Gaming and Sci-Fi

Gaming — the video variety, not the gambling kind — has made itself at home in our cultural consciousness. It's been settling in for awhile, probably for longer than I've been aware.

There have been, of course, the staggering, multi-billion dollar revenues that gaming companies rake in. But money is only so interesting. It's more interesting to me when relatively marginalized activities hit the mainstream.

One of my favorite podcasts, On the Media, ran — and a year later reprised — an hour-long look at the history, influence, culture, and future of videogaming. Toward the end was an interview with a game designer, Jane McGonigal, whose TED talk asks why the real world doesn't work more like an online game. Her project, as she puts it: "to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games." It's an interesting presentation, both for her optimistic argument and for the nervous laughter at many of the statistics she spashes on the screen. Is gaming mainstream now? Maybe. But not comfortably so.

I've just recently finished three science fiction narratives that tap into this zeitgeist to a meaningful extent. Since I didn't choose the books with this in mind —that is, I didn't set out to read a series of books dealing with gamers and gaming — it probably gives me a heightened, and perhaps false, impression that video games have become, for science fiction writers, important technologies worth exploring in depth. Nonetheless...

 I read Neil Stephenson's Reamde simply because I like Stephenson and I'd put his latest book on my Amazon wish list. Merry Christmas!

(A brief aside: In a lot of ways, I wish I'd put his previous book, Anathem, on that list; I think it would have been more interesting, since Reamde is more of a thriller than one of his usual "big idea" books. Fortunately, a Stephenson thriller is far better than most.)

At the heart of Reamde is a World of Warcraft-like game: one of the main characters is the owner and originator of the game, and the events of the narrative are kicked into gear through concrete interactions between gamers in their game world and their real world. I don't want to give away more than that; it's a romp, full of surprises, and certainly worth the many hours it takes to read (it's a long one, clocking in at 1000+ pages). My point: one of the main character's invented the game, and the novel takes place in and around that game.

I stumbled upon Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline, through an Audible.com recommendation on one of the podcasts I listen to (apparently, the book is read, to the delight of many a geek, by Wil Wheaton). I put it on my Amazon wish list, too, and, voilà: it too appeared at Christmas.

Ready Player One is another romp — more fun but not as interesting as Reamde, in my view. In Cline's book, the founder of a video game — one that has become an almost Matrix-like escape for a devastated world--dies and leaves his unbelievably massive fortune to whoever can find an "Easter egg" buried somewhere in the game universe. And since the deceased designer was an '80s freak, the gameplay — and the book — is jam-packed with all kinds of 80s pop-culture references — games, of course, but also music, TV, and movies. Nothing of earth shattering importance, but a good ride.


From the recommendation of another podcast, I got ahold of Daniel Suarez's Daemon and its sequel, Freedom™. In this case, I had no idea what I was getting into, just that someone I respected liked the books and that they were sci fi. (I didn't even know, until I finished Daemon, that Freedom™ continued the story.) I was thus a bit surprised to find that these books also deal with the legacy of the founder of a video game empire--though in this case, the battle is not for an Easter egg of riches, but for — wait for it — the survival of the human race.

Of the three narratives, Suarez's is by far the most interesting. For one thing, if I were still in grad school research mode, the cross between  posthuman and ambiguous utopia would be right up my alley. But I think the judgment holds even without my special interest; like the other books, Daemon and Freedom™ have their share of romp, but it all serves a larger project of raising frightening questions about the world we, the readers, find ourselves in today.

And, while the story sometimes becomes a bit pedantic in its lectures about the causes of various economic woes, these lectures are always followed up by a satisfying massacre of the otherwise untouchable guilty parties.

I have a stack of papers waiting to be graded, so I don't have time to meditate on the way that videogaming has found itself at the heart of so much good (and popular) sci fi. It reminds me of the spate of jacked-into-the-net movies that came out in 1999 — The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, and eXistenz... The question of how we would (or wouldn't) be able to tell the difference between a real and a virtual world seemed to become suddenly very important for awhile there...

Anyway: fun stuff.  I recommend all four books, even though I'm not really a gamer, and the 80s isn't really my decade.

(Another brief aside, though: If you haven't read Stephenson before, I'd recommend Snow Crash (second only to Gibson's Neuromancer as exemplar of cuperpunk) or Cryptonomicon (a unique mix of historical fiction, computer science, and thriller--and yes, I used the word unique. Because I think it is.)