Mason-B t1_j0flgjj wrote on December 16, 2022 at 7:29 AM

Reply to comment by lupius_mohnschein in How Fantasy could transform the Web by lupius_mohnschein

> Ok, so apparantly MIT presented programming as magic, but is there any mainstream fantasy novel, series or movie in which this is truly the case?

Well books aren't really mainstream anymore anyway.

But it's certainly been leaning in that direction for a number of years. "Knight's & Magic" [SIC] is just a dumb anime that makes fun of tropes and it even explicitly calls this trope out. You can say the magic system is "like programming" but people rarely dive into it enough for it to matter. See also Brandon Sanderson's rules for hard magic, the point of a non-soft (re: not deus ex machina) magic system is to be predictable by the audience, but no one is going to be putting code in books (let alone TV shows/movies).

Fundamentally programming is more interactive than that. We are then left with games as the only real medium for teaching concepts like this.

lupius_mohnschein OP t1_j0fm5ab wrote on December 16, 2022 at 7:38 AM

You are right. I have talking about stories too much. But it could be in any medium really.

Games could be the best medium, that's true but after all, they too are telling stories. What they can do can also be done in a story if done right. Also many great video games are based on books like the Witcher.

I would like to add to your list the manga "Witch Hat Atelier". It's about a young witch, who learns magic, which in this world means drawing magic runes. It is in my opinion the closest one can get to the feeling of programming in fiction medium that is passive (novel, movie, comic, etc.). And it is also kind of popular.

I'm actually not sure myself whether novels are the right medium here. What I wonder about games is that they typically have a much lower live span. People read novels that were written one hundred years ago. Most games are outdated after a few years. Because many skills associated with computer science can be described in a general manner, I think there could be a book, for example like the Lord of the Ring, that would be fresh for a long amount of time. In my opinion that would be a great step forward.