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What’s on your bookshelf?: art game maker and level design expert Robert Yangread-only
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Image credit:oldbookillustrations.com
Image credit:oldbookillustrations.com
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Books obviously come in many different sizes, but did you know that there’s an obscure law that dictates the legal limit for how long a novel can be? It’s measured in ‘George Martins’. If your story is more than three ‘Georges’ wide, you’re swiftly escorted to a cell and made to eat any bits of book that reference more than three characters in a scene with the same surname. This week,it’s developerand writer of the legendarily goodRadiator Blog, Robert Yang! Cheers Robert! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
What are you currently reading?
I moved to New Zealand a few years ago and I’ve been trying to catch-up on local art and theory here. Two weeks ago I stumbled on this book,The Aotearoa Digital Arts Readerwhich is a collection of kiwi writing about creative technology. Often these kinds of books can be cringe portals, like imagine the “NFT metaverse revolution” book in the $1 trash bin. But this book from 2008, so far, has done a decent job thinking about the future. Just a lot of solid grounded thinking about still-relevant, perhaps even timeless concepts. And even when it doesn’t foresee something like today’s weird zombification of social networks, well, few did in 2008.
What did you last read?
What are you eyeing up next?
What book do you quote from the most?
What book do you find yourself bothering friends to read?
What book would you like to see someone adapt to a game?
I re-read Mrs. Dalloway every year or two, it’s probably my favorite book. I do intend to adapt it into a game someday. For those unfamiliar, it’s about all these people in 1920s London and how their lives intersect, and then they all meet at a big party at the end. Structurally it’s like a Wes Anderson movie, but Virginia Woolf would’ve thought Wes Anderson was a total twat. Like usually you read Woolf in school, in a formal way to learn about advanced narration, but that dry approach skips over how cool and funny she is – noclipping between all these assholes so she can no-scope them in the street.
Robert, Robert. You’re telling me you can conceive of a project so delightful as an “ongoing series ofexperimental video game triptychsabout gay stuff,” and yet completely fail to name every book ever written, as is the real goal of this column? Welp, we’ll see how next week’s guest does. And, as always, don’t count your books before they hatch, because then you’ll just have to count them all over again, and that’ll take ages. Book for now!
