Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2011 > October > 11 > Entry
Author Neal Stephenson talks ‘REAMDE,’ elliptical gaming
Stephenson has a fascinating and the topic seems ripe given that he’s the author of cyberpunk mainstays like “Crytonomicon” and “Snow Crash.” But the conversation, led by games journalist Geoff Keighley, was bone-dry and more than half of it was spent in a fruitless discussion about games that Stephenson plays or admires.
The packed ballroom full of game industry professionals couldn’t have been too enthralled by Stephenson’s middle-of-the-road gaming tastes. He plays a lot of “Halo 3” while exercising on an elliptical machine for 45 minutes at a time and plays games like “Left 4 Dead” and “Portal 2” in part because he lives in Seattle and has access to local gaming heroes Valve Software.
A discussion about the open-ended customization of a game like “Fallout 3” and the more rigid storyline of “Red Dead Redemption” was discussed, but Stephenson seemed out of his element talking about the latest and greatest games that developers regularly reference.
The talk picked up energy when Stephenson discussed his writing projects, including “The Mongoliad,” an online serialized work with seven authors that, it was announced Tuesday, will be published in paper form by Amazon.com. Stephenson said there’s also a demo version of a game he and his collaborators are trying to develop that ties in with that story. “It’s in its embryonic form so far,” he said.
He says he’s been interested in how traditional writers are working in the games industry and dealing with narrative challenges. For his part, he says working as an embedded games writer doesn’t really suit his lifestyle. “It’s hard to get me to do anything that causes me to leave my house and deal with other human beings,” he joked.
When the subject turned to his new novel “REAMDE” (the title is a play on computer documentation “README” files), he said he combine the phenomenon of gold farming with the idea of a writer of computer viruses. For the gold farming bits, he traveled to China and had online conversations with gold farmers, but he said they often wanted to talk about NBA basketball instead.
Of gold farming, he said, “It’s one of those things that makes you want to give up writing science fiction because you could never come up with something that weird.”
Stephenson is optimistic about the future of gaming and narrative. He believes that the audience for good games will get more demanding, forcing game developers to make better content. “(The audience knows) when they’re being respected and when they’re being disrespected. The audience is going to force the industry to respect them,” he said.
When asked about the Metaverse and many aspects of the Internet (and, seemingly, Facebook) that he foretold in “Snow Crash,” Stephenson was more reticent.
“I feel oddly detached from the Metaverse and ‘Snow Crash.’ I’m aware that I wrote about it a long time ago,” Stephenson said, “I get asked questions in this vein all the time and I never know what to say about it.”
The real Internet, it seems, is intruding on his work. Stephenson said he wrote “REAMDE” on a laptop and found himself constantly distracted by email and websites. He said he plans to try to find ways of being more focused when he writes his next book.
Permalink | | Categories: Austin, Videogames
