You Should Read This: Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

John Bellairs wrote a host of children’s books, including one of my favorites, The House with a Clock in Its Walls, and a single adult novel, The Face in the Frost. I wish the ratio had been in the opposite direction, because The Face in the Frost just has such an engaging world and characters that I would have loved more of it. Much, much more. It’s a woefully slim little book, and I will not claim that it has the world’s most satisfying ending, but it delights me in so many ways.

Much of the book’s richness lies in the banter between the two old friends (there’s only one place it falls flat, and it says something about the quality of the texture elsewhere that the flat spot drives me a little nuts every time I read it), who are both skilled and eccentric wizards. The friendship is a longtime one, built of mutual affection, exasperation, and shared experience. Pieces of this book are a buddy roadtrip, taken through a series of small kingdoms, some only town-sized, and the supernatural menace is one that is genuinely haunting.

I’ve read other books by Bellairs, but with the exception of The House with a Clock in its Walls (which has lovely Edmund Gorey illustrations as a bonus), I find that his children’s literature falls flat for me, though I know it’s well-loved by many middle-graders. For me, it lacks the menace that both Face in the Frost and Clock in Its Walls hold.

I used part of the first paragraph for the description of Prospero’s house for our clan housing on Dark Castle MUD, (back in the innocent days of the early Net when the majority of us had no idea what copyright meant); for all I know (and hope) it’s still there, but I somehow doubt it. Here it is, for your delectation:

Several centuries (or so) ago, in a country whose name doesn’t matter, there wa a tall, skinny, straggly-bearded old wizard named Prospero, and not the one you are thinking of, either. He lived in a huge, ridiculous, doodad-covered, trash-filled two-story horror of a house that stumbled, staggered, and dribbled right up to the edge of a great shadowy forest of elms and oaks and maples. It was a house whose gutter spouts were worked in the shape of whistling sphinxes and screaming bearded faces; a house whose white wooden porch was decorated with carved bears, monkeys, toads, and fat women in togas holding sheaves of grain; a house whose steep gray-slate roof was capped with a glass-enclosed, twisty-copper-columned observatory. On the artichoke dome of the observatory was a weather-vane shaped like a dancing hippopotamus; as the wind changed, it blew through the nostril’s of the hippo’s hollow head, making a whiny snarfling sound that fortunately could not be heard unless you were up on the roof fixing slates.

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