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What’s on your bookshelf: Remedy Entertainment, Bioshock 2, and Gone Home’s Johnnemann Nordhagenread-only
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Image credit:oldbookillustrations.com
Image credit:oldbookillustrations.com
Booked For The Weekis our weekly chat with industry folk about the books they love, have loved, and are hoping to love in the future.
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! I need to start getting a ‘Gene Wolfe referenced’ reaction image for these things, I swear - although this reference is at least hidden behind a couple of links. Which links? That’d be spoiling the layered environmental storytelling that keeps you coming back. This week, it’s Senior Technical Narrative Designer at Remedy, previously of Fullbright, Bioshock 2, and Where The Water Tastes Like Wine fame, Johnnemann Nordhagen! Cheers Johnnemann! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
What are you currently reading?
What did you last read?
What are you eyeing up next?
I enjoyed Karl Ove Knausgård’s Morning Star when I read it a while ago and I’m looking forward to reading the next two in the series - I live in Sweden now and it feels appropriate to read some Nordic fiction. And then obviously wherever my book podcasts go I shall follow.
What quote or scene from a book has stuck with you?
I think I will never forget the ending of Blood Meridian. I think the whole novel has stuck with me, though, clinging to me no matter what, haha.
What book do you find yourself bothering friends to read?
What book would you like to see someone adapt to a game?
I’ve thought a lot about how China Mieville’s The City and the City would work as a game - a mechanic requiring the player to only pay attention to certain things on the screen, or perhaps forcing that on them somehow, would be a really fascinating thing to explore. I don’t think I’d want to do the exact plot of the book, necessarily, but that specific quirk of the world is so cool and seems well-suited to exploring in an interactive context!
“I know I gave multiple books for nearly every answer, but that’s because I was trying to name every book ever written. I think I got close?” says Johnnemann. No. No you did not. But that’s fine! Gives next week’s guest something to talk about (books). I realized the other day that some folks might be coming to this column for the first time, and so not realise that “book for now” is a deliberately stupid sign off I stuck with while trying to think of a better one. In the mind of at least one person, I am someone who would unironically write “book for now!” as a sign off. Ah well. Book for now!
