Tom Gammarino's Free Writing Challenge

So as part of my game programming course, guest imagineer Tom Gammarino challenged my students to a 10 minute free writing challenge, where they write on any topic for 10 minutes without stopping, and I thought it important to take the challenge myself.  My ten minutes of writing without stopping became 15mins and I include it below.  I had planned to do something more narrative based, but it became more about some thoughts about games I am wondering about being able to create.  Either way it was fun to force writing like this - I wonder if I could do it for longer - I always remember that author who thought he was going to die (Anthony Burgess?) who tried to write all his remaining novels in a year and then didn't die and just carried on writing at some ridiculously prolific rate - anyway, want to try this again and force myself into some more narrative thing where I am describing something that is happening to some set of characters ...

There was a young man from nantucket, I like limericks and IO'd like to implement a computer system to generate them ,but I just don't seem to get time for these thethings during the normal course of he semester, and I want to create a computer game interactive narrative that explores the development of Japan during the Jomon period, which is a really interesting period since they seemed to develop advanced pottery before some other parts of the world ,who were still in the new stone age or something.  of course the astounding thing is the suggestion that we can really know anything about what people's lives were like during that time.  I'm reading these japanese history manga and the early lives seem pretty idyllic in terms of hunting and gathering and building small villages and starting to use agriculture, but pretty soon we get into the later yayoi and kofun periods and before long there is warfare and invading korean and things like that - seems like agriculture supported a huge increase in population and that ultimately led to people who had leisure time for warfare and inequality and things like that.  Of course before the start of organized hostilities there would have been lots of unpleasant situations like not managed to get enough to eat, and your kids dying from starvation, and getting injured going hunting and starving to death.  It would just be so fascinating to actually go back in time and watch some people living in one of these periods that we only really know anything about by archaeology and inference based on observing indigenous tribes - of course I guess the thing to do would be to become an anthropologist and go off and live with some of these pre-industrial tribes that still live in the amazon rain forest - I did take an anthropology course at edinburgh university one time and the instructor had lived in the rainforest with one group and talked about his experience of being a child, like they couldn't leave him along in the forest as he would get totally lost - he didn't have any independence and was totally reliant on the tribesmen to get him to places and to feed him, since he had none of the skills that allowed him to survive in the forest - of course it's the gradual introduction of technology and adoption of new techniques for getting food etc. that's just absolutely fascinating which is what we see in games like civilization and makes them real fun, although they do still seem to lack something of a narrative.  I ilke these japanese history comics because they give a bit more of a narrative sense, but it doesn't go quite far enough - they introduce some early historical figures like some queen who sent a messenger to mainlinad china in the 2nd century, but we don't really know hardly anything about her, and so they kind of sketch her out as a kind of intelligent young woman who was really good at predicting the weather, and who was raised up to be queen to avoid the men all fighting each other to be king, but we really don't know the politics of the events of the time, and I guess they are afraid to make them up since they are trying to be historically accurate books/comics things, but I think they could go further, but then I am also complaining that they don't really know how people lived although I haven't followed up on all the background sources that they might be using.  but there's a difference about developing a narrative.  There was a book, "clan of the cave bear" or something that explored that - it was like a story set in the stone age, and "American Gods" had some of that in it's little pre-history vignettes - I still think an interactive narrative in the Jomon would be cool, but I'd really like an underlying physics model so that game play was kind of open ended, e.g. you could make clay into pots and discover some early technologies, but in a more narrative oriented fashion than civilization, e.g. you can store more nuts and berries in your pots in order to make it through the winter, I mean get your little family to make it through the winter - I can imagine a really raw game where sometimes you'd have to make choices like leaving a sick child to starve in order to have your other healthy children survive - would that make for fun gameplay? I'm not sure - it's certainly a very dramatic issue and something that early humans likely had to face - there was a song I learnt in a language school in japan that was said to be dedicated to those children that had to be killed so their brothers and sisters might survive.  It seems so horrific in this modern age where we expect all of our offspring to make it to maturity - is there value from exploring these things?  perhaps in just making us appreciate how lucky we are now ...