You Should Read This: Doctor Rat by William Kotzwinkle

This may well be the first writing book I ever read. My grandmother met Jackson at a book festival and had her sign a copy for me. The inscription reads: Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance! Keep up your writing — you’re already choreographing the steps!” I have treasured this book for decades and it still, somewhat improbably, even retains its dust jacket.

What: Turn Not Pale, Beloved Snail is a writing book aimed at children. Jackson is an experienced YA adult writer, but this is less about writing for children than it is about being a kid who likes to write.

Who: While this is a great book for the nascent writer in your family, any writer will benefit from Jackson’s insight into what hooks a reader as well as her examinations of her own work.

Why: This book is full of joy in writing, a spirit so strong it can’t help but inform your own.

When: Read this with your kids if they’re thinking about writing. Or read it if you’re thinking about writing something aimed at kids and want to remind yourself what the reading experience is like for them.

Where and how: Read with a pen in hand, if only to jot down the many fiction recommendations Jackson makes (or if you forget, they’re all collected in an appendix.) It’s a reading list that shaped my own middle-grade reading, leading me to L.M. Boston and Tove Jansson, among others. Try the exercises as you go.

There are some books I loan reluctantly or not at all; this is one of them. This is because it used to be hard to get (nowadays you can find it in both electronic and hardcopy form), and it’s such a charming, useful little book for thinking about game (and narrative) design.

A Theory of Fun for Game Design is written by an author who deeply loves games, understands how they work, and believes in them as an art form. As the forward by Will Wright notes, Koster brings a multi-disciplinary method to the examination of games, pulling out basic concepts and breaking them down in a way that is both easy to understand and enjoyable to read. Accompanying his pithy observations are cartoons illustrating each concept, such as the illustration accompanying “Stories are powerful teaching tools in their own right, but games are not stories,” in which one student says to another, “I beat the last level of Ulysses last night. I had to use god mode for the end boss. Molly is really tough!”

A listing of the chapters provides a good sense of the book:

1. Why Write This Book?
2. How the Brain Works
3. What Games Are
4. What Games Teach Us
5. What Games Aren’t
6. Different Fun for Different Folks
7. The Problem with Learning
8. The Problem with People
9. Games in Context
10. The Ethics of Entertainment
11. Where Games Should Go
12. Taking Their Rightful Place

With Gamergate still brewing merrily on Twitter, those last few items seem particularly important. “The Ethics of Entertainment” contains all sorts of useful stuff, including a passage about end user experience typical in Koster’s wry, succinct summations:

The dressing is tremendously important. It’s very likely that chess would not have its long-term appeal if the pieces all represented different kinds of snot.

He goes on to say something that resonates with recent discussions:

The ethical questions surrounding games as murder simulators, games as misogyny, games as undermining traditional values, and so on are not aimed at games themselves. They are aimed at the dressing.

Koster extends that even further, saying directly “Creators in all media have a social obligation to be responsible with their creations.”

Despite Koster’s correct insistence that games are not stories, for writers, Koster’s book is well worth reading. A lot of the material overlaps with the ways people enjoy stories, particularly the section about the brain.

The book may also change the way you perceive games when playing them, mainly because Koster talks about them in terms of an art form, like a story or a painting, rather than the trivial pursuit label that sometimes get slapped on such entertainments. Koster believes deeply in the evolution of games to something as immersive and enlightening as any other media.

#sfwapro