I am a terrible journalist

I felt like I should mention as soon as I discovered the fact that Jonathan Blow hired a writer to collaborate on the script of his forthcoming puzzle game The Witness - Tom Bissell to be specific: journalist, author, videogame commentor and critic, Guggenheim Fellow and Rome Prize winner.  Which omission of detail in my recent writing makes me look, well, super dumb.  I need to read up on Bissell more as I'm not acquainted with his writing but its a development that definitely makes me more optimistic about the writing in The Witness.  So far reading about the level of difficulties in the puzzles in the game, I have a feeling this is just the start of The Witness making me feel dumb.

Experimental Indie Gaming’s Writing Problem

I am super looking forward to game designer Jonathan Blow’s upcoming game The Witness. Playing his surprise hit platform puzzler Braid gave me enormous respect for him as a designer and innovator in the medium. Reading that he is essentially gambling all the money gained by Braid’s success on bringing his vision for The Witness to life just increases that respect.

But to be clear, what excites me about The Witness is the prospect of learning its game play, working the puzzles and seeing how they interact towards the game’s climactic elements. What I’m not looking forward to is the game’s writing, by which I mean anything in it that you read or is read by an actor. Because experience tells me it just won’t be that good.

Here is a random sampling of the writing from somewhere around midway in Braid.

But to be fully couched within the comfort of a friend is a mode of existence with severe implications. To please you perfectly, she must understand you perfectly. Thus you cannot defy her expectations or escape her reach. Her benevolence has circumscribed you, and your life's achievements will not reach beyond the map she has drawn.

All I can get out of that is a contrived and badly overwritten comment about how expectations in a relationship can limit you, but what it means doesn’t much matter anyway. It’s sole relation to the game’s plot (such as it is) is it communicates the idea that Tim’s relationship with The Princess has Issues. At the point in the game this text occurs, reiterating this idea is completely superfluous. Indeed, everything you need to know about it for the sake of playing is communicated in the first line of formal text in the game:

Tim is off on a search to rescue the Princess. She has been snatched by a horrible and evil monster. This happened because Tim made a mistake.

This is a decent bit of writing, it is brief and direct and it plays with your sense of the usual dynamic of the barest of bones videogame plot (the bad guy took your girlfriend and you have to fight your way through to rescue her) with that little twist (and it was you fault it happened).

Two things make Braid great. The first is the wonderfully engrossing game play of solving spacial/temporal puzzles with its combination of traditional platformer skills and time-manipulation mechanics. It is absolutely this, rather than moving through the “story,” that keeps you playing Braid. And that’s fine: nobody plays a classic Mario for the story (spoiler alert: the Princess is in another castle, until she’s not).

But Braid rises above this tradition not solely through its innovative gameplay. It adds the icing of a genuinely satisfying game-narrative arc, by which I mean the whole experience of play from its fantastic, beautiful atmospheric opening scene, through the very effective temporal dynamic of the final levels, culminating in the superbly effective final boss. That last involves a narrative touch that I could easily sum up in a few simple sentences, but no need for spoiler warnings here. All I need to communicate is that this touch is surprising, simple, easy to understand, and it wraps up the game in perfect sync with its play dynamics and minimalist, referential narrative.

And then there is the text. Not to belabor it but the basic reality of the text is that it is just not great. Obfuscated, overwritten, generally delivering a tone of contrived artiness. Above all these deficiencies though is that it simply adds nothing of real substance to the narrative. Braid would play exactly the same with almost all the text removed. One pithy sentence on par with the opening line per level would manage the same effect.

When you add the fact that everything not-great about the text is present in spades in the game's dénouement level, I have to say that the writing actually detracts from the game. It sucks energy out of the great climax and renders the small, quiet puzzles of the post-ending’s interstitial world (which are conceptually a great element in and of themselves) less satisfying. The only proper reaction to these final textual elements (that isn’t motivated by frankly slavish, uncritical devotion to the game as a whole) is to go “What?” and “Huh?”

I feel like I have to stress before I go on that the writing in Braid isn’t terrible. It is merely not great (okay, probably even not good) which is a shame because the game is great. It is great game design, great art, great music... and mediocre writing.

Bad writing in videogames is practically canonical, setting you up the bomb and so forth. Bad writing in independent, experimental, innovative games is a pet peeve though because damn it, the designers of these games ought to know better.

Braid has a great game narrative because Jonathan Blow is a great game designer. Braid has great art because Jonathan Blow knew he was not a great artists so he went out and hired an artist. Braid has great music because Jonathan Blow knew he was not a great musician so he went out and searched for great music by musicians. Why doesn’t Jonathan Blow know he is not a great writer?

Why do video game designers not know that they are not writers? Do they think that game design and writing are the same thing? They don’t narrate their own product when it’s time to record the audio for the game, they hire a professional voice actor. Which is good because you have to be a professional to even marginally pull off something like this:



Just to review that text...

I’ve begun my voyage in a paper boat without a bottom; I will fly to the moon in it. I’ve been folded along a crease in time, a weakness in the sheet of life. Now, you’ve settled on the opposite side of the paper to me; I can see your traces in the ink that soaks through the fibre, the pulped vegetation. When we become waterlogged, and the cage disintegrates, we will intermingle. When this paper aeroplane leaves the cliff edge, and carves parallel vapour trails in the dark, we will come together.

This is gobbledygook, a mishmash of metaphors couched in ostentatious prose (wait is the paper a boat, or a cage, or you’re the paper and you’ve folded, and it’s an airplane? Sorry an aeroplane? And about this... fibre? The pulped vegetation? We’re talking about, like, paper again, right?). I’m sorry, and I’m not saying I could do better, but that is just what it is. The game looks beautiful. The music sounds beautiful. But the sum total of the narrative scope I get out of the paragraph (aside from feeling like I’m in for another beatin’ from the Art Stick) is that The Princess is in Another Castle.

And I'm going to go out on a limb and say the reason for this is that it was written by Dan Pinchbeck and Dan Pinchbeck is a digital artist and a game designer. Dan Pinchbeck is Dan "not to be mistaken with the writer Daniel Pinchbeck" Pinchbeck, the not writer. thechineseroom game team doesn't have any writers. It has artists. It has a composer. Nobody has the title writer. Is it that they don't believe they need one? Or that they think they already have one, but that it isn't an important enough role to put it in an actual title?

Please. Game designers. You can be so good at what you do. It is exciting. It is a new medium. It is art. But text is text, it’s not game design and it is a different kind of story than the one you tell with games. There are so many great writers out there scrapping in a terrible market. Hire writers. Hire writers and explain to them what the game means to you and the story you are trying to tell and let them play the games and figure out how to properly tell that necessary allotment of text that you read or hear as you play the game. Let them do their job, let them amplify and perfect your vision the same way artists and composers and voice actors do.

i me a river, adventures in electronic bookulation

Since I’ve been going on about eBook reader gadgets for a while it will come as little surprise that I finally pulled the trigger on acquiring one. I ended up going a little weird on the specific gadget, however, for reasons I’ll cover later. First off though I’ll note that this is not really a device review, because I have next to no hands-on experience with any other reader, without which my take on how the thing works lacks the context to mean much. Call it impressions.

So I purchased an iriver Story HD:



Which at this point I fear you could probably safely call an “also ran” in the reader race. The reason I feel like you can say this is, interestingly, also a big reason I chose this particular device: Target, where the Story made its exclusive retail debut, has by all appearances given up on the device and put the remainder of its stock on sale for 50 dollars. My local branch of the hipper-than-Walmart department giant had plenty on hand but given that they were at last look still on Amazon for $95 and people were trying to move them on eBay between $70 and $130 I wouldn’t be surprised if what’s left dries up fairly quickly in the rush to take advantage of the price discontinuity, but who knows.

If you want to know what’s wrong with the thing, you know, look up a review. In a nutshell its design sense is a dowdy, its buttons-only interface is bare bones clunky for anything other than straightforward cover to cover reading, and its ergonomics are sub-par. What it offered on launch by way of compensation was a higher resolution display and built-in integration with Google Books. Showing up as it did in the midst of the majors adopting touch interface en masse, 3G connectivity and the undeniable fact that Google just does not have the profile as a media provider that an Amazon does (perhaps unfairly, as I’ll get into later) its chances were probably not great when it showed up at pretty much the same price as a the roughly equivalent Kindle or Nook. For 50 bucks, though, I thought it was worth the experiment.

I liked it as soon as I got it out of the box, but soon surmised that a lot of this was over reasons that aren't, maybe, very sensible... but are a lot like me. What I realized (on the heels of this essay) was that for once my late adopter ways had left me disappointed: I had left the electronic book go until well after the whole market was fully domesticated, and consequently not as magical and exciting. I suspect part of my hidden motivation in going off the path in this first selection was to get (or at least simulate) an experience slightly more out of the mainstream. As such its design issues are almost a plus to me - its terminally unsexy melamine-brown hospital tray back shell, it’s goofy little coffee-toned plastic chicle keypad contrasted with its up-level display and nerd-cool Google connection. I took undue pleasure in trawling the internet, over several days, for more winsome editions of free public domain literature, defying the lords of Amazon and their Whispernet as I loaded it all up on a gigabyte SD card I had sitting around, plugged into a little USB reader dongle that I also had sitting around. Bought a couple odd ball à la carte downloads for this library as well - including that Rucker short story collection I mentioned the other day (such a steal, now available in a straight .epub direct from the source). Finally to fingernail open the little door in the back of the reader to slot it, boot and just like that, a respectable library of 200+, and I got my magical moment with technology new to me, however swiftly it might be getting overshadowed in the march of the tablet paradigm.

Of course how I’m actually spending 95% of my time with the thing is reading Neal Stephenson’s Reamde that I bought from Google for the same $14.99 the Kindle or Nook edition would run me.

The primary risk of all this is that I’m steadily locking myself into an .epub file preference which is currently incompatible with Kindle. All I can say about that is, you know, get with it, Amazon. Everybody supports .epub except you. EVERYBODY.

A few negatives and a positive to wrap this up. I am not so convinced of the general superiority of the Apple Design Revolution but but really the ergonomics on this thing are a little off. Turning a page involves your thumb going either to the middle of the lower fifth or the bottom right corner, both of which just aren’t quite right. Of course it still beats wrestling with one of Stephenson’s 3.5 lb. doorstops, not to mention the vastly superior ergonomics compared to holding a conventional 200 volume library in one hand.

Still. Given that signing into your Google account can be a frequent necessity of trying to use it as anything other than read-only storage, given further that a solid 20% of the front architecture is given to the keypad, it’s hard to excuse said keypad’s lack of a numeric row and a few judicious symbol keys (. and @ and @gmail.com) - these offered instead as clumsily mapped alpha keypad alternatives visible only on a display-based “symbol” menu. Repeatedly entering my relatively strong password rapidly became infuriating.

That “repeatedly” brings in the second negative, though there is a distinct possibility that this one, or at least a large part of it, was on me. You access Google Books through your google account and actual content of these books live in Google’s cloud until you download them. If you pick stuff up via your computer they won’t show up on the reader at all until you refresh your library. Yesterday all my library refresh processes started to hang. The device didn’t crash - I could pull out of the hung update with the home button - but otherwise it would not resolve: left to itself, the reader would ultimately go into its sleep mode from which it would wake back at the home screen, library unrefreshed. I probably entered my gmail address and password 7 times fooling around trying to resolve this and experienced moments of hearty hatred for the thing in the process.

As I say this might be on me: I’d been fooling around under the hood in ways not obviously verboten but possibly (in retrospect) unjudicious: in the process of reading the box out of desperation with the glitch I discovered that it doesn’t actually support Mac OS (fucking seriously, iriver?). So the fact that I’d previously plugged it in via its mini-USB connection and been manually fooling around with files inside the drive menus that came up on my iMac might well have been what glitched it.

If not it could end up being an actually deal-breaking problem. I ended up taking it through the set-up wizard again, which wiped my settings, bookmarks, and everything in my download library, (though the latter didn’t matter because there wasn't all that much of it, and it is all in Google’s cloud). So early into owning the thing it didn’t matter much, everything was refreshed and downloaded within half an hour. If it were to become a regular occurrence however it would basically render the device unusable. Time will tell.

The only other bad thing to say is purely speculative: I’ve read enough reports about screen fragility to be concerned about it, though its clearly a far from universal occurrence. I’m crossing my fingers on that one.

An unexpected plus side is that I was basically unaware of Google Play. Early impression is that it is a promising and welcome addition to the digital media retail field. They have a lot of free stuff to boot and they’re running some interesting promotions (like the 25 cent “play of the day,” sufficiently enticing to get me to check in frequently, as is of course their intent). It’s interesting enough that it could even tempt me to stay in the iriver ecology. It remains to be seen of course if what looks like a basic commercial failure with the Story will push iriver out of the reader market entirely, or if they will rally with offerings that leverage the positives and exploit the Google relationship (bringing in Android and Chrome functionality seem like things that ought to happen). I hope they do because the Story has potential.

Trancing the Real Gnarl

If you ARE one of those people who already owns one of them newfangled electric bookulators and you like cyberpunk, cypherphunk, steampunk, hell, beanpunk? I don't know. Druggy lit up postmodern fin de siècle-era style science fiction type writing, then you best be informed that Rudy Rucker has started his own imprint, Transreal Press, and he is kicking it off by selling a super compendium of his short stories - roughly five book's worth of collected short stories for less than five dollars, which is basically a no-brainer's no-brainer (Little Kidder reference getit?) if you like that kind of thing. Yaaar.

Making book in 2012

A rumination on five books, 4 real and one imaginary

It's an issue I'd expected or at least hoped was going to temper with age, because it gives me a lot of grief and it's boringly typical mid-life crisis material (that my age has now finally caught up with). This question of vocation. I used to blame it on my father, his capital-C Calling. As I drift (there's no other word for what I've been doing lately) further past that bright dividing line where what he does became what he did, I begin to think that while I might have gotten this bug, this need to be defined by a profession, from him, it was probably at a much more fundamental level than merely nurture. Something in the cells, the genes, the architecture of my brain. Something in the way I'm wired.

That expression, the way I'm wired, is one I picked up from William Gibson, from Neuromancer, a construction that wormed its way deep enough inside my head that I use it unconsciously, non-referentially, like it was something I came up with myself, or something of the common coinage. Which is irritating, because I generally find it embarrassing by proxy when people use fictional devices as if they were normal components of language, like people who say "shiny" as if it were normal slang for "good".

Somehow I totally missed cyberpunk when it happened, I was reading 50s-70s era science fiction classics from the hardcover stacks of Montevideo's (Minnesota, not Uruguay, natch) local library and fat, terrible fantasy paperbacks from the recent acquisitions rack of the same, and then I got put onto literature, and sometime mid- to early post-college I got back onto contemporary science fiction, having pretty much missed the 80's.

I was never a "fan" proper and this was still pretty much pre-internet for me so I'd managed to never even hear of Neuromancer when I noticed its incongruous presence on the bookshelf of my wife-to-be (she's not a science fiction reader, at all, and I still don't really know why she ended up buying it sometime in the very early 90's). I was actually not that taken with it on first pass, I read it too quickly which made its narrative style come across as fractured and murky. But it got some hook in me and I went back, and again. It ended up being for a while one of those things I could seemingly go back to at will, just for sheer entertainment, though as with most such things I finally had read it one too many times and went back one last time to find that it just wasn't really something I could read anymore. It had become part of the furniture of my brain; running my eyes over the words again was just redundant. I've yet to find anything in literature outside of certain poetry that is proof against this effect, likewise in movies, though it's common enough for me to find music that my mind finds seemingly evergreen.

After I'd read Neuromancer the second or third time I bought everything else Gibson had out in paperback, which in 1996 was a disappointingly short list. Still, I loved it all. Further output came at a relatively slow pace, but consistently satisfied, and so new Gibson joined a very short list of things I buy automatically in hardcover upon publication, just to get it sooner.

I ran into inner resistance to this policy with the recent release of his collected nonfiction essays, Distrust That Particular Flavor. I'd already read most of it, I figured, authorized republication or not, online, during a period when I was stalking him around the internet a bit. And liked it fine but not to the extent of feeling like I had to have it on the shelf. Frugality has had a premium lately, maybe you heard about the economy. Maybe I would wait for it in paperback, or check it out from the library, or maybe just skip it. Then a few days ago I ran across it in a bookstore and something rare occurred: I was seduced by the actual object itself. Just a nice, pretty little hardcover book. A thing that could easily last centuries (I have a 1764 book of German sermons my dad gave me when I got married, which is probably worth, the experts tell me, less than I paid for the new Gibson hardcover - centuries is hardly hyperbole for a well-bound book provided it stays in decent environments). I bought it and I'm glad I did, because I'm getting a kick out of the essays (a different beast than reading the fiction though I'm not totally clear on how), and because it got me thinking about the object of the book again, the construction of the thing, which is interesting.

Books remain a lovely technology, I don't believe they'll ever go away. A nice hardcover is, like a well-produced LP, an affordable little luxury, a piece of utilitarian (if slightly anachronistic) industrial art. Better than an LP, as no equipment is required to enjoy: it will retain its self-contained functionality as long as it retains its physical integrity.

It made me think about a particular relationship I have with books, similar to one I have with a number of things which share the one unique property that I have, at least once, made them from scratch, by hand. A little class I took, at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. I made a pair of little blank books, the real deal, sewn signatures and carefully assembled boards. It is really the only way you know completely what a thing is, I think, by making it. I dug up one of them (I don't remember what happened to the other one) that I'd given to my wife, it is a charming little thing. It, too, could last centuries, strangely enough.

I took that class under the influence of of another one of my restless sojourns in search of calling. One of those things they tell you to do: take a class.

I've been thinking about making books again, lately, specifically the construction of the book that is pure electronic ephemera. Thinking I perhaps will figure out how these electronic books are put together.

I've been finding myself wondering lately how much play there is in that, the degree to which an eBook can be well (or poorly) assembled. I've related my disappointment in the "free" content in the public domain. I've been digging into this business further now that I downloaded Amazon's free Kindle reader for the Mac. It's the little things: a lot, probably most of it, is basically just a monolithic hunk of linear text. No table of contents, little or no framing art, and what there is bland and cursory and low-fi, anything weird (like Ben Franklin's checklist charts he used to print up to work on ironing out his personal deficits) coming through mangled by formatting conventions (or the lack thereof). And I feel like a dick, complaining about it, because mostly volunteers have extracted this stuff from the highly imperfect output of optical character recognition, and cleaned it up and gotten it into a format that you can't say isn't readable.

But there is at least a somewhat premium product that is possible. I recently forayed into a first experiment at actually purchasing an electronic book, another step on the all-but-inevitable path of buying another gadget. Our friend Mr. Gibson makes another appearance in the narrative: I read in an interview recently that he'd published a short story in a Canadian anthology - a thing he just doesn't do, I've often wished he would write a little short fiction somewhere in the long gaps between the novels. I wanted the story. I wasn't at all sure I wanted to pay $17.21 for the anthology. The anthology is a bit weird, the only apparent binding thread of it being that the authors are all Canadians, I think, and its tagline (Astounding Tales of Tomorrow!) is such a clanging cliché that it you have to assume that it is intentionally so, but why? To what object? What does it mean? The title and cover art are similarly opaque. Maybe after they talked William Gibson into crossing the line into short fiction territory again they decided they didn't have to come up with any other arguments to convince the prospective reader to sign up.

I decided to make an experiment of the compromise of spending a penny less than ten bucks by buying the Kindle edition. The transaction, I have to say, was satisfyingly space age. A handful of clicks and it is there, instantaneously or as near as makes no odds. As with other forms of digital delivery I'm starting to appreciate the fact that the price is the price, there is no shipping and handling surprise at the end of the transaction (please don't start fucking this up with meaningless gotcha fees, oh ye deliverers of digital content).

And so I have my hands (so to speak) on a "premium" eBook, a proper digital edition. It is okay. It has a cover image of decent size and resolution, a table of contents with proper links. I liked the story, it was pretty far off Gibson's beaten path (its closest kinship perhaps with 1981's The Gernsback Continuum"). Ten bucks a steep price at that but maybe I'll like the rest of it if I read it (sitting and reading fiction at the computer just doesn't work very well for me - although the Kindle program makes it work a bit better - despite all the time I spend absorbing text from the internet). I imagine the file is not something I can pull apart and tinker under the hood without breaking some laws but as a showpiece I can at least get some ideas of how it is supposed to work, and how it could work better.

Perhaps, something like affluent book collectors of yore, I will end up ganking "unbound folios" of straight-up text from Gutenberg's files and binding them in my own shop, give them a proper cover and functional contents, pretty them up a bit so they look nice on the virtual shelf.

Still and yet I dream of a better electronic book, a notion of a thing that doesn't exist yet. Somehow purer like the simplicity of a nice binding yet more diverse and functional with all the promise of hypertext, of markup languages and style sheets, like the internet itself. The imaginary thing I thought I was noodling out around the borders of, way back in the 90's with the abortive Kingdom Come Institute (I note that despite my efforts substantial chunks of It's Rome, Baby are succumbing to link rot, truly the center cannot hold).

Perhaps somewhere I generally find a little fraught to engage much I am still pining to make a book in that other sense, the dream of being not just a writer (now that the internet has made that functional verb so meaninglessly accessible to us all) but (dare I say it) a novelist. And I wonder again if the fooling around with various ephemeral electronic wrappers for text is anything but a way to avoid coming to terms with even thinking about the real work of writing a functional book that someone might actually bother to read.

I think about Gibson, again - writing about the earliest stages of his writing, phrases like "try to learn to write fiction" and "trying to figure out how to try," it shows up again in that new short story, "starting to try to write fiction." I think this? Still? I'm forty, for fucks sake. I've only got so much time left to devote to any serious trying, trying to try, trying to learn. I think about a musician I asked for advice about figuring out what the hell you're supposed to do in this life, who could only say "find out how to find out".

I think about a philosophy professor, gone now, almost 20 years ago, in a class improbably called "The Philosophy of the Literature of Existentialism," a professor who I now know was perceptibly (though none knew it then, I don't know if he did or not) grappling with the earliest stages of Alzheimer's, trying to get at something by saying "when I write my next book" and then breaking to, with surprising emotion, "oh, who am I kidding, I'll never write another book! If any of you have any creative aspirations at all you must leave academia at once! It destroys creativity!" Nervous laughter. I doubt he was playing for laughs. 6 years dead. Nobody left academia. Of course I was studying Science and assumed I was immune to these sorts of dangers.

Free as in lunch (though not as in effort): the other side of eBook econmics

So I was complaining not that long ago about eBook pricing, in which you could end up paying twice as much for Amazon to shoot you what probably represents $0.000001 worth of data for them as you would pay to have someone in California mail you a like-new used copy of a book whose author died something like 25 years ago.

There is though another side to the economics of the eBook that I only slightly hinted at in that essay, the issue of (very roughly speaking) everything through 1922, which is to say, the U.S. public domain. Which is a lot, a lot of books.

Many of which are available absolutely free of charge! This is actually pretty amazingly incredible, of course. This entrances me in a way that the prospect of reading Neal Stephenson's latest three and a half pounder without suffering back strain doesn't touch, despite this latter promise being (given my actual historical reading habits) a far more practical argument for my acquiring one of these devices. To hell with Dune, who can complain about free?! Ah, watch me.

The fantasy that dances before my sparkling eyes is of hooking my freshly unwrapped Kindle (I'm sick of carrying water for Amazon but I'm pretty resigned to this being the fact of the eventual matter) and zapping an everloving bolus of data from my computer into it - et voilà - a vertiginous library of classical literature at my fingertips, intellectual fodder for a lifetime, quick and handy access to all those smarty-pants references the erudite continually sneak into their prose.

To be honest, while I do actually read this kind of thing from time to time, what really gets me is the whole library in your pocket thing. It'll doubtless be a matter of zero wonder to the kid, who is learning to read in the basically unexamined assumption that if you want to know anything, Daddy will go to the computer (he will not turn it on, it is always on) and the information will be found readily at hand. But to me - someone who quite literally came of age alongside the personal computer (and Lo, JMH didst attempt to program an adventure game in BASIC on a TRS 80, and verily didst he fail mightily) it is The Future, the stuff of fiction. My great library of human wisdom, in the palm of my hand. Glorious.

The reality of course collides with my fantasy forthwith. Even as my conviction to get on the eReader bandwagon grows, my initial forays into the world of free text rapidly demonstrate I can expect to be regularly tossed between the twin horns of Lack of Curation and Unreliability of Source.

Overabundance. Checking out the statistics page (which has 6 "likes" on Facebook, what does it all mean?!) I learn that first off, I also literally came of age alongside Project Gutenberg - being how the first text was uploaded just the month before I was, er, downloaded... But more relevantly that as of July 2011 some 36,701 books had been uploaded. Surely one to two miles of conventional bookshelf. Too much! As usual the best curating offered on the spot is popularity... handy if I want to know that A Christmas Carol, The Kama Sutra and the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes summarize the rough mindset of the Vox Populi (oh man have I got a fanfic mashup for you... Sherlock Holmes' Kama Sutra Christmas, anyone?).

I thought I was onto something of a start when I stumbled on the Harvard Classics - doubtless a shibboleth of an intellectual mindset, virtually untroubled by any shadow of what we now call multiculturalism, that belongs firmly in the 19th century. Even so! A manageable collection, officially vetted by an Extremely Erudite Gentleman.

Immediately I started running into issues. My dreams of finding this thing neatly packaged as a single one-click zip file vanished in a trice. But that wasn't the start of the end of it. Mainly I discovered (not unsurprisingly) that a free, downloadable file of an electronic book was a bit of a black box. Part of the problem of course is that I don't have a hardware eReader - yet - so I'm trying to simulate the experience with a free desktop reader... which I just discovered got eaten by Amazon at some point in the recent past which explains some stuff... Suffice to say it ain't easy. Some test files wouldn't open. A lot appeared to be just a straight whack of text - not so much as a table of contents. This is non-ideal. The first one I manage to get open at all pops up on my reader with the title Classic_Harvard Classics, and call me shallow if you like but its frontpiece image is this:



That's full size, mind you. Displeasing. But truly, readability is the big pig in this poke. No contents, no chapters, formatting (or more specifically lack thereof) that's hard on the eyes. Clearly the big pile of free text is not going to be so sweet to parse. Maybe my reading technology is to blame (it is surely at least part to blame) but seeing what I see there I find it hard to believe the state of the art will do much better with the source material. Readable in the technical sense of the word, but not nearly up to my standard for what I'd call a book.

Clearly somebody should be doing something about this.

My wild impulses has me quickly thinking about launching the Kickstarter project, you know, I think I could happily spend several years of my life turning these text dumps which represent the (noble, valuable, decent and correct, mind you) output of Project Gutenberg into something you would actually want on your virtual bookshelf. My forays into business tend to suggest I do not have a firm finger on the pulse of the consumer, though, and experience tells me that obvious things that do not end up getting done by friendly volunteers tend to prove more difficult than they seem on face value. Leave that one on the back burner. My virtual, infinite, increasingly cluttered back burner, shouldn't there be an app for that?

Indeed a certain amount of this is ongoing by the looks of things. My researches continue and I suppose my free virtual bookshelf will slowly accrete as I start to save the odd pennies towards the eventual, inevitable (it has started to feel, finally, of late) purchase. But I realize I've distinguished in my mind another gradient of freedom on the as beer/as freedom axis... The well of public domain content is increasingly both those things, but acquiring and consuming it is nothing like free from effort, yet. And my pocket library is still mainly a dream.

Nine Nights in Azeroth, Chapter 5: The Call of the World

Chapters: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5

Not quite at the end of the free trial period I decided the World of Warcraft was probably not singing to my better angels: the household entertainment budget seemed like something that was due for a stoic reevaluation rather than an impulsive expansion and in just over a week I had rediscovered in myself a caution-worthy inclination towards shoveling solitary hours into the Grind - that low level, light-skill playing towards the gradual but inexorable accumulation of treasure, levels, virtual skills (as opposed to the real kind whose acquisition is far from automatic regardless of the time you sink).

Much has been made of the dangers of immersion in these new virtual realms, and I tend to think it is pretty much all invented hysteria. Escape is always going to be an attraction in an epistemologically ambiguous and frequently egregiously unpleasant physical universe and there are always going to be people who ride escape to genuine ruin - whether the medium is sherry, bridge, novels or glue. Obsession over new media is just something to sell papers with, another bit of grist for the feuilletons. Nevertheless, I let my subscription lapse. I would hope perhaps that someday I will sort out my personal issues of money, time, and personal balance to the extent of allowing me to really enjoy the possibilities of one of these new social environments.

I left my dwarf in an Inn with the beast he’d just tamed (new “skill”) at his feet - I spent a few coins to buy him a drink, even. It is all a goof, narrative wrapped in technological moonshine, but we’d spent a good few hours together nonetheless. In some sense I think of him as being there still.

That wraps it up for Nine Nights in Azeroth, and I think for the 2011 edition of Phree as in Phreakshow unless something AMAZING happens. What’s next? No idea.

Nine Nights in Azeroth, Chapter 4: Country Mouse, City Mouse

Chapters: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5

Right from the get go I had this social interaction problem in World of Warcraft. It gave me a strong Playground vibe: everyone is ignoring me and that’s cool, but at any minute someone bigger and meaner than me might wander by and pants me. A lot of this came out of not taking the time to learn how to properly socially navigate the world. I didn’t know any action commands not related to combat or quest negotiation, or even how to start a conversation with another player. WoW was the first multiplayer online game I’d played. The exemplar of this weird hangup was a moment when I saw some dude tussling with a bear and noticed I had a bead on the beast with my rifle-type weapon, so assisted him with a shot. He noticed where the help had come from and executed a neat little bow and made some innocuous comment like “nice, thanks.” I had no idea what to do with this so I ran off.

So I’m running around basically grinding (which was 90% of what I did in my brief sojourn through Azeroth) and suddenly a name I do not recognize is “whispering” to me and my immediate reaction is oh what now?! Am I about to be subjected to teasing? Invited to participate in some collective action in which I’ll embarrass myself through ineptitude? Subjected to the pitch for some scam? It wasn’t until the person whispering was inviting me to connect on Skype and I recognized their handle there that I realized I was in fact talking to the same friend who had introduced me to the game in the first place - they were just inhabiting an avatar I hadn’t encountered yet - and deduced that the “whispering” thing just meant they were communicating privately.

So we got connected on Skype and my friend invited me to run around with him a while and see the sights. I’m still ridiculously susceptible to these technological “holy Brave New World, Batman!” moments and interacting with someone across town in a virtual world while simultaneously talking to them via a phoneless, internet mediated, free communication protocol was reasonably mind-blowing.

At this point I was more or less the character I’d started as, this drab dwarf in dull leather clothes: I’d acquired a few indifferent pieces of marginally better gear. So my friend shows up as some sort of wizard, resplendent in all this sparkling attire and dire-looking magical stave, attended by arcane familiars, occasionally shooting off sparks or bursts of flame... it was all very Country Mouse, City Mouse. Immediately he is showing me all this amazing stuff I was not ready to get to yet at my lowly level, transgressing at least some of those invisible walls I’d noticed at the outset.

And so I finally figured out the real hook of this kind of game: ironically (and already clichéd) it was all about the social. At its heart World of Warcraft’s actual game is not all that damn much more sophisticated than Paper Mario; certainly it doesn’t bring a lot more innovation to gameplay. The radical expansion occurs with the introduction of other people in real time. This is one of the 21st century truths of technology, I think: friends are the killer app. My nine nights in Azeroth certainly gave me a lot to think about in terms of the philosophy of gaming, as evidenced by the fact that I’m wrapping up a series of essays about it after almost 3 years, but my favorite memory of it is that night, being a rube, getting shown the bright lights by my friend from the city.