That’s The Rush of Geek Feet

[bryant]

Hey, it’s time for a new Neal Stephenson novel. This one is going to be called Reamde, which is probably a gloss on README, which is funny. Particularly to me. This was announced like a year ago but I wasn’t paying attention. It’s about gold farmers in MMORPGs, and it will be nearly 1,000 pages long, and it will come out in September. That’s also funny to me, although I imagine it isn’t a reference to the Eternal September. I happily anticipate being grumpy about MMO inaccuracies.

Mirrored from Population: One.

Comments

[jadasc.livejournal.com]

See, what I saw was "Remade."

[bryant]

Probably that too!

[death-by-monkey.livejournal.com]

I was going to ask about what other inaccuracies you've been happy to be grumpy about in Stephenson's other novels, but then I remembered my own bout of grumpiness with his portrayals of both the Welsh and Australia during WWII in Cryptonomicon, so you make a fine point.

[bryant]

In general I find Stephenson to be pretty good -- Cryptonomicon was quite accurate on technical stuff, although his predictions haven't worked out as well. But man, people always get MMOs wrong. ALWAYS. Now get off my lawn. ;)

[death-by-monkey.livejournal.com]

Hm, I can't say I've seen that much fiction involving MMOs - except the South Park WoW episode, which was pretty funny, so I can't say how much folks get wrong.

That said, re: Cryptonomicon - while I still find it a great book, it strangely comes across to me as very pre-9/11. I'm not sure what makes it feel so starkly dated like that, but it does to me now.

[bryant]

Cory Doctorow is awful. His politics, which I am not unsympathetic towards, get in the way of getting the medium right. Charlie Stross is closer but I disagree with him on the likelihood that characters will become fungible between games. The problem with writing exciting stories about gold farming is that MMOs are closed, tightly controlled systems, and you have to really stretch the possibilities if you want gold farmers to threaten the game itself in any real way. Alternatively, you have to make the game operators fairly small scale and bad at their jobs.

But a Blizzard or a Zynga or an NCSoft or a Sony... they're too big and too smart. Now, old school hacking, that's different -- but then you're writing a novel about hackers and there's nothing particularly MMOish about it.

[death-by-monkey.livejournal.com]

I haven't read any of Cory Doctorow's stuff, but I did just recently read Stross's "A Colder War" which I really enjoyed. I may have to look at some of his other stuff. Although reading a synopsis of Halting State on Wikipedia, I think I already see some of the issues you're talking about...

[shiffer.livejournal.com]

Ooh, another Stephenson novel! It doesn't feel that long since Anathem at all.