Thoughts about something I’ve recently read.
I finished Snapshot by Linda Barnes
That said, good as the last Sunny Randall
I first tried this series out because the detective plays steel guitar (and in fact, that was the name of one of the books in the series)…
You know, I also have to wonder how many people are a bit taken aback by how many series detective novels I consume. 🙂 Well, the next book on my vacation stack is an Andrew Greeley generational saga, so we’ll see how all the game geeks cope with that…!
Just the other week, while I was in Korea, I faced the interesting task of explaining to Korean native speakers the phenomenon of “texting,” asking whether there was imilar jargon and slang being used in korean Internet-speak. They said that yes, there was, but they were intensely amused by the linguistic distortions inherent in the best SMS and l33t.
And now I see that the classics are getting translated. I dunno, as a former English major I ought to be horrified, but instead, I find charm in these:
Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” which describes hunky Mr. Darcy as “fit&loadd” (handsome and wealthy). the ending to Jane Eyre — ‘MadwyfSetsFyr2Haus.’ (Mad wife sets fire to house.) Hamlet’s famous query, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” becomes “2b? Nt2b? ???” John Milton’s epic poem “Paradise Lost” begins “devl kikd outa hevn coz jelus of jesus&strts war.” (“The devil is kicked out of heaven because he is jealous of Jesus and starts a war.”)
In particular, color me unsurprised that Bleak House reduces down to a couple of sentences. That’s Dickens for ya.
A while back I was lucky enough to meet Jim Lee, he of comics fame. We got to talking comics (of course) and I told him that I wasn’t much for the superhero stuff anymore. When I was a kid, yeah — it was all about JLA
But then, a long hiatus, unbroken until my buddies in college turned me onto Watchmen
Nowadays, if I read comics, it’ll be Gaiman and Moore (and yeah, there’s superheroes in Top Ten
I shouldn’t have been surprised, of course, to learn that an accomplished comics artist is also a fan of all sorts of comics. So in the mail one day, I get a package with a bunch of comics that he thought I’d like. And the first ones I read were two by a Norwegian artist named Jason.
I don’t think I can summarize these. After I read them I just sort of stared at them in disbelief. Jason draws anthropomorphic animals with almost no expression on their faces. He uses a thick, rough line. The books aren’t in color. Lots of repeated panels.
And Hey, Wait…
Sshhhh!
In one way, though, it reminds me of how I felt when I finished watching Grave of the Fireflies
Worth taking a look, even if you’ve given up on the funnybooks. Thanks, Jim.
Or actually, I’m out of it, wherever this hotel is. Tomorrow I’ll see the city proper.
I suspect the city will be branded Samsung. Everything else here seems to be. 🙂 In the immigration line at the airport, the screens telling you the rules were not only flat-screen Samsung TVs, they also were interrupted by ads for Samsung phones.
Had dinner with Jason Della Rocca. I surely didn’t need to travel quite so far to do that…!
Finished off that Warshawski novel (it was Hard Time
It’s full of sharply observed details about how life would adapt if there were things going on like cold snaps to 50 below in DC. I was particularly amused when the reinsurance companies showed up willing to pay billions of dollars to dump thousands of tons of salt in the North Atlantic; it was the cheapest way out for them. If anything, the weakness of the book is that it demonstrates all too clearly just how adaptable humans are — by never crossing over into the sensationalism of Day After Tomorrow, it also makes the catastrophes cozier. A whole bunch of DC homeless manage to survive that cold snap, for example.
This is a spiritual take on the issue as well, what with the presence of Tibetan monks and a possible reincarnated lama, the protagonists’ delving into Ralph Waldo Emerson, and so on.
OK, I’m drifting off (my biological clock still thinks it’s 5am) and I can’t seem to wrap up my thoughts on the book into something coherent. So I’ll stop there. 🙂
Here I am in the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX, waiting for my connection to Taipei, which has now been delayed by 2 hours. This means that I’ve already knocked off the first book I brought with me ont he trip, which is Aaron Ruby and Heather Chaplin’s Smartbomb
I spent several hours with Heather in an amazing interview a couple of years ago, and another hour perhaps at GDC 2005. The book that she and Aaron have written is essentially a cultural history of videogames, a glimpse at the passions, politics, and personalities of the gaming world. I’m in it, and so are Rich Vogel, John Romero and John Carmack, CliffyB aka Cliff Bleszinzki, Seamus Blackley, Mike Zyda, Will Wright and Shigeru Miyamoto. Rather than trying to capture everything about the gaming world, this book is written more as a series of looks into individual people and projects, and each is chosen as a frame for the issues that the writers want to talk about.
And what do they want to talk about? The ways in which art and commerce live in tension. The quasi-rock-star celebrity that games can attract, and then the ways in which that can damage people. The curious sort of intellect it often takes to succeed in working in games, and the outlandish characters who result. The authors play up the alienness of many of the developers, the perhaps Aspergian distance, the obsession with models and minutiae, as if to make the point that these are not the people you usually deal with. Heather told me when interviewing me that part of what she discovered during the writing of the book was that she wanted to know “why so many of the brightest people I’ve ever met are making games.”
From inside, of course, it doesn’t always feel that way (though I do know several people, people you wouldn’t expect, who say they simply cannot communicate with Will Wright because he’s too out there). This outside perspective is valuable, especially as the industry continues to evolve rapidly in a swirl of big cash and small ambitions.
Much of the story depicted here is of art and idealism and perhaps most importantly, love of play, finding itself caught up and co-opted in goals that wander a bit afield–training soldiers, fighting for corporate ownership of the boardroom. A bit of an agenda creeps in in the authors’ tone–there’s a clear sense that they too, are horrified along with the graphic artist who asks if the makers of America’s Army are insane, that they are more on Seamus Blackley’s side when he argues for creativity than J Allard’s when he gives away HD TVs and proclaims the day of the microtransaction in the struggle for the soul of the Xbox and the living room entertainment experience. And there’s something downright elegiac in their treatment of Nintendo.
The book has some minor inaccuracies — I’ve never lived in the Philippines, and I never got beat up in school, and I don’t think my smile is supercilious (you tell me!) — but as a look into the realities of why many of us in the industry do what we do, and as a primer on where the heart of he industry has been and where it is going, it’s invaluable. Definitely give it a look.
BTW, there’s something really eerie about reading about yourself as a character.
They’re doing reading events across the country; I was supposed to be at the San Diego one but cannot make it since I will be in Korea. John Donham is there instead. Let me know how it goes.
