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 folks about books! I am still cross-referencing my way through Blood Meridian, both incredibly vivid prose-poetic alchemy of the profound and harrowingly mundane, and also a bit like if a bible ate a pulp paperback then shat out a second, stupider bible with at least twice the people getting severed dicks shoved in their mouths. I love literature so much.
This week, it’s Civilization, Offworld Trading Company, Old World, and Designer Notes’s Soren Johnson! Cheers Soren! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
What are you currently reading?
I’ve got a stack of history books next to my desk on a certain part of the world during a specific period of time, all of which are now full of notes and underlined sentences. Unfortunately, I can’t really say anything about them without making it very obvious what our next game is going to be about. Sorry!
What did you last read?
Over the last decade, I have been a loyal reader of Jimmy Maher’s games history blog, The Digital Antiquarian, which is one writer’s attempt to chronicle the entire history of computer-based video games. In 2011, he started with games from the 70s like Hunt the Wumpus, Adventure, and Oregon Trail, and by 2025 he had reached 1998 – meaning Baldur’s Gate, Starcraft, and Half-Life have all made recent appearances. (For those keeping score at home, that means he roughly covers two historical years per calendar year.) Frankly, there is nothing out there – physical or digital – with this combination of breadth and depth. When covering games – many of which have never had anyone write serious histories of them – he reaches back to contemporary articles and other sources to place the works in their appropriate context and to actually verify the stories that have been told (and have grown) over the years. Not to name any names, but not every game developer has proven to be an accurate source on, for example, how many copies their game actually sold or on who was to blame for a project’s mistakes, and Jimmy does the best he can to set the record straight.
If a reader is not sure where to begin with his work, I would recommend starting with A Game of Falling Shapes, the third article in his series on Tetris, which launches the reader on the implausible-yet-true story of how Tetris escaped the Soviet Union and conquered the world, circling the globe and passing through many hands along the way, some of which belonged to, shall we say, very colorful characters. While his work hits the predictable high points of computer gaming (consoles makes only brief appearances – a necessary allowance for such an already implausible project), some of his best work involves unearthing forgotten dead-ends, such as Interplay’s misbegotten Realms of the Haunting, and pursuing tangents too good to pass up, such as the many (failed) attempts to lay the first Trans-Atlantic telegraph cable (as a prelude to the story of the Internet).
While choosing a blog might feel like a cheat for a column about my bookshelf, the Digital Antiquarian’s existence as a living document online makes it far superior to the static books on game history which are frozen in time as soon as they are printed. His articles build on top of one another, often linking back to past themes which he might not have even been aware of at the time, and the comments section is frequently visited by the game developers themselves, who help him make corrections and give extra context to the decisions they made at the time. These developers don’t always agree with each other – which will actually be indispensable to future historians who won’t have the chance to talk with them while they are still alive. The impetus to get the story down now, while we still can, is the same reason I started my Designer Notes podcast back in 2014, and I have to admit it was a strange feeling when Jimmy started using my interviews as primary source material. Indeed, I wish I had picked my subjects better to match up with his schedule. I just interviewed Charles Cecil (of Beneath a Steel Sky and the Broken Sword series), and he had some record-scratching stories to tell about how the games business worked in the UK of the 80s – some of which had already made it into Jimmy’s articles on Charles and some of which I was hearing for the first time.
What book do you find yourself bothering friends to read?
Sticking with the games history theme, I have encouraged many game developers to find a copy of the Second Edition of Richard Rouse III’s Game Design: Theory and Practice, which contains extensive interviews with seven of the most important game developers of the last century – Sid Meier, Will Wright, Chris Crawford, Steve Meretzky, Doug Church, Jordan Mechner, and Ed Logg. I’ve read plenty of developer interviews over the years, which tend to stick to some marketing beat and to be light on actual introspection, but Rouse somehow got enough time with his subjects to fill 20-30 pages for each one, going deep into what motivated their design decisions. I’ve never found a better collection of interviews.
What book would you like to see someone adapt to a game?
I’d love to see someone turn Dune into a sprawling, turn-based strategy game. I know Dune has a storied history in games, and Dune 2, as the first modern RTS, is one of the most important strategy games of all-time. (Indeed, the Digital Antiquarian extensively covered how Virgin accidentally ended up with two unrelated games on Dune at the same time, which is why Dune 2 is not really a sequel.) However, the Dune books have always struck me as being fundamentally contemplative works – much less about action and reaction than about prediction and preparation. They are about understanding the world above all else, and giving players time to think and plan – even to improvise and imagine – is what turn-based strategy games do better than any other genre. Someone should make it happen! (The recent board game, Dune: Imperium, may not be sprawling, but its tight action economy and dangerous Intrigue deck do a surprisingly good job of capturing Dune’s paranoid yomi.)
You’ll have noticed Soren has cleverly sidestepped the issue of naming every book ever written by refusing to tell me what he’s reading, and also forgetting to answer two of my questions. Truly, the man is three moves ahead of the rest of us. One week ahead of us is another guest, likely destined for similar success at naming all the books. Book for now!