Reading

Thoughts about something I’ve recently read.

Air, a meditation on how the future hits

 Posted by (Visited 5879 times)  Reading
Oct 232005
 

I just finished reading Air by Geoff Ryman. I had gotten most of the way through it–it’s deceptively long, the edition I have has nice small print–and then I had lost track of where I set it down. But now I’ve finished it…

Usually books about how the future is going to hit are somber affairs that try to scare the future-thinking out of you. Ryman here has written a book where the future, and the interconnectedness that the titular Air (a sort of mental Internet) brings, are indeed frightening and even deadly, but are still something to embrace. It’s a book about adapting to change, rather than only fearing it.

The Net-jargon throughout is cute and correctly used, which is refreshing! More importantly, however, the novel is cast fom the point of view of a rural area somewhere in the west of China, so all the jargon is fresh and unfamiliar; this makes for a real change from something like Cory’s books, where the jargon is immediate and assumed as part of everyday life. Here the story is one of culture clash, where one of the cultures is still very much an agricultural one.

If you can handle the slow, somewhat dreamy pace of the narrative, it’s definitely worth reading. I believe it just picked up an award in Canada–well-deserved.

Masaya Matsuura will do the Japanese foreword!

 Posted by (Visited 8748 times)  Game talk, Reading, Writing
May 042005
 

Been a litle while here–but there’s plenty of news.

The book is now also going to appear in Italian. I don’t have a timeframe for this, but it’s still pretty exciting.

Masaya Matsuura, designer of games such as Parappa the Rapper and VibRibbon has agreed to do the foreword for the Japanese edition. The Korean edition will feature a new foreword that I am writing aimed specifically at the Korean market.

The current print run is almost sold out! So the book is going back to press. I’ll get to fix those two egregious errors in the end notes (Debussy and Ravel, and whether Deathrace inspired the movie or vice versa).

A few speaking engagements are coming up. I’ll be on a panel at Supernova 2005. Not much to do with the book, though. The one that is is Training Fall, which is mostly about e-learning. This will be a version of the original “Theory of Fun” talk.

I am starting to get email related to the book. Of course, it’s hard to send me email since I haven’t actually published my email address on the website. Maybe I should have a forum for discussion here somewhere? Hmm.

Lastly, I have to point to Steven Johnson’s new book:

He recently wrote a wonderful little bit on games on his blog. I asked him whether he’d read AToF, and his reply was that he came across it very late in the process of writing, but he’ll be recommending it to people as he does his book tour. Much appreciated! I very much enjoyed his earlier books, so I am looking forward to this one.

I turned 30 years old yesterday.

 Posted by (Visited 13356 times)  Game talk, Music, Reading, Watching, Writing
Sep 082001
 

I tried not to think about it too much. Sure, a week ago I put down a down payment on a minivan. And I just bought two recliners (La-Z-Boy, no less, and they are rocking chairs too). Elena is going into kindergarten next year. There are some signs that seem like inexorable tidings of age.

I thought about having a birthday party themed around the refusal to grow up. We’d watch anime movies, play video games, and play loud guitars and make sangria and daiquiris like we used to in college. It didn’t happen, though. Instead, my wife and I went out for dinner and a movie. My presents were a few DVDs–ones about video games and about playing loud guitar, as if it can only be experienced vicariously now–and a new wallet and new watch.

I started to write a long thing about the things that I had planned for my next ten years, back when I was 20, and what’s actually come to pass. But I have to admit that by any measure, I’m ahead of what I had dreamt. Sure, I’m short on the writing scale, but other scales have gone well beyond that, so I have to call it a net gain. I guess I’ll have to pay more attention to writing in these next ten years.

So what’s new on the site? Well, it’s been forever since I updated, hasn’t it? There’s been a couple of interviews done. One was with Shift.com’s Chris Shulgan, on Gaming the Matrix. Basically, about the future of online gaming and whether we will all forget we’re playing, as in the movie. Then there was a very nice long one done by Mark Asher for Computer Games Magazine. The magazine version was pretty short but the full version was on the CG Online website. I have written to the editors at both places asking if I can reprint them here. We’ll see what they say.

The Laws have been updated with Dundee’s Law, Caliban Tiresias Darklock’s Laws, and the now infamous “Socialization Requires Downtime” law.

I have five new Snippets up. They’re mostly pretty long, and if you’re into the game design theory stuff, you’ll especially like On Socialization and Convenience and Jared Diamond applied to muds.

There’s a ton of updates to the Online Worlds Timeline including more on the history of D&D, events from 2001 filled out (did I give Richard Garriott the idea for his new company’s name?), updated dates for some stuff from the PLATO days, some history for Turbine from a founder, and lots more…

I was interviewed for a documentary film on online worlds, that the makers hope to submit to Sundance. I was also interviewed for a book on interactive design. I have no idea what the timeframe is on those.

I got videotape sent to me of the episodes of the snowmobiling show that used my guitar pieces. Now that was a strange feeling, to watch snowmobiles cruise through some gorgeous countryside with my guitar in the background. Very cool.

Since the last update, we’ve had the Game Developer’s Conference and E3. Both went very well. Based on the feedback from the GDC presentations, people enjoyed the lectures. Next year Rich Vogel, Gordon Walton and I will be doing a tutorial on running a Live game, and as usual Rich and I will do a production and a design lecture. The design one is going to be about narrative in online worlds, and it should be fun! As for E3, there was plenty of coverage at the time, so no need to rehash it. I will say, it would be nice if the various magazines spelled my name right!

The Books/Reading section has been updated with what I have read recently. It’s a long list, thanks to Amazon.com. In music news, I’ve acquired a nice new microphone (Audio Technica AT4033a/SM cardioid, if you care) for doing more recording, and I have a slew of new songs to get on tape. I’m working on doing someahat more rock arrangements for them, and have been writing bass parts. I also got a nice pair of studio monitor headphones since my kids keep breaking the cheaper ones.

In the last several months I went through a severe Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli addiction. I have now seen every film they have made, and am depressed that there aren’t more.

I think that’s all the news for now. I promise to update the site more often again. 🙂 March 11th, 2001 It’s been a while since I updated the site, but here we go! Lots of news and new stuff this time.

I attended a really good conference at The Annenberg Center at USC. There was a fair amount of press coverage, including one article calling me “the eloquent Raph Koster”… sheesh, stop, you’re making me blush! I spent most of my time hanging out with Warren Spector and Hal Barwood, especially a few fun hours traipsing all over the USC campus in search of a decent lunch with Warren… I have put up the transcript and slides from my talk there under Gaming/Essays.

While there, I was also interviewed by GamespotTV, now known as Extended Play, which airs on some cable networks on the TechTV channel. I have no idea when or if this will air, but it was basically a fifteen minute chat about online games and the future.

Some other additions to the Gaming section:

I’ve put up the transcript of the second Myschyf’s Roundtable under Gaming/Talks. The first one was about storytelling in online games, and this one is about economics and politics. There’s a bunch of well-known online game designers as attendees. This was originally posted on Lum the Mad’s, but I got permission to reprint it, so you may have seen it before.

I’ve been pretty active on the Star Wars Galaxies boards, posting as “Holocron.” One of my posts was a thing explaining the costs in massively multiplayer online games and explaining why we have to charge fees. Well, Brad McQuaid reposted it on the EverQuest boards, and then two separate World War II Online sites added it to their FAQs, and then other games started reprinting portions of it too… I figured, since this is all out of hand already, I may as well reprint it in its entirety on the site. So that’s under Gaming/Snippets. The Laws have seen the addition of Ananda Dawnsinger’s Law, “The less disruption that occurs in a community, the less able the community is able to deal with disruption when it does occur.” That’s under Gaming/Laws, of course. Speaking of the Laws, I’ve stopped doing the GDC presentation on them, and have handed it over to Anthony Castoro, also known as Sunsword. He’ll be running the roundtable at this year’s GDC.

What am I doing at GDC? Well, I’ll be helping run a tutorial on Community Building for Large-Scale Gaming Worlds with Amy Jo Kim and Rich Vogel. I’m also doing a lecture on Design Patterns for Online Worlds which is based on the design patterns presentation which you can find on this site under Gaming/Essays. Lastly, I am supposed to do another lecture with Rich on production needs for massivel online games, but he’s done most of the work himself already! I don’t know yet whether I can attend MERA ’01 but I am completely psyched about its existence. In any case, it’s a new research organization about online world environments, and it’s put together but a bunch of the MUD-Dev regulars. The Online World Timeline has become on of the top draws on the site somehow. It’s really brought PLATO users out of the woodwork too. This month I have a bunch of updates to it from Jason Downs on TeenyMUD, George Reese on LPMuds, and Don Gillies on PLATO, plus some notes on The Eternal City, plus I’ve fleshed out the year 2001 and some of 2000.

I attended Turkey City, the seminal science-fiction writing workshop that folks like Bruce Sterling, Don Webb, and now Paul DiFilippo are a part of. My story went over pretty well–well enough that I was persuaded to send it out for publication after some revision. I must say, that was a pretty cool and different experience–getting to go back mentally to the days when I thought that being a wrier was what I’d do with my whole life. In any case, I intend to become a Turkey City regular now.

Believe it or not, there’s more than one TV item in this news this month. Two TV shows made in Quebec are using my instrumental guitar pieces on the soundtrack. So keep an eye out for “Quebec en Motoneige” and “Passion Motoneige.” They’re both shows involving snowmobiles, and they’re in French. “Quebec en Motoneige” airs on Canal Evasion and “Passion Motoneige” on Reseau des Sports. The latter channel is only seen in Montreal, and parts of Ontario and New Brunswick, but the other broadcasts throughout Canada and apparently syndicates in Europe as well. Special thanks to Martin Lucas for being enough of a fan to use my stuff! I think that’s about it for this update. Seems like enough, at any rate!

Another year, another website redesign…

 Posted by (Visited 13699 times)  Art, Game talk, Music, Reading, Writing  Tagged with: , ,
Nov 262000
 

I hope you like the new artwork. That’s what happens when I take my first vacation in a year. I had meant to also do some recording this week, but I didn’t get around to it, unfortunately.

So what’s changed? Let’s see… first off, this (News) is now the front page of the site. This should make it a little easier to find out if I’ve bothered to update lately. The Guestbook is still around, but you have to go to the Main section to reach it. I also got rid of the old Bio section and old front page and moved that content into Main under About. I tried to save all the guestbook entries, but if you entered a message right when I was putting up the new site, yours may be gone.

Under Gaming, there’s plenty of new content. For a while now, I’ve been working desultorily on a book on online world design. Some excerpts were published at The Rantings of Lum the Mad a while ago, but now I’ve decided to go ahead and toss up more here on my own site. Look under the “Book” section for that. Also, I’ve been working on a breakdown of typical design patterns for online world design (mostly extracted from the book, actually) for a GDC presentation next year. So that’s up there under Essays as a set of Powerpoint slides.

Under Writing, I finally went ahead and put some actual content in under Poetry, Fiction, and Genre. Hope ya like it. If you’re an editor starving for an author, lemme know. In fact, out of all the stuff in the site updates, this is the area that I’d most like to see comments on. I don’t write much anymore, and the stories are mostly a decade old, but I started out as a writer and I am sure that someday I will go back to it.

I reorganized the Music section. I recently wrote a guitar instrumental that I titled “Alice” after the character in the comic strip, and I’ve put up the sheet music and guitar tablature to it. There’s also another small guitar instrumental piece there called “Memorial,” with sheet music and tab.

I got rid of the Teaching Materials section under Books. I can’t locate any of ’em (somewhere in the garage no doubt). But I did add a new page on what I’m reading lately. Only four books there right now, as that is all I got to over the holiday.

There’s a couple of new images under Art; a new doodle and two ink pieces from over ten years ago.

In other news, I recently did an interview for Joystick101.org. This site is devoted to academic critique of games, developing a critical vocabulary, etc, and the folks who run it are all involved in academia. Check it out, leave a comment, support the site, whatever. 🙂

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