Update: Frozen Moments
April 28, 2019
My friend once observed that as photographs age, they transcend their status as documents and move gradually into the realm of sublime art. Even the most casual, throw-away snapshots, given eighty years or so, become nothing short of jaw-dropping---windows into a forgotten world that we can barely imagine ever really existed. We also occupy a very special place in history---the place where photographs, as a relatively recent invention, only document very recent history for us. We can dream about photographic evidence of the middle ages, but we will never see it.
Now imagine people five hundred or a thousand years from now, and how they will likely be able to look at photographs that are many hundreds of years old. Even more mind-boggling, they will have access to moving images that are many hundreds of years old, where we don't even have movies of our grandparents when they were young. It seems like these kinds of multidimensional documents will serve to make distant history more real and less mysterious. That seems neat and all, but part of me likes the mystery.
And this game mostly preserves that mystery. What happened long ago? What did it look like? Who lived here? How did they dress? Now we all have a very narrow window into the past, and your photographs will be messages in bottles that wash up on the shores of the future. Damn, I'm really laying it on thick this time, aren't I? But this is profound stuff that we're dealing with here. Pictures of Grandma. Forever.
And the first in-game photos have already started showing up. Here's a good one for you:
You can see the full stream here:
http://photos.onehouronelife.com/server.php?action=front_page
And check the family tree browser for people who have been tagged by a little photograph icon.
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