tim etchells' 'the broken world' and other books with videogames in them

I have just read the above. It made me really frustrated, because I kept thinking of reasons the game could not really exist in the real world, or why it would be terrible, if it did.

The book consists of the blog entries of some dude (never named, I think) who is blogging a solution to the massively complicated & titular videogame, The Broken World. It's made clear towards the end that his 'walkthrough' is also a 'blog'; on the other hand, it totally seems more like GameFAQs fodder, in style. Anyway, the narrator keeps getting diverted from writing his walkthrough to this game, and talking about his girlfriend, death of a friend, disappearance of another.

Anyway, it sort of becomes clear that Tim Etchells does not have clue one about videogames when this impossibly-complicated videogame (which has whole towns, countries, planets at near total levels of verisimilitude) requires you to pick up a screwdriver or something in the first town in order to unscrew something in the fifth. At this point in the book, I felt almost as frustrated as I would in a videogame that actually made me do that: this is kind of the problem with the whole thing, that the game is repeatedly described as having this kind of incredible depth and complexity that clearly identifies it as a non-videogame player's fantasy of what the ideal & perfect videogame might be like, except that it then obeys totally retarded ten-year-old adventure game conventions. It's a bit like if a novel about a food blogger encountering the very ideal of restaurants kept talking about how good their prawn cocktail was—

There's also Horwood's Skallagrigg, which has a similar problem of LOOK MY FICTIONAL WORLD HAS A VIDEOGAME IN IT WHICH IS SO PROFOUND I CAN'T REALLY DESCRIBE HOW PROFOUND IT IS, OKAY—Etchells' novel is way better, though. For example, it doesn't have a bit in which the palsied girl based on the author's kid loses her virginity to someone who sees past the fact that she is palsied and drooling to her true inner beauty. This would not really be a problem if I could keep the whole based-on-the-author's-kid bit out of my mind, which I really could not.

After this I find myself thinking of novels I read as a child, which I would call "children's novels" but which I believe the current term for is "YA fiction": Only You Can Save Mankind and two books I can't remember much about, save that one of them was a sequel to The Demon Headmaster.

The one I wish I could remember, I think it had a narrator with some mid-adolescent crush on a girl he once watched dancing to 'Agadoo'? & it was in my junior school library in the early 90s, and so horrendously out-of-date (viz. 'Agadoo') and thus based on games arriving on mail order from the publishers on five inch floppies. It had a bunch of kids trying to lateral-think around the stages of this game, which presented itself as a crappy shmup and then kept evolving into other things, and then possibly invading the real world? It's quite hazy.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51KERP10DYL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

I read this in 7th grade and threw it at the wall for its frequent absurdities.

Oddly enough the one book here which seems to most plausibly establish the videogame logic it would then depart from is the one by Terry Pratchett, though the bits where the oblivious teenage narrator watches the invasion of Iraq on the news and goes 'huh, that looks kind of like one of my videogames!' would probably bug me, now.

xpost: good lord, Hoos, that looks dreadful

"When paraplegic ex-policeman Walter Toland and diabetic teenager Baal Curran discover the virtual reality computer game known as Killobyte, they revel in their temporary ability to escape their handicaps--until a malicious hacker turns a friendly game into a deadly race against time. This stand-alone novel by the prolific Anthony features fast-paced action, a pair of engaging protagonists, and a guided tour through the worlds of virtual reality. It should be purchased where the author's works are in demand."

"diabetic teenager" "handicaps"??

My brother has been fully insulin dependent since he was 12 (that's more than 40 years ago, btw). It isn't a happy situation, but he never let it keep him from doing anything he wanted, including wilderness treks for many days at a time, carrying everything he needed in a backpack, away from roads, phones and anything resembling emergency services. Just last July (after he endured a bypass surgery in March, 2008) we spent 4 nights in the wilderness hiking and camping together.

I am compelled to wonder how this character's diabetes plays into the plot.