My Future and Doom

For my first, sheepish New Year’s post, I’m going to remind everybody of something important that happened last mixed-up year...

The movie version of the videogame Doom was a landmark moment in human consciousness.

For the last eight years or something like that, millions of kids have steered space Marines around bombed-out space stations in this first-person shooter game. The Doom screen scaled the videogame world to fit between your own two eyeballs, changing the way we imagine things forever. Pounding the keyboard in Doom, you had the jumpy, 3D illusion that “your” shotgun was sticking out into the zombie moonscape.

Directors used to worry about how to transfer readers’ imaginary expectations about novels into movies; now they are figuring out how to transfer videogame expectations about “you” into movies. Doom was just the beginning, imaginary versions of "us" will never be the same. From Videogame Media Watch to this Guardian piece we have to figure out how to represent these new perspectives.

This year, I resolve to write stories, blog posts and novels that explore videogames more, mapping out the last imaginary frontier before other writers get there.