The round-up podcast recorded at the Harry Potter Academic Conference is now posted at Reading, Writing, Rowling. Check it out and please comment. We;d love to hear from attendees and non-attendees.
Chestnut Hill Conference wrap-up!
November 11, 2019 by 2 Comments
The title of Episode 31 is: Books! And Cleverness! The Harry Potter Academic Conference […], which makes a good general point: Only books are permanent enough to easily support academic research.
If J. K. Rowling had worked it right she could have had the popularity and money without the critical analysis she claims not to want if she had, say, had, like Ron Gilbert, gone into point-and-click adventure games. I’m thinking in particular of Loom (1990) and the two Monkey Island games, 1991 and 1992, from LucasArt. What? Who? When? Where can I see these things? Exactly. That’s all gone except for what can be searched online.
To me those Ron Gilbert games have a lot in common with the Harry Potter books. The games and the books are from the 1990s. The difference is I can go back to the printed codex format books but not to a game system title for an old game system that I no longer have.
This must be one of the problems historians face. That is, a lot was going on at that time; even if I find out some of that, how do I find more about it?
Postscript.
Perhaps it would be a more persuasive statement if I tell you that the main character in Loom was a teenage boy, Bobbin Threadbare, who is instrumental in bringing the world to an end on the day his powers kick in, and that the young teen, Guybrush Threepwood, who is the focus of the Monkey Island titles, was so popular that he remained the focus in 1997, 2000, 2009, and 2010 sequels, some of them fan financed.
(I apologize if this seems off-topic; my job is historical researcher, and aspects of that frustrate me. Part of my job is looking for patterns in data.)