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In anticipation of GDC this week, I’ve been checking out some of my old posts on gaming and I thought it might be interesting to share some of my favorite books, movies and other media that involve games or online worlds as thematic elements or plot devices. Some of these will probably be super-obvious, and I’ll most likely miss some easy ones too, so feel free to abuse me in the comments.

• Books
• Lucky Wander Boy by D.B. Weiss - This book is so awesome. It touches on the influence of games in personality development, the experience of working in the game industry, the fetishization of classic games and the art/business dichotomy that pervades the entire field. Weiss reminds me a lot of Douglas Coupland, except that whereas Coupland puts out a new book every two years whether you want him to or not, I am still waiting for a follow up to Lucky Wander Boy. Which brings us to…
• jpod by Douglas Coupland - It’s a lot like pretty much every other Coupland book, as it features international espionage, mental breakdowns, unrepentant use of deus ex machina and all that, but the skin that’s been applied this time around is a company which (according to Coupland) “resembles, but legally in no way is Electronic Arts.” jPod makes a nice counter-point to Coupland’s Microserfs, as both books examine the innovator’s dilemma and follow the lives of young people searching for meaningful and challenging work in software development. For whatever reason Coupland seems less optimistic about the prospects faced by today’s game developers than the web / application coders in his previous book.
• Movies
• eXistenZ - Virtual-reality, wetware mindfuck by David Cronenberg, complete with bad NPC dialogue, contrived puzzles and squishy spinal-tap interfaces. Contains some of my favorite movie quotes like, “There’s a very weird reality-bleed-through effect happening here. I’m not sure I get it.” and “Arrrgh. Spores. No. No, spores. Deadly spores.” Plus, how awesome is the following exchange?

  Ted: We’re both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistent, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don’t understand.
  Allegra: That sounds like my game, all right.
  Ted: That sounds like a game that’s not gonna be easy to market.
  Allegra: But it’s a game everybody’s already playing.

• The Last Starfighter - I’m not even going to bother describing this one.
• WarGames - The same goes for WarGames, aside from just saying, “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?”
• Etc.
• The Wonderful Power of Storytelling - Bruce Sterling’s 1991 GDC lecture. And I quote, “Computer entertainment should not be more like movies, it shouldn’t be more like books, it should be more like computer entertainment, SO MUCH MORE LIKE COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT THAT IT RIPS THROUGH THE LIMITS AND IS SIMPLY IMPOSSIBLE TO IGNORE!”
• The Long Zoom - An incredible article on Will Wright and Spore by Steven Johnson
• God Is the Machine - In the end, it’s all about processor speed.

[UPDATE:] Mario Too by Perry Bible Fellowship