Category: Books

I haven’t finished it yet, but Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic by Brad King and John Borland is, for me at least, both a look back at my own past and a glimpse into what might have been, given a lot of luck and determination.

The book puts the culture of electronic gamers into perspective, drawing its origins out of the Dungeons & Dragons backgrounds of people like Ultima creator Richard Garriott and the developers of Doom and Quake.

Every time I read something about this particular subject, I’m reminded of just how many contacts I had with a number of the truly mythic personalities of the field, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when — if I’d had more confidence — I might have been able to get into the ground level of the electronic gaming field. Ah well.

I’ll have to see how the story turns out.

In honor of John Kerry’s Cooper Union speech today, here’s a completely off-topic quote from Abraham Lincoln’s May 1860 address there that shows how far back one element of speech goes. In it, he’s addressing the threat of Southern states to secede if an anti-slavery Republican is elected. (As quoted in “The Greatest Republican” by James M. McPherson, from The New York Review of Books, August 12, 2004.)

But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! [Laughter] That is cool. [Great laughter] A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!” [Continued laughter]

Not that I’m advocating voting Republican this year. Unless Lincoln’s running.

You’d think that on Hawthorne Boulevard — oft-cited as one of the most liberal neighborhoods in Portland — just about any place that sold books would have jumped on the chance to peddle a few copies of Al Franken’s best-selling Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Oddly enough, it took the Hawthorne Fred Meyer over a month to put any on display. Their bestseller book table has had books by conservatives Bernard Goldberg, Dinesh D’Souza, and Michael Savage. This month, Bill O’Reilly’s latest, which was released two weeks after Franken’s, made it onto Freddy’s mixed fiction/non-fiction bestseller rack, despite its ranking behind Franken’s book on both the "New York Times" and "Publisher’s Weekly" non-fiction rankings earlier in October (the release of Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country? knocked Franken’s book out of the top position in this week’s NYT hardcover non-fiction list [2 Nov 03]; both Moore and Franken are ahead of O’Reilly in PW‘s ranking [24 Oct 03]). Neither Franken’s or Moore’s books are on Freddy’s October bestseller list.

Since they first went online in 1995, the most requested article from the archives of Plant’s Review of Books has been a 1992 review of a book published in the ’70s, about a political figure from the ’20s and ’30s. Go figure.