The Threat of Reading
Dangerous paperbacks when video games came first
“I know you’re not a reader but,man, you’d love this.” It was pointless saying so but I couldn’t help myself. I’d fallen head long again, deep into a story I didn’t have to overhear or construct for myself. I was spending hours in my own little world, happily away from the enforced gaming I resisted at school — supposedly classical games that would make us better people.
“Really? You really want to go there again? Listen, don’t take it the wrong way but I’m just not into all that uber intense pre-written shit. Give me something I can walk around in any day.”
It still seemed odd, that books were left to kids and hard-core readers. Somewhere along the way in their short life, they became synonymous with middle class woes and the desire to self medicate with philosophical narratives. Maybe they’d escape their fate and mature like games had over the years, but maybe they wouldn’t. It made me kind of sad; books may have been new and a bit juvenile but there was so much more to them than most people realized.
“OK, OK, let’s leave the fear and anger to the Daily Mail, shall we? This book’s different — I guarantee it.”
“Well, why didn’t you so say sooner? If the book comes with Mr. Riley’s bona fide guarantee let’s roll out the red carpet and dispose of the last hundred years of gaming.”
“Thanks, nice one. Dick. I know it’s odd and awkward and hard work, but sitting down without a controller and reading a story, there are moments when it’s like I’m playing a game. Words and sentences fade out and I’m left in the presence of this person who wrote it.”
And it was true, more or less. I’d queued up the day before, release day, for a new novel from a recent San Fran Text House I’d discovered. Getting home clutching my disc, I loaded it into my Station press and waited as each page was painstakingly recreated in ink and paper. The smell and the sound of the thing still sent tingles down my spine.
Admittedly it took a couple of reboots and a firmware update before I had the loosely bound set of pages in my lap. But I loved the feel of these things, loose leaf pages extruded from photopolymer to create a flex no other press could achieve of this generation.
And then I read.
No cut-scene, no quick time event, no strafe circling, just text and pages and reading. The experience felt almost pornographic in its restraint, masochistic in denied control. There was one choice, to submit to the one who wrote it, to inhabit their mind and hand yourself over trance-like to their view of the world.
“It does sound kind of intriguing, I’ll admit it.” Ed, having listened to my enthused description of the opening scenes, was unusually warming to the idea. “I still can’t get my head round why you’d have a story without any agency though, but I’ve never been up with these kinds of new-fangled ideas. My reticence probably confirms it’s going to be massive.”
“Steady on there, but yeah at times these are as compelling and grown-up as any game I’ve played through all my years. Sure, it’s hard not to wince now and again as grandstanding and philosophising rears its head, but the bits in-between make wading through all that worth it.”
“But why not just make a game? It’s crazy all that time and money wasted on these novels, locked away in a form people just can’t access, don’t want to. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for new controls but can anyone who didn’t grow up reading in bedrooms really get through one of these?”
I knew that there wasn’t an answer for this. Unlike me, Ed had spent his younger years playing the usual video-games with family and at school — munching his way through a steady diet of culturally recommended and recognised experiences.
While I’d paid cursory attention to all that, at weekends and late nights I’d harboured another less acceptable consumption. For all their friendly familiarity now, I still remember how alien my first books felt. To read uninterrupted by prompts, to turn pages, to take time over words and sentences and find meaning between the lines was a skill learned over years.
“And anyway, it still seems kind of dangerous giving yourself over to someone else’s thoughts like this. However you slice it, there’s a big risk here, granting another person uninterrupted access to your subconscious. And children reading these things, that’s just plain wrong — I don’t care what you say.”
“Is it really all that different from playing something though?” I knew it was, but hey.
“Different? It’s night and day. It’s not like playing too many games is really going to change who you are or what you think. These books though, man, there’s cerebral dynamite right there. Open that door too often and you’re on a train to a brain wreck.”
It was something heard more and more. Books, our new emerging media, however misunderstood or lazily compared to video-games and tabletop sessions, were increasingly seen as a dangerous pursuit. Legislation and book industry innovations worked to rate each new title and protect the ‘vulnerable’. But of course, the fact that it was illegal to sell particular books to minors only made them sell more, which in turn fed the scaremongering.
Books, so the headlines ran, offered no interruption to their progress and no control to the reader. Suspension of disbelief, so often shattered by game’s unavoidable moments of interaction and decision, claimed total submission of the reader in a book. Although they had so far escaped government safety films, the image of a child lying on their bed with a book was a parenting cautionary tale.
Truth be told, it was why many of the hard-core read. It was why I buzzed with excitement sitting down with my freshly generated copy the other evening. Games had their tried and tested interactions, but readers upped the stakes by offering their very minds, maybe their humanity, to a story. The return was a trip that made the risks worth it and made me feel alive again.
“Actually, I should confess I did check out that Let’s Read video you sent me. It was strangely moreish listening to someone else read a book. They certainly seemed to know their stuff and even without the commentary it was intriguing to see how emotional it got.”
“You’d better watch out or you’ll be a book man too before you know it. That’s a gateway drug right there.”
“Well maybe I should, you only live once, eh? Shame there aren’t any multi-player ones, we could read something together one evening with a couple of beers.”
“I’d read with you,mate. We could just press another copy and read along together.”
“You wouldn’t get too frustrated waiting for me? It’s not like I have anything to lose these days, not since Karen up and left. Maybe there’s a book that could help? All those games my counsellor prescribed didn’t do shit.”
As our reading rendezvous became regular it grew to eight of us. Friends and family wanted in on our strange book club, as they furtively called it. Some came just once, and others brought a handheld to play in the corner as if in denial they were really there.
A handful though, fell under the spell of our new media. They weren’t saying it out loud yet, and certainly not in public, but for them these pages became as important as any videogame.
