Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry people about books! Books obviously come in many different formats, but did you know that there is an obscure law that sets the legal limit on how long a novel can be? It is measured in ‘George Martins’. If your story is more than three ‘Georges’ wide, you will be quickly escorted to a cell and told to eat all the bits of the book that refer to more than three characters in a scene with the same last name. This week it’s the developer and writer of the legendary Radiator Blog, Robert Yang! Cheers Robert! Do you mind if we have a nose for your bookshelf?
What are you currently reading?
I moved to New Zealand a few years ago and am trying to get acquainted with the local art and theory here. Two weeks ago I came across this book, The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader, a collection of Kiwi books about creative technology. Often these types of books can be cringe-inducing portals, like imagining the “NFT metaverse revolution” book in the $1 bin. But this 2008 book has done a good job so far in thinking about the future. Just a lot of well-founded thinking about still relevant, perhaps even timeless concepts. And while it doesn’t foresee anything like today’s strange zombification of social networks, few did so in 2008.
What did you last read?
I’m currently prototyping an unannounced rugby strategy game, so I’m also reading a lot of rugby player manuals and coaching guides. The best so far is Rugby Skills, Tactics And Rules (5th Edition) by John McKittrick and Tony Williams. It’s 50% photos? I think it might be for jocks. Either way, they write about what they think ‘good rugby’ looks like, the unspoken norms that shape sport more than official laws. Fans don’t (or can’t) explain it because they breathe it, but newcomers like me need these fish to explain water.
What are you paying attention to now?
I read this fascinating interview ‘Buildings Born Ruins: Philosophy and Architecture After the Apocalypse’ about how the apocalypse is already happening, but it is a ‘hyperobject’ that transcends the horizon of human space-time. It reminds me of a futuristic conference I went to ten years ago, where a cheerful scientist told me, “It’s already too late, we’re working on climate engineering so that there will be options by 2030.” So is this what an apocalypse should feel like? One of the interviewees Lisa Doeland has a book Apocalypsofie, but it seems to be only in Dutch. The other book from the interviewees is Modern Architecture And Climate: Design Before Air Conditioning by Daniel Barber, which sounds more material, about ‘comfort’ and its cousin ‘survival’, which reminds me of the recent TV series The Curse.
Which book do you quote from the most?
Oof. Uhm. I quote the Simpsons all the time. Is The Simpsons a book?… I think the quote I have in mind right now is from James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, where one of the characters shouts, “What’s the use of an American who isn’t happy? Luck was all we could do.” As an American who now lives outside America, I often have to define my Americanness out loud at parties, something that would never happen in America – not because Americans never talk about America (haha), but because I’m Asian and all. I’m never quite American enough for Americans James Baldwin inspires and terrifies me – a brilliant gay, non-white American who left America to think about something else for a change, but ended up thinking even more about America.
What book are you bugging friends to read?
Metagaming by Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux. They claim that video games are not games, but that we all play multiple games within the video game. Some of us story mode, some of us speedrun, some of us hacking or modifying or shitposting or reading wikis… and these are all different games. They extend the gamer concept of the “meta” https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/”metagame” to everything we do with games. It transforms game development into wedding planning, like this ecological art about nurturing multiple symbiotic habitats that coexist.
What book would you like to see someone adapt into a game?
I reread Mrs Dalloway every year or two, it’s probably my favorite book. I plan to make it into a game someday. For those who aren’t familiar, it’s about all these people in 1920s London and how their lives intersect, and then they all meet at a big party at the end. Structurally it looks like a Wes Anderson movie, but Virginia Woolf would have thought Wes Anderson was a total idiot. Like you usually read Woolf at school, in a formal way to learn about advanced storytelling, but that dry approach ignores how cool and funny she is – not among all these assholes so she can’t see them on the street.
Robert, Robert. You’re telling me you can come up with a project as delightful as an “ongoing series of experimental video game triptychs on gay issues,” and yet be completely unable to name every book ever written, as is the real purpose of this column is? Welp, we’ll see how next week’s guest does. And as always, don’t count your books before they come out, because you’ll just have to count them all over again, which will take forever. Book now!