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.)

"The Torture Report": Inspiring?

On the Media had a brief interview today with Larry Siems, the principle author of an ACLU project that hopes to create an accessible narrative about post-9/11 anti-terrorist activities from thousands of pages of documents the ACLU obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

When I heard about the project, I was prepared to be depressed--especially when I heard the title: The Torture Report. I expected something along the lines of Mayer's The Dark Side.

There's good reason to be depressed, of course. The Torture Report's first chapter--all that is written so far, I understand--begins its narrative with events of Sept. 17, 2001, the day that President Bush signed a secret directive authorizing secret interrogation facilities. Also, at that time, Bush Administration lawyers wrote a memo declaring that the president may use the military on U.S. territory--in defiance to Congress, who, while granting the president authorization to use force in Afghanistan, had just refused to grant him that power.

I was pleasantly surprised, however, to hear Siems announce that he was, in fact, inspired by what he found when sifting through the mountains of documents: "There are an abundance of characters," he said, "who exhibit extraordinary courage and conscience along the way in this story--more than we ever knew."

In the interview, he reads the account of one interrogator, for example, who stood up to Special Forces troops who were harrassing--if that's quite the word for the fear they inflicted--a prisoner she was interrogating. This interrogator concludes her account with a defense of the Geneva Conventions: "if I don't honor it," she said, "what right to I have to expect any other military to do so?"

A month later, President Bush signed an order declaring that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to Al Qaeda or Taliban prisoners.

Siems' discovery--and the insight that I hope The Torture Report gets across--is that while a lot of really bad things were going on, there were, as Siems puts it, "so many people who looked at the same set of facts about the threats that we face and never moved in this direction, and when others moved in this direction they objected. We as a country owe it to those people to look at the whole story and to honor what they've done."

I want to hear more stories like this--not because I think people like Mayer are wrong (I reviewed her book favorably awhile back), or that they are focused on the wrong things, or anything like that. On the contrary, we need to look unblinking at what happened, in part to hold responsible parties to account, and in part to ensure that such abuses can't happen again.

But I do want to honor those who resisted the Dark Side. And I'm heartened to know that it was more than just a few brave people who did so.