EIBF: Tom Chatfield has Fun, David Shukman reaches the end of the world

Well-spoken, likeable, and with a particularly English air of bumbling good humour about him, David Shukman is a brilliant poster boy for the BBC’s science and environment coverage. His book, Reporting Live From The End Of The World, recalls his time travelling around the world reporting on the effects of climate change.

Despite his globe trekking reportage, he doesn’t portray himself as a valiant he-man battling against the elements. In the first of the slides and video clips he showed us, he sheepishly admitted to being violently sea-sick on his first trip on a Norwegian whaling boat.

This experience, as well as making him physically queasy, left him disturbed at the appalling treatment of the captured whales. “The anti-whaling campaigners have a point,” he said.

Shukman moved on to describe his experiences of covering the Amazon . He recorded the rainforest’s steady destruction from illegal logging by rigging a camera to a weather balloon and filming the vast tracts of razed land, bringing home the scale of the devastation.

Most unsettling were his reports from the Pacific islands. There plastic waste from big cities is being washed up on shore, killing marine wildlife. In addition, the tiny island nation of Tuvalu risks being lost under the waves as a result of a forecast rise in sea levels over the next few decades.

When questions about the contested nature of man-made climate change theories came up, Shukman contended that he always based his work on articles on peer-reviewed scientific journals. Reassuringly, and despite world leaders’ failed attempts to reach an agreement in Copenhagen he reckons we’re not all doomed. In his view, we have the resilience and the creativity to pull through.

 

Tom Chatfield’s book Fun Inc, describes the rising power of video games. His style is clear and detailed enough to engage gamers and non-gamers alike, in a topic which can often seem incomprehensible to the outside world.

The gaming world is often like “a black box filled with inward-looking mirrors” to those not familiar with it, he says. Yet few are unaware of the industry’s economic impact, which is now grossing over $150 billion annually. Spending on games is nearly overtaking that on books, a fact which was not lost on the unfortunately small Book Festival crowd.

Taking World of Warcraft as his starting point, he described how games were increasingly impacting and shaping our world. He brought up the infamous “corrupted blood” incident, where player’s avatars were poisoned with a highly infectious disease, leading some to run for the hills, others to form self-help groups and still others to deliberately try to infect the rest of the fantasy world’s population. This allowed researchers of real-life infectious diseases to map human behaviour in a pandemic in a way that would not be possible in a laboratory.

This, along with the economic “outsourcing” of “gold farming” lobbies he brought up, is familiar territory for anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the game, but Chatfield adds an intellectual weight to their description that few can match. Games are now a subject for academic discussion in ways few could have predicted, and he holds up recent mind-bending blockbuster Inception as an example of video games influencing popular culture.

Pressed on what games he plays himself, Chatfield expressed disdain for first-person shooter “twitch” gameplay. “After you get to about 25 the teenagers just come and kill you” he said frankly. He prefers the independently-created Flash games, and looks forward to the sequel of Shadow of the Colossus.

He’s currently helping to write a game based around “philosophy and death.” Judging by his Book Festival talk, it’s one to watch out for.