Sunday, March 01, 2009

An Elfish Gene in Cyburbia

There's a book out there called The Elfish Gene, which I came across over at Jeff's Game Blog (where he's reading it). From the book there is a blog (or is it the other way around(?)), and from the blog there are links to radio interviews about the book. When I listened to the second of these, found here (Jan at about 14 to 24 minutes in the hour long program (11 Jan 2009, part A)), it sounded a bit to me like a dude talking about some of his ol' gaming nights with his buddies and who's a bit surprised that he's found himself on the radio talking about it.

No comment on the book as I haven't read it, but i note on the blog the author says on January 31 that he is thinking of toning down the negativity about the gaming community that is apparently evident in his book for the soft cover print run. He says this has come about following conversations with gamers since the first print run. Good on him for being flexible enough to do this. I hope his publisher is as flexible.

I'm reading Cyburbia - a kind of ethnographic montage of history observation sociology of the shift into cyber space that has occurred over the past ten years, much of it during the life of this blog. The book covers a big space of ideas, and I don't know how much i agree with its conclusions, but it is intriguing in that it is looking at what I think is the subjective experience underlying online existence (!) that interests me in my anthropogical mode. If I pull of this back to gaming specific stuff, I'll let you know.

For now, back to the Renaissance...

1 comment:

Jeff Rients said...

i note on the blog the author says on January 31 that he is thinking of toning down the negativity about the gaming community that is apparently evident in his book for the soft cover print run. He says this has come about following conversations with gamers since the first print run.

Yeah, in some spots the dude comes off as the gaming equivalent of the smug-as-hell ex-smoker or the newly converted vegetarian. It honestly made me wonder who the hell he thought was going to read the book.