Leonard Richardson's CONSTELLATION GAMES

I've kind of overdosed in historical fiction lately, what with my Napoleonic War summer and all, and felt myself in need of an antidote to all of that highly mannered costume drama. I found it (Oh did I find it!) in Constellation Games, a book on which I've had my eye since I first spotted it at publisher Candlemark and Gleam's website really just based on that cover. So eye catching, even before one realizes it's actually depicting an exotic video game controller!

And I do mean exotic. For this is a first contact novel, and as far as our protagonist, game designer/blogger Ariel Blum (a male) is concerned, the only interesting way for two cultures to make such contact is via the sharing of video games past and present. And the Constellation, which is an Ian Banks Culture-style* conglomeration of all sorts of alien species, has millions of years of gaming history to share, all ready to be ported for human tech. At least as much so as stuff developed for wildly divergent sensory organs/sizes/number and type of limbs/utterly alien worldviews can be.

So of course our man Ariel seizes on this right away, and is chosen to be one of the lucky few who get to experience this contact directly. Before we know it, he's hanging out with an Alien otaku, who is not only obsessed with gaming, but also with an extinct and bizarre culture from his home world to the point of painstakingly recreating a period correct crappy apartment where an Alien like him once spent most of his life playing video games. Come on, this is every sci-fi nerd/gamer's dream, right? Aliens show up and they want to sit around your house and shoot the breeze and tell stories and talk about crappy awesome games from their youth and exciting new games under development and passing the controller around and making plans to port your stuff to their systems and vice versa? It can't just be me, you guys!

All this and there is a plot, too. For of course while our crowd is nerding it up, government types from Earth and sort-of-government-ish-but-really-more-hive-overmind-avatar-like from the Constellation are dealing with bigger matters. Like how an advanced civilization has shown up on humanity's doorstep to observe that it's a very nice planet and maybe humans should stop trashing it and hey, we can help clean it up if you want. And how certain factions on Earth don't like that idea one little bit, not in their backyards, they can have my non-existent global warming when they pry it from my cold dead fingers. But on the other hand, it is nice to have a space program again and while you scared the crap out of us when you blew up part of the moon, that is a very nice base you built up there. Mind if we do some of the experiments we had planned to conduct before we let our space program decay into kipple?

All of this is told in a wonderfully wry narrative voice in the vein of David Wong's "David Wong" in John Dies at the End. Except -- and this is my only quibble about this fantastic, fantastic book -- said voice mostly comes to us via his blog, making Constellation Games a 21st century epistolary novel, which is not my favorite narrative style even when it's done the way it should be, in exquisite and grammatical 19th century prose as rendered by a writer who cares very about that sort of thing and has created a character who also cares about that sort of thing. Ariel's blog posts are very casual and while not totally ungrammatical, well, they're a little too note perfect as blog posts. Fortunately, they are very funny blog posts, and really do fit the story and all of its wonderful little nuggets, like when Farang visitor/representative/gamer who has been dropping F-bombs right and left because hey, that's how Ariel talks, learns what F-bombs actually are and turns around, matter-of-factly, to inform Ariel that he swears too much. Hee.

What's really, really excellent about this book though, is that the aliens are really genuinely alien, as in not Star Trek humanoids with face wobblies, and so are their games, which really do make a wonderful lens through which to view a culture, and herein, like the aliens themselves, are really alien. And not just in that David Cronenberg bio-port/umbi cord way (though hey, I love me some eXistenZ as much as anybody!). For instance, one member species' individuals are essentially two individuals in one body, with the male mind "in charge" part of the day and the female for the other part. Their games are those a weird combination of cooperative and competitive and, incidentally, something that I would really like a chance to play someday. And no, that's not an unsubtle hint to any aliens who may be snooping on my blog. Although wouldn't that be awesome?

And now I'm off to read a story Richardson wrote for Strange Horizons a few years ago, "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs." Sample dialogue: "Humans won't pay to watch dinosaurs ride motocross bikes forever." YES. I think I love this Leonard Richardson person.

*A bit less anarchic, but basically it is the Culture, in all the ways that matter. The Culture with all kinds of bug-eyed monsters and other wildly alien life forms.

100 Books 59 - Ernest Cline's READY PLAYER ONE

"The past, she thought, was like glue. No matter how far you thought you had moved on, it kept you stuck in one spot." - from Gary McMahon's DEAD BAD THINGS

It's perhaps odd of me to quote from the book I took up after it in writing about Ernest Cline's Ready Player One (Dead Bad Things will likely be book number 60, unless I get a wild hair and tear through the rest of Henry James' Portrait of a Lady this week), but then again, it's odd and a bit startling to run across a sentence in the next book that so very aptly captures my feelings about the former.

I can't remember the last time I tore through a book this fast, but even as I was, on the whole, enjoying it, something kept bugging me: for all the fun it offers -- for all the fun it offers, Ready Player One is actually kind of a depressing book.

Stick with me here.

As anyone who's read the blurbs knows, Ready Player One concerns a dystopian near-future in which most of the world is utterly consumed by a contest to find the ultimate easter egg in a giant, sprawling combination MMORPG/Second Life/Web X.0 computer generated universe called the Oasis. The player who finds the prize wins not only that creator's immense personal fortune but also control of the company, which means, effectively, control of the World As We Know it circa the post-oil 2050s*. With stakes like those -- and the world otherwise being a blighted, miserable, static place (as in every major city now having giant sprawling exurbs full of nothing but vertical trailer parks -- trailers stacked via makeshift scaffolding into huge structures like skyscrapers -- full of refugees from the smaller cities that have collapsed economically and socially in this new energy crisis) -- this game has pretty much taken over the collective everything.

And here's where the sad really gets to me. Because the game is all about the creator, Halliday's, pop culture obsessions. And he's an old fart in the 2050s -- meaning he grew up in the 1980s. Which means everyone in the 2050s is spending all of their time in goggles and haptic gloves studying up on 1980s pop culture. Most of which, let's face it, wasn't really very good. You who are nostalgic for it are only remembering the highlights. Sit down and watch an episode of Family Ties. Or Silver Spoons. Now imagine that your best and only shot at a halfway decent future is playing a game which, in part, requires minute knowledge of that crap. That the knowledge base also includes good stuff like Star Wars and Monty Python and Zork may make it seem palatable but... ugh.

We who are part of Halliday's generation, who were teenagers in the 1980s, already have had a taste of what that is like. Growing up in the shadow of the Baby Boom, we had 1960s culture force fed to us constantly. And a lot of us just went ahead and embraced that 60s nostalgia -- ersatz tie dying, affected preference for that era's music and politics and mores over modern stuff and all -- at the cost, to some degree, of our development of our own culture. Hence crap like Family Ties.

But so now we have a world beset by real problems -- energy shortages, staggering poverty everywhere except for a few tiny pockets, rising sea levels, polluted air, crime, darkness, horror -- and everybody is avoiding this by immersing themselves in a virtual world fixated on the 1980s. Minutely studying John Hughes movies. Deconstructing Thundarr the Barbarian. Memorizing Superman III.

In its defense, one of the competitors in Ready Player One wants to use the staggering load of money at stake to save the world (as opposed to another, who wants to use it to build a spaceship and go find us another planet, thus saving humanity as a concept but leaving billions behind to stew in the filth of generations), but she still has to win the game to do so. All other planning is on hold while the best minds of the current generation re-enact War Games.


All that sad subtext aside, though, Ready Player One is a fun, fun read. I am absolutely its target audience, and was utterly absorbed in the urgency of the plot -- for it's not just about game play, this story; it's a struggle for the future, with our plucky protagonist fanboys pitted against a giant, evil corporation who wants to take over Oasis and commercialize the hell out of it, privatize it, wall it off, monetize its user data -- sound familiar? So even though it's far fetched that our plucky fanboys and fangirls could save the world with Halliday's money, I still bought in to the notion that their quest had meaning in that they were trying to keep the world from getting even worse.

Plus, yes, it would be fun to get to play King Arthur in a meticulous re-creation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. For great justice.

100 Books 27 - Jane McGonigal's REALITY IS BROKEN

Jane McGonigal is one hip chick, in ways I thought I was too but find that I really am not.

It's a strange and vaguely disappointing thing, being confronted by one's own un-hipness. I feel very connected and in touch via my amazing Twitter feed, which consists for me essentially of a thousand or so friends constantly on the watch for cool new stuff, disturbing news, ideas, breakthroughs, constantly saying "look at THIS, you guys!"

But somehow about 90% of the games and idea implementations McGonigal talks about in Reality is Broken are ones of which I had never heard before. This stuff has been right under my nose, just a click or two away from virtual places I frequent, and I've been all but wholly ignorant of it! How in the world did that happen?

Partly, I suppose, it's because I'm kind of crap as a gamer. I'm of that generation that came of age alongside video games, but missed out on a lot of the early years due to geographical and cultural isolation. My middle school had A personal computer, an Apple IIe over which a handful of us (and only a handful; most of my schoolmates, mercifully, were profoundly uninterested in it) fought, in order to get a few minutes on it to play, e.g. a crudely animated arithmetic game in which we destroyed very abstract asteroids by entering the correct answers to math problems. Someone out there probably knows the name; I don't remember. But so while so many of my present-day friends were sitting in their parents' dens and basements playing Zork and teaching themselves to program, I wasn't. This is not a complaint; I had a fulfilling if vaguely old-fashioned childhood, but it was in Wyoming, where it was still the 1950s except with modern cars and (eventually) cable TV. And the one arcade video game down at the 7-11, which the bigger, drunker kids usually were hogging.

I've done my best to make up for lost time since then, of course. Fast forward to the present and I have an Xbox360 that I break out every now and then for a spell -- I game in binges. When I find something I really like, say, the Oddworld games, I play the hell out of it, sometimes forgetting to go to bed; my days off disappearing into the game world, leaving me a semi-delirious shadow of myself when it's time to resume my day gig. It's bad for me but since I live alone there's little to keep me from doing it except for old-fashioned self-discipline, which resource I'm currently channeling into other endeavors, so, bottom line, I don't play very often. And because I'm a cheap bastard in certain ways, I'm also a few cycles behind the cutting edge as far as new games; my friends are all raving right now about L.A. Noire while I'm sort of desultorily poking at Alan Wake, for example (desultorily not because I don't dig the game, but because I've got a lot of pressing demands on my time just now and can't afford to disappear into that world for hours or days like I do).

But hell, I pay attention. I know what L.A. Noire is and that it's going to be a hell of a lot of fun to play when I get around to it.

But somehow, I had never heard of most of what McGonigal is talking about in this book.

Huh.

Reality is Broken is that rare thing, a positive polemic, arguing that gaming in general and video/computer games in particular are far more a force for good than for degradation and sloth, as most of the popular press still likes to portray them. The statistics she cites about how much collective time and energy we expend playing these games are staggering and at times both im- and oppressive, but, being a game designer herself, a gamer herself, and someone who has made it her responsibility to forecast the future and find our best possible outcomes, she does not decry the spreading bottoms, the carpal tunnel, the (mostly-bogus) claims that these games desensitize us to violence and rudeness and misogyny that are all the cliches that arise when most writers tackle the subject of how we all seem more interested in interacting with pixels than people.

Rather, she argues that it's best that we accept that this is how we as a species like to spend our time; it's not going to change short of some kind of brutally oppressive regime exterminating the game industry, taking away all of our toys, and exercising superhuman powers of surveillance and invasiveness and every other dystopian police state tactic to suppress the black market that would inevitably arise. We like to play. You can whine about it and wring your hands, or you can take it as a starting point, accept it as a fact of humanity, and find a way to work with it to achieve a much nicer future.

These games, she argues over and over again, are nothing more than a massive, decentralized, somewhat anarchic training program for the future. We are all the Last Star Fighter, except no external force has crafted the simulation that is testing us; in playing these games we are eternally bootstrapping ourselves forward. It's a nice thought.

I won't waste anybody's time summarizing the argument she constructs; plenty of reviews and columns and essays have already done so. For this blog and this series I'm more interested in documenting my experience of reading these books I've chosen. I will say that I found her arguments more persuasive than not*, and have been delighted at all of the discoveries she has led me to, like FreeRice (a vocabulary game in which each correct answer results in a donation of ten grains of rice to an anti-hunger project) and PlusOneMe (a sort of social media site that allows users to "plus one" other people in a wide range of categories to reward their real-life performances in the fashion of stats boosts in video games) and Investigate Your MP's Expenses (in which a British newspaper turned the tedious chore of sifting through a million pages of Parliament member expense reports to find the kind of essentially fraudulent reimbursements elected officials were making to themselves into a massive, crowd-sourced game), to name three. That lots of game designers, players and enthusiasts are doing exceptionally exciting and creative things was never news, but that so many are trying so hard to harness our inherent fondness for tackling unnecessary obstacles, our hunger for real engagement, to improve real life kind of was, to me.

While this has been thrilling, however, in a very real sense reading this book has also felt weirdly depressing. As she makes her argument about the inherent attractiveness of gaming, she contrasts it with the meager offerings of the real world, our "broken reality" which does not easily offer us focused and achievable goals, satisfying work, chances to be adventurous and heroic, measurable feedback on our accomplishments and failures, and many other things positive psychologists have highlighted as keys to feeling that life is really worth living. Which is to say she is constantly reminding us that real life as it is constructed now is really rather a sad and dull affair, disconnected, hopeless and meaningless, a reservoir of near-infinite human potential going to waste. And all the problems we face: climate change, dwindling fossil fuel supplies and slow progress towards replacing that resource, threats to the food chain, poverty, economic crises -- the list is long, and the litany appears over and over again as she talks about the kinds of problems she is sure we can solve if we tap into this weird resource we've bootstrapped ourselves into creating with games: a huge population of people eager to collaborate, brainstorm, imagine and, above all, work (for as anyone who's spent hours and hours trying to beat a modern game can tell you, gaming is totally work).

And I'm convinced that what she is proposing can happen, though not through games alone. It can happen because of what we are making of ourselves with technology, the connections we are forging every day, the hive mind we so like to joke about but all have come to rely on. Our biological evolution may seem to be stalled but our evolution as a species has left us unrecognizable to our ancestors, after all; what would even our great grandparents make of us walking around, Bluetooth headsets in our ears, talking to thin air, pulling gadgets out of our pockets to look at and laugh and get excited and participate in arguments great and small. We are becoming telepathic with technology, with consequences marvelous and yes, sometimes a little ugly (forum trolls, anyone?). The potential is there and it is manifesting in more remarkable ways every day. But we're still at bottom jumped-up hominids with brains that are messy evolutionary kluges, and so to tap all of this potential we basically have to trick it: we have to turn our world into a game if we're going to save it and be happy.

Why the hell not?

*She hooked me in right away with an example from Herodotus, in which a famine in ancient Lydia was in part addressed via games: the kingdom mandated that every other day would be a fast day in which everybody played games, immersing themselves so entirely they would not notice their hunger pangs, and so passed 18 years and the society survived. I've always loved that story (hell, I love Herodotus period) and that she used it as one of her first supporting examples grabbed my attention like perhaps nothing else would.