Interesting article describing how Words with Friends cre­ators Zynga reshaped the [Scrabble] board, added four tiles, and changed the values and dis­tri­bution of the letters in the process of devel­oping their block­buster smart­phone game.

‘One of the goals we had in designing our letter dis­tri­bution was to give players letters that would allow them to form words much more easily than in other word games,’ [designer and engineer Kevin] Holme said via e-mail. ‘In [Words with Friends], we put four Hs into the bag and set their value to 3 — a big dif­ference from Scrabble, which uses two Hs worth 4 points.’

In other words, he amp­lified the number of… ‘explosive moments.’

Further to the link I posted last week about the psychic division between the writer as author and the writer as human being, here’s author Chris Womersley writing for the Untitled Books website about the del­icate splitting of the self that comes with pro­ducing a work of fiction:

The fellow who does the dishes, forgets people’s names, fero­ciously bites his nails and eats por­ridge for breakfast — the everyday me, in other words — and the one who per­forms the slightly dreamy act of writing are, subtly, dif­ferent. The everyday me doesn’t actually narrate my works of fiction. Instead it is the writerly version of myself — the one with access to the (hope­fully) best pos­sible word, who can spend months revis­iting sen­tences to ensure they are just right, who can see the structure of the story being told, who under­stands his char­acters; the one who rearranges.

“The Hitler Youth LP”. (For context, see this tweet from @spikelynch.)

‘Good God, man, what do you mean?!’ cried Sergeant Major General. ‘Do you mean some unima­ginable alien being came through a hole in the fabric of space-time and sucked this man’s living heart from his body as part of some kind of plot to take over our planet?’

Inspired the acquis­ition of a number of books all named The Eye of the Tiger, Pinknantucket Press is making its own splendid con­tri­bution to the canon of works endowed with this most excellent des­ig­nation.

Keep a look-out for the forth­coming Eye of the Tiger Omnibus.

Psychologists from Washington University used brain scans to see what happens inside our heads when we read stories. They found that ‘readers men­tally sim­ulate each new situ­ation encountered in a nar­rative’. The brain weaves these situ­ations together with exper­i­ences from its own life to create a new mental syn­thesis. Reading a book leaves us with new neural pathways.

Gail Rebuck in the Guardian on the role of written nar­rative in devel­oping empathy and a sense of self. She adds that (as) pub­lishers, we need to use every new piece of tech­nology to embed long-form reading within our culture. We should con­cen­trate on the message, not agonise over the medium. We should be agnostic on the platform, but evan­gelical about the content.

Every writer is two people (at least). There’s the one that does the writing, and the one that has an egg for breakfast. I’m the other one.

Margaret Atwood on the psychic division between the writer as author and the writer as human being, quoted in the New York Times in the context of authors extending their private selves into the world via social media.

Every book has an intrinsic impossib­ility, which its writer dis­covers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. The problem is struc­tural; it is insoluble; it is why no one can ever write this book.

From a gal­van­ising 1989 piece by Annie Dillard for the New York Times. A vivid, powerful expression of the art of writing if ever I’ve read one.

The ori­ginal article is behind the NYT paywall, but Google has a cached version.

(Thanks to T.B. McKenzie for the link.)