10 ms·
Books Become Games
- ilaksh 4y agoDoes anyone know who the brilliant high school Korean podcaster is that he mentioned?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- barry-cotter 4y agoThis is one of those long essays you come to the end of and wonder “What the hell was that?” It’s entertaining but what does it even say? Books need commitment and mental labor and most people on a podcast tour or radio tour never even read the book, just the talking points? Some people read deeply and well? Having a conversation on the same set of talking points can be valuable even if you wrote an entire book on the same topic as the talking points? That’s probably the meat of the thing. The riffs on books and video games and social media are less well developed. He’s trying to fit a book into an essay and it won’t go. The compression leaves you with a copy of the idea in the book so blurry you can’t see anything but the shape of what he’s trying to say. And then there’s an annoying postscript that can be safely skipped. I wish he’d told us who the teenage Korean podcaster was. He sounds interesting.
- routerl 4y agoHe's not making an argument, there's no conclusion. It's a lament.
- bombcar 4y agoIf the jist is people discuss and interview without actually reading the book, well that happens. Even with game reviews many reviewers don’t finish the game - movie reviewers have a cap on how long it can take to watch - but the whole point is to get something out quickly. And if most people never read the books they buy, then the interviewer is doing a service by letting them know what signal they’re sending by buying the book.
- magpi3 4y agoHe mentioned that he will link the podcast episode when it goes live.
- boffinism 4y agoFor an article about book promotion and tone of voice, the tone of voice sure did put me off buying the book.
- auggierose 4y agoWhy is that? By the way, this might be a book promotion, but it is not really about book promotion or "tone of voice".
- jayjaangid 4y ago
- andrewstuart 4y agoThis article made me think: "When I release my next software product, I'm going to get a book promoter to promote it."
- barry-cotter 4y agoThat wouldn’t work anywhere near as well as doing it yourself and you wouldn’t learn a twentieth as much. Writing the one pager forces the author to condense the book. Discussing it honed his thoughts. Even after that much work thinking, to write a book, discussing it taught him things, made him better able to discuss it. A very similar process if behind the idea of ELI5 or “Talk to your customers, sell to potential customers or improve your product. All else is distraction.” Aka “Make something people want.”
- auggierose 4y agoMore like: Make something, and market the hell out of it so that people think they want it.
- barry-cotter 4y agoThe Juicero strategy
- waqf 4y ago> Writing the one pager forces the author to condense the book. Discussing it honed his thoughts. I find this observation shocking, because it forces me to confront the idea that the author didn't already have a concise explanation of the book in their head, even during the later stages of finishing and editing the book. Am I unreasonable to feel that I'm probably not interested in reading a book created by someone who didn't have any overall perspective on what they were doing?
- bombcar 4y agoThere are many different authors and many different writing styles and not all are compatible with everyone. And people read for different reasons, too. You don’t read Wodehouse for the same reasons you’d read Tolstoy or a Missing Manual. For fiction especially you’ll find that some is meticulously planned out and then “filled in” whereas others are more story idea + characters and see where they go.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- auggierose 4y agoI see from the comments that many here don't get what he is talking about. I think he sums it up nicely in the end: > I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: we see in the concept of games —here it comes again— a double mouvement, and indeed something approaching an autoantonymy. The concept in question can signify both a free play of the imaginative faculty, a Schillerian Spieltrieb; and it can signify a situation in which one is bound by formal constraints on one’s motions, and is therefore compelled to respond to one’s existence fundamentally through coming up with strategies. The gamification of our social life, which was honed and perfected on social media before it jumped the fence to affectivity, labor, and who knows what’s next, forces us to sacrifice free play to strategic play, and the leisurely flight of the imagination to narrow problem-solving. > On the face of it, the gamification of reality looks like fun. But when everything becomes a game, it turns out, that game ends up dissolving into its merely apparent opposite: work. The dupes of the new ideology, underlain by the metaphor of the game, think they’re giving us life in an arcade —a child’s dream!— but what we’re really getting is life in a global warehouse, monitored and metricized, forced at every turn to devise strategies that maximize engagement with whatever it is we’re putting out there… all in the name of scraping by.
- bsenftner 4y agoBlows my mind how people can't read anymore. The essay is excellent.
- mvonballmo 4y agoIt's impossible for me not to think of this (Idiocracy, 90s, 2 clips): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py37IFuKxYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py37IFuKxYw
- Nebasuke 4y agoI had a great time reading the essay. The information and concept density of this essay is higher, and reading this essay reminded me of reading a good book. I think the author advertised their book honestly in the sense that the essay likely reflects the reading experience of their book, but it's probably too honest if their goal was improving sales. About the actual content: I resonated with the concerns of games becoming work, as it matches what I've heard from most of the YouTube creators I follow. YouTubers having to create strategies that maximize engagement makes video creation more work and less "game"/fun than it used to be. I agree that a lot of the web can be seen to be following this trend.
- bambax 4y agoThis essay is over 3,000 words (over 3,200 actually, but it includes quotes). I'm sorry to admit I gave up after the first 20%, without still having any clue as to where the author was going. This seems to be a problem on many Substack posts; it tends to attract ramblings. For all the talk about disintermediation, it turns out good editors are invaluable, and sorely missed.
- Danieru 4y agoIt is a writer, who is complaining how people do not read books anymore. He writes lots because writing little is not his goal. You have no complained that his complaint is too long. His reply might be: that social media has transformed books into tokens. Their content worth nothing more than to provide an identity and tell what message can be explained in a single page. He is lamenting how while promoting his book he is getting interviewed by people who have only read the marketing sales points. How during consideration for a award the committee will only evaluate a synopsis. Overall, a article worth the read. Yes it is long. Yes it is not concise. Yes it is not a great article to retweet to your followers and establish your credentials with crowd X.
- ekianjo 4y ago> . He writes lots because writing little is not his goal Writing clearly should be a goal of every wannabe writer. Whats the point of long form writing if you dont even know what the whole point of the essay is 20% in?
- barry-cotter 4y agoHe’s not a wannabe. He’s a writer. Sometimes the journey is as important as the destination, more. Not all writing needs to follow an introduction, body, conclusion format, with topic sentences. It’s ok to write densely, allusively, to reward rereading.
- ekianjo 4y ago> He’s not a wannabe. He’s a writer Anyone can claim to be a writer. It does not take more than having a keyboard in front of you and lots of time. > Sometimes the journey is as important as the destination, more. You don't have to make the reader pain through your long and fastidious journey. > Not all writing needs to follow an introduction, body, conclusion format, with topic sentences. Indeed, but still writing is supposed to be more than just fluff that says nothing paragraph after paragraph. That's just filler content.
- netmonk 4y agoI was ready to order the book until he writes about Frederic begbeider. Then I cancelled
- irrational 4y ago> the famous double mouvement that nearly every academic talk ever given in French identifies in whatever matter is at hand: dans la Monadologie de Leibniz il y a un double mouvement; dans Méridien de sang de Cormac McCarthy il y a un double mouvement… Why would someone writing an article in English not include an English translation? I have zero idea what this sentence means.
- bombcar 4y agoBecause we’re not special enough (though apparently it’s just that every academic talk in France identifies something called a “double movement”).
- notpachet 4y agoThere was a time when French was the lingua franca (literally). Academics are exposed to more of its vestiges than lay people. I didn't mind it. In a way I feel like this is indicative of one of the points of the essay: the expectation that authors today need to dumb down and distill their work into cereal for the lowest common denominators in order to sell more copies. Granted, there's a fine line between gesturing to your intellectual forebears and just being an obnoxious prat, but I don't think the author crossed that line for the worse. Time to brush up on your french?
- mvonballmo 4y agoThe author has been living and teaching in France for years now. He reads and speaks many languages besides French and English.
- brimble 4y agoDepending on field and author, that's downright common. French is still often untranslated in works that tend toward the literary or philosophical. Before the 70s or so, Latin (usually some unattributed quotation you were expected to recognize) was often untranslated. Before World War I, Greek was like that, too—but that's because both Greek and Latin were studied in primary school, then. In all cases it seems like the British have held on to those a bit longer than Americans. In this instance, you ought to be able to pick it out by context, thanks to cognates and two famous works by two famous figures being included. "Méridien de sang" can only be McCarthy' Blood Meridian; "la Monadologie de Leibniz" can only be Leibniz' Monadology—the philosophy of monads being the thing he's second most famous for in the English world, after co-developing calculus and before noble genealogy. "un double movement" is almost identical to English. From there, your guess at the meaning, given the lead-in to it, will likely be correct. You think this is bad, you should see what they do in math.
- throwaway284534 4y agoDisclaimer: I’m working on a micro fiction app. Ironically, Justin’s argument gets lost in repetitive rhetoric. Not that repeating an idea for emphasis is bad per se — I personally lost interest at the 60% mark once I got the gist of it. He’s right though. Books are often purchased like mementos to signal the ideals you’d like to be associated with. And to add to the irony, Justin may be inadvertently writing his book for the same reasons. It’s fun to be thought of as a published author, to escape the 9-5, and to do something passionate for a living. Personally, I don’t have much of an attention span for long form, so I can sympathize with my own readers. I took it as feedback to rework my book into a ADHD friendly format.[1] I want stories that have a true sense of time between pages, character dialogue that feels like more than text on a page, and exposition that has a verisimilitude rivaling a movie. …But not everyone wants that. Some authors want to publish books the way they’ve always been written. I just wouldn’t be surprised if finding dedicated readers gets harder every year. [1] (NSFW) https://hugbox.biz/story/is-that-me/the-girl-in-the-mirror/ https://hugbox.biz/story/is-that-me/the-girl-in-the-mirror/
- pessimizer 4y agoYou mistook the first thing that he wrote as the thing the entire essay was about, and you mistook the development of the first thing he wrote into his larger argument as repetitions of the first thing he wrote. Not an essay on how cool it is to have books, or how pretentious it is to have books.
- throwaway284534 4y agoRespectfully, I disagree and I don’t believe this article is written well. An entire essay cannot stand in for a thesis statement, or at least not without disregarding the reader’s time. I think what especially frustrates me about this article is that there are good portions. Justin makes some good points that would do well with another round of editing.
- paulclinger 4y agoInteresting idea, but I think this is too short (and page transitions take longer than reading of each page). BTW, on p5: s/who’s/whose/ in "who’s room is this".
- wallfacer120 4y agoI strongly disagree with this kind of techno-pessimism. Social media is a grind if you treat it as a grind. Your friend count is a high score only if you treat it as a high score. Your reddit karma is only important if you treat it as important. You all act like you're being forced to use social media, or use it in a particular way, you're not. You act like its some sinister outside force that makes you obsessed with status, it isn't. It's just you. It's fun and oh-so-fashionable to blame corporations and Mark Zuckerburg for your emptiness, but it comes at a terrible cost to your ability to grow and change and understand the world around you.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y agoThis is an increasingly difficult concept to escape when you’re in certain career positions. Are you sure that this doesn’t matter if you’re a new, unestablished cultural commentator, fashion designer, model, journalist, politician, union organizer, musician, artist, or marketer? (Please note how I said new, unestablished. People who already have platforms and influence before obviously don’t need what social media offers.)
- wallfacer120 4y agoHow has social media made this worse?
- cardanome 4y agoThe problem is that social media is not optional for many professions. A book author is absolutely expected to have social media and it can be quite critical towards whether they succeed or not. In fact for any kind of artist is. Even as a software engineer, yeah you can do without it currently because of how good the job market is but playing the social media game right can offer a huge career boost (or malus if you are not careful). So not engaging with social media or not engaging strategically leaves you at a clear disadvantage. Humans have a strong desire to be accepted by the group because that is critical for survival. And these days, being good at social media, having many followers, is a huge survival advantage. It directly translates into opportunities to make money, towards job offers, towards networking ability, towards finding a new apartment, being able to do a GoFundMe if you have been ruined by medical bills and so on. So no, people are no doing it to themselves. They have to play the game.
- Tao331 4y agoThis essay was nearly impenetrable for me, so I suspect I'm nowhere near educated enough in the humanities to understand his book. This zinger really stood out to me: "The only appropriate use of social media, beyond simple announcements of personal milestones or professional engagements, is shitposting. It is a medium that deserves nothing earnest, and that can facilitate no real project of social betterment." Unfortunately I think the shitposting is being digested and regurgitated by web3 cultists as the "real project".