Hello fellow reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of great people in the industry about books! Books obviously come in many different sizes, but did you know that there is an obscure law that sets the legal limit for how long a novel can be? It is measured in ‘Georgi Martins’. If your story is more than three ‘Georges’ wide, you will be quickly escorted to a cell and forced to eat any bits of the book that refer to more than three characters in a scene with the same last name. This week it’s developer and author of the legendary blog Radiator, Robert Yang! Cheers Robert! Would we mind poking our noses at your library?
What are you currently reading?
I moved to New Zealand a few years ago and am trying to catch up on local art and theory. Two weeks ago I stumbled upon this book by The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader, a collection of Kiwis writing about creative technology. These kinds of books can often be portals like the $1 trash can book “NFT Metaverse Revolution”. But this 2008 book has done a decent job of thinking about the future so far. Just a lot of firmly grounded thinking about still current, perhaps even timeless concepts. And while he doesn’t foresee anything like today’s weird zombification of social media, well, few did in 2008.
What did you read last time?
I’m currently prototyping an unannounced rugby strategy game, so I’m also reading a lot of rugby player and coaching manuals. The best so far has been Rugby Skills, Tactics And Rules (5th Edition) by John McKittrick and Tony Williams. Is it 50% of the images? I think it might be for athletes. Anyway, they write about what they think “good rugby” looks like, the unspoken norms that shape the sport more than the official laws. Fans don’t (or can’t) explain it because they breathe it, but newbies like me need these fish to explain the water.
What are you looking at next?
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 human space-time horizon. It reminds me of a futuristic conference I went to 10 years ago where a cheerful scientist told me, “It’s too late, we’re working on climate engineering to make 2030 a possibility.” So this is what the apocalypse is supposed to look like? One of the interviewees, Lisa Doeland, has the book Apocalypsofie, but it seems to be in Dutch only. Another book for interviewees is Daniel Barber’s Modern Architecture And Climate: Design Before Air Conditioning, which sounds more material, about ‘comfort’ and its relative ‘survival’, which reminds me of the recent TV series The Curse.
What book do you quote from the most?
Phew. Ummm. I quote The Simpsons all the time. Is The Simpsons a book?… I think the quote I’m thinking of right now is from Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, where one of the characters yells, “What good is an American that’s not happy? had.” As an American who now lives outside of 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 that I’m Asian and stuff. I’m never American enough. James Baldwin inspires and terrifies me – a brilliant non-white American who left America to try something else for a change, but ended up thinking about America he thought even more.
What book do you think you pester your friends to read?
Metagaming by Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux. They argue that video games are not games, instead we all play several games in a video game. Some of us story mode, some of us speedrun, some of us hack or mod or shitpost or read the wiki… and those are all different games. They expand the gaming concept of “meta”https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/”metagame” to include everything we do with games. It transforms the development of wedding planning games like this ecological art into caring for several symbiotic biotopes existing side by side.
What book would you like someone to adapt into a game?
I re-read Mrs. Dalloway every year or two, it’s probably my favorite book. I intend to edit it into a game someday. For those who don’t know, it’s about all these people in London in the 1920s and how their lives intersect and then they all come together at the end for a big party. Structurally, it’s like a Wes Anderson movie, but Virginia Woolf would think Wes Anderson was a total nutcase. As usual, you read Woolf in a formal way at school to learn about advanced storytelling, but this dry approach skips over how cool and funny she is – she spends the night among all these morons so she can’t see them on the street.
Robert, Robert. You’re telling me you can imagine a project as adorable as “an ongoing series of experimental video game triptychs about gay stuff” and yet completely fail to name every book ever written, as is the real purpose of this column? Well, we’ll see how next week’s guest fares. And as always, don’t count your books before they hatch, because then you’ll have to count them all again, and that will take ages. Book now!