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Why Democracy Failed: Plato’s Nightmare Coming True

February 2, 2019

Society

democracy, failure, ignorance, popularity, responsibility, social masses, society

Why democracy failed. It sounds awful, and perhaps a bit self-certain. I could’ve at least ameliorated it. Instead of stating Why Democracy Failed I could’ve asked, Has Democracy Failed?

But keep in mind, every time you see a news headline ending with a question mark, the answer is invariably “no”. It’s just that the so-called journalist who wrote the piece didn’t have the guts to put her/his name there without leaving this escape hatch open.

There won’t be any question marks in this case. I’m not asking whether democracy has failed. I feel convinced that it has. If you have a different opinion after you’ve read this piece, you are free to share your thoughts in the comments.

why democracy failed
Even a perfect, direct democracy such as ancient Athens descended to tyranny. What do you think is happening now?
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Visuality and Memories: A Way of Seeing

January 27, 2019

Experiencing

affect, experience, memory, nostalgia, seeing, vision, visuality

The term “visuality” might at first appear obscure. We define visuality as “the quality or state of being visible or visual”. This definition might actually make you wonder, why didn’t I simply use the term “visibility”?

However, I like what “visuality” conveys. It’s not merely the quality or state of being visible/visual, as the dictionaries inform us. Rather, I see visuality as a philosophy of seeing.

That’s an impossible weight for a humble word to carry, and doubly so because this is simply the way I choose to see the word. Guess what, however? That’s precisely what I’ll be talking about in this article: the subjective rendering of reality through visual representation.

visuality and memory
The visuality of this scene is not merely what is visible in it, but what I render (=see and remember)
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Mansion Escape – a Text Adventure App for Android

January 22, 2019

Literature, Programming

Android, app, computer, programming, text adventure

Note: If you’re interested in Mansion Escape, check its brand new iteration, available for PC, Mac, or Linux, on desktop or mobile.

Please note that none of my Android apps is any longer maintained – and they’re not even available on Google Play anymore – for reasons you can read about here. If you still have any of the Home for Fiction Android apps installed on your phone, you’re advised to uninstall them. The post below should be seen purely as a snapshot of history.

Mansion Escape is a text adventure app I’ve developed for Android phones and tablets. Mansion Escape pays homage to the text adventure genre of the early computer era, as well as to the “dark mansion” genre of films, board games, and narrative in general.

After all, a text adventure app is first and foremost a narrative! That is, a text adventure app is a piece of interactive fiction, where the player/reader follows a story actually participating in it, deciding which path to take.

Mansion Escape: a Text Adventure App where Clue meets the Cold War

I’ve talked in the past about the devolution of video games, and how today’s games can sometimes be a bit too easy. Text adventures were a kind of adventure games in the early computer era, where the player had to actually read (the horror, the horror) the descriptions, as there were no graphics.

text adventure app

Of course I realized that this is not 1985, and an entirely text-based Android app would not be well received. So, instead of (old-school) typing commands, we use buttons. But make no mistake! This is still a text adventure game.

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