books

Top to bottom:
The Wayfinders by Wade Davis
The Lost Origins of the Essay edited by John D’Agata
Borges: Selected Poems by Jorge Luis Borges
A Buddhist Bible, by Dwight Goddard
Freedom by Daniel Suarez
In Such Hard Times by Wei Ying-Wu, translated by Red Pine
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

The bald fella with the big facial hair is Neal Stephenson, author of many wonderful books including Cryptonomicon – my freshly-signed copy of which he is holding – and Anathem, which is his latest book. He was at Schuler Books and Music on 28th Street yesterday for a reading and Q-and-A session. He was very personable, if quite tired-out from the book tour, which has taken him all over the country in a fairly short amount of time.

During QA, I asked him what he thought the next Age might be, in the context of the ages he described in his early novel “Interface”: (A run-down of those ages is here). He got a funny look on his face and said “You’re asking me to predict the future.” Then he went on to opine that people nowadays seemed to be increasingly afraid of anything of significant complexity, and they were looking for simpler lives. One way they (we) are doing this is to latch onto people with powerful personalities and let them lead the complicated lives while we follow safely in their wakes. This is an observation toward which I will need to direct some significant thought.

After I finish reading Anathem.

In the past two years I have spent a lot of my free time working on two computer games. They were both entries in the annual “Four Elements” (“4E”) contest put on by the website GameDev.net. Both were (well, ARE, actually) economic games, manifested as trading simulations.

I have always liked games where you start out with nothing, and by virtue of personal fortitude, business acumen and a bit of luck, amass a fortune and gain whatever rewards come from the experience. The 4E games were my attempt to make those games better. And maybe win some money.

I recently finished reading the Baroque Cycle for the third time, and when I finished the second book in the series I went to the library and picked up Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. I am part-way into the first chapter. At the beginning “economics” is defined as “…the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternate uses”. In other words, why do people decide to spend money on A instead of B?

This is some seriously interesting stuff, and may help me refine my games, if I am ever in a position where I can bring them to completion.

A friend recently pointed me to a series on Google Video called The Century of the Self (links to videos at the bottom of the page), which explores how governments have used Freud’s theories to “engineer consent” in various populations. One off-shoot of this was Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, who is generally recognized as “the father of public relations”. Basically, he showed organizations how to take his uncle’s theories and put them to use in convincing people to buy things.

I am convinced that somewhere in the intersection of these two basic texts is the seeds of a Big Idea I can put to use somehow, either in a game, or in some aspect of my “real” life — although making it real may require some research into how the stock market works, and perhaps some delving into psychology.

In any case, I have something to keep my mind occupied for the next couple of months.