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.
‘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.)
Every generation must lose its innocence, must see the brightly painted nursery wall smashed away by the wrecking ball of betrayal to reveal a blighted landscape. For our predecessors, it was the Somme, the Great Depression, the Holocaust or Vietnam; for my generation, it was The Phantom Menace.
David Mitchell compares the launch of J.K. Rowling’s exhaustive Harry Potter website Pottermore with George Lucas lifting the veil of myth from the pre-story to his original Star Wars films and filling in all the detail like, as Mitchell puts it, ‘a tedious nerd’.
(W)hat we can expect from books is what the internet has always given us. More. More of everything. But what of taking in continuous prose, in the form conventionally known as “reading”?
Yes, it’s another article about ‘the death of books’ and dwindling attention spans, but Sam Leith seems less anguished than most, and in this piece for the Guardian he touches on an interesting aspect of the rise of digital books — namely the way in which traditional book formats have come about by ‘cultural accident’, and whether emerging formats will have as profound effect on the nature of prose narrative as have the physical constraints of conventional books.
There was no such thing as ‘geek chic’ in my day. There were no fashion spreads featuring models in tweed jackets and glasses. Now hipsters buy specs with clear glass in them as fashion accessories, made by Tom Ford or Yves Saint Laurent.
Stephen Merchant (and others) on the awkward years of adolescence. If you’ve heard Merchant on the Ricky Gervais podcasts (or the earlier XFM radio shows) then some of his anecdotes about life as a ‘teenage geek’ will be familiar to you. As they also might if you’ve ever made the mistake of pretending to be something you’re not.
It’s a long-established rule of fantasy that the more powerful and ethereal a being is, the more freely he can indulge his latent transvestism.
That’s Gary Gillat describing the evil (no, really?) Black Guardian from Doctor Who, in his 2009 review of the ‘Black Guardian Trilogy’ DVD box set.
A new series of the BBC Radio 4 sitcom Cabin Pressure began earlier this month, and in his blog post introducing the first episode, writer John Finnemore shares a page from his notebook, offering a fascinating glimpse into the process of constructing a half-hour comedy. I especially like the emphasis on what each of the main characters wants, the ‘value at stake’ and the ‘question’ of the episode.
Incidentally, John Finnemore was a guest last year on an episode of the Rum Doings podcast, which features an agreeably geeky and rambling discussion between Finnemore and hosts John Walker and Nick Mailer on the subject (mainly) of British sitcoms.
Sam Anderson in the New York Times discussing information overload, James Gleick’s new book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, and the overwhelming inclusiveness of the internet on one hand and the restraint of the traditional almanac on the other:
Like the Web, the almanac aspires to be a total information delivery system – the source of every datum you will ever need. Unlike the Web, however, the almanac aims for exhaustiveness within clearly defined limits. It has a front cover and a back cover. Compared with the Internet, it feels wonderfully contained and stable – it is curated omniscience, portion-control Google. Much of its value comes from the empty spaces around its edges, the missing entries in its index, the silence that descends when you close it.
Mike Lynch at Nannygoat Hill offers an examination of Doctor Who, its central character and its enthusiasts in the form of a Ballardian short fiction-cum-psychiatric essay, as though the program itself were a series of ‘disaster reports’ detailing ever-increasing threats to humanity, the universe, and temporal reality itself; metaphors, as the essay suggests, “for some crisis of the mind’s ability to retain an integral image of itself over historical time”.
The Journal of Victorian Culture Online compares the recent Doctor Who Christmas special, ‘A Christmas Carol’, to Dickens’ original. Much is made of the Doctor’s active participation in the Scrooge figure’s past, present and future, in contrast to the ‘passive observation of the past leading to internal reflection’ in Dickens’ story. “What ensued,” notes the author, “was a deliberate manipulation of Dickens’ plot to suit both the hero and the show”.
Every day for much of this year, Melbourne poet Anna Ryan-Punch has been requesting words, ideas and phrases via Twitter to form the basis of a daily poem. Every day! The results are frequently amazing. This — a sestina with acrostic — is one of my favourites.
Guillermo Del Toro, speaking to Rick Kleffel about his vampire novels The Strain and The Fall (co-written with Chuck Hogan), is worried about Godzilla dropping turds on Tokyo.
Television scriptwriter and author Ben Aaronovitch on why Google’s Ngram Viewer should be a regular port of call for writers of historical drama.
‘Sticking out like a sore thumb’, incidentally, appears to have originated in the middle of the nineteenth century. Likewise, ‘port of call’.
A selection of poetry by the so-called ‘Chaucer of Cheese’, James McIntyre. I suppose there are worse subjects — or less interesting dairy products, at least — toward which one could direct their poetic talent.
Incidentally, The Guardian recently reported that works by McIntyre and fellow curd-enthusiast William Topaz McGonagall will ‘soon be recited in public for the first time in more than 100 years, and maybe ever’.
