The examples that you gave of drama don’t seem like particularly interesting things to me, and seem similar to the lowest grade forms of entertainment that we have today, if anything maybe less. I think art and cultural entertainment today are some of the highest forms, and those do exist in the culture, but a big part of the appeal of art is that has teeth, that it actually criticises something. This isn’t shown to be much the case in the Culture.
But moreover, I can easily imagine worlds that are vastly more interesting even within the constraints of the Culture itself that it doesn’t explore. For example, each GSV could represent completely different worlds of experience to its inhabitants, plus a vastly richer digital realm, packed with people competing over invented metrics such as what we see in MMOs today, or people creating vast LARP battles, or recreating interesting moments and scenes from history, or engaging in decades long simulated games with things like simulated magic facilitated by advanced technology.
This is just what I can think of in a few minutes, but there should be enormous numbers more kinds of different experiences available, as well as quite strong convergence to particular sets of values within the Culture, such that the final result seems overall somewhat less diverse even than the modern United States, letalone modern Earth as a whole today.
The examples that you gave of drama don’t seem like particularly interesting things to me, and seem similar to the lowest grade forms of entertainment that we have today, if anything maybe less. I think art and cultural entertainment today are some of the highest forms, and those do exist in the culture, but a big part of the appeal of art is that has teeth, that it actually criticises something. This isn’t shown to be much the case in the Culture.
But moreover, I can easily imagine worlds that are vastly more interesting even within the constraints of the Culture itself that it doesn’t explore. For example, each GSV could represent completely different worlds of experience to its inhabitants, plus a vastly richer digital realm, packed with people competing over invented metrics such as what we see in MMOs today, or people creating vast LARP battles, or recreating interesting moments and scenes from history, or engaging in decades long simulated games with things like simulated magic facilitated by advanced technology.
This is just what I can think of in a few minutes, but there should be enormous numbers more kinds of different experiences available, as well as quite strong convergence to particular sets of values within the Culture, such that the final result seems overall somewhat less diverse even than the modern United States, letalone modern Earth as a whole today.