Christmas Wish List

Three things I want made but don’t have to know-how to make myself:

• An interactive computer/video application whereby I can explore the works/worlds of famous writers. Just like you can walk around Hogwarts Castle in the Harry Potter video games, I want to be Stephen Dedalus or Leopold Bloom walking around James Joyce’s Dublin in Ulysses. Or be one of Faulkner’s crazy characters living in his fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi. Someone needs to bring to an interactive game the fictional worlds of Dickens, Dostoyevksy, Tolstoy, and the Flann’s (O’Brien and O’Connor). I don’t want their works cheapened. I want them to be known by those who wouldn’t necessarily read them otherwise. I want to elevate my understanding and experience of the great works of literature. Surely the technology exists. Surely this could be a great educational tool.
• An postcolonial video game. You choose any time from the 16th century up to the mid-twentieth century. Then choose which colonized/oppressed people group you’d like to represent: a Cherokee on the Trail of Tears in 1838, a member of a tribe in sub-Saharan Africa as the British and the Dutch and everyone else are carving up your “Dark Continent,” an Irishman or woman during the Easter uprising in 1916, a Hungarian revolutionary in 1956 Budapest, a Jew or Christian during Roman rule in the first century A.D., a black man or woman in 1963 Alabama, an Iraqi in 1989, an Iraqi in 2005. Do you have what it takes to rewrite history, to throw off the weight of the oppressor? Will you choose violence? Or non-violence?
• Famous assassination action figures. Like G.I. Joe figurines and their accompanying plastic bases and jeeps and guns, I want a figurine kit for historic assassinations. For Kennedy’s, you’d have a scaled-down recreation of Dealey Plaza and Elm Street and the Texas School Book Depository. You’d have the whole presidential motorcade, complete with JFK, Jacqueline, Connally, and Oswald action figures. But you’d also have some wild card figurines, gentlemen of questionable intent whom you could place on the grassy knoll or wherever you think the shots could have been fired from. You could mock up the assassinations of MLK, RFK, Julius Caesar, and the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Think of all the educational possibilities.

Filed under: Books, Games, James Joyce, Politics, writing