This series has always been worth reading, whether you are an American looking through the eyes of a fellow American, or otherwise intrigued by a niche of American perspective that is not quite representative of that culture as a whole.

First things first: sometimes a book, a music recording or other item is only available from the mainstream online retailers such as Amazon or iTunes, but whenever possible we promote the purchase from independent sellers.  So click the image to the right if you want a link to independent booksellers in the USA, provided by the ever-entrepreneurial American Booksellers Association.

Now, the side show: the series editor Jason Wilson is also a contributor to a site we refer to on occasion, and he wrote an interesting item a couple of years ago that began:

“Go to a place, report on its culture, foibles, distractions, and bring it back to entertain your readers…it’s not enough just to say what happened — you have to make people understand what it felt like to be there when it happened.” This seems like a pretty good description of travel writing, right? It wouldn’t seem out of place as advice given by an editor to a first-time travel writer. But actually, this quote is by a video game journalist named Kieron Gillen, taken from a manifesto he wrote not too long ago on what he calls “The New Games Journalism” (after Tom Wolfe’s famous term “The New Journalism”). In his manifesto, Gillen exhorts his video game colleagues to become “Travel Journalists to Imaginary Places.”

If games of the type referenced in this article might bring an otherwise unaware person to the point of caring about places, natural and/or cultural, that might otherwise not be valued as they deserve, then this is more than interesting. Whatever other purposes travel serves, discovery is one of the key words that we think of in our practice.

Click on the image to go to the site of the game Endless Ocean, by Nintendo

Not in any aggrandized sense of that word, but in the common sense of it: unless it is purely for the sake of business or some other utilitarian purpose, should we not expect to discover something new whenever we travel? Wilson’s concern, in the end, is appropriate when thinking about how games such as this might displace experiencing places in person (it is worth adding that this displacement might be due to loss of the types of places depicted in such games):

All of which mean that Endless Ocean was becoming a little scary. I wondered if someday in the not-so-distant future, fake gaming worlds like Manoa Lai might replace, say, the real South Pacific as an actual destination. If the current economic and energy crises continue, perhaps my boys will have to skip the old backpacking trip to Europe and instead experience that formative travel though some type of gaming. I guess if that unfortunate outcome truly does come to pass, at least I take solace that some form of travel narrative might still possibly thrive.

The same might be said of all the entries on our site, whether it is daily views of birds, sightings in the Periyar Reserve, or the discovery of new photographic techniques: we wouldn’t want words to take the place of the thing.