge (of course, this is limited compared to everything that could ever be known), that the path or paths forward would be clear, at least clearer.

Maybe an AI will beat a human to it.

My problem is not that I can’t choose, it’s that I chose an incredibly, some would say impossible, path: get to the largest understanding possible.

This encompasses sciences, self-perception and understanding (through meditation and tai chi), as the body is not disconnected from the mind, anthropology, social sciences, humanities: literature, history, geography.

I should read the encyclopedia, right?

It could be that I am hopelessly old and has-been.