Author Steven Johnson spoke to the Gameological Society about his latest book, Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age, and the games he enjoys playing.
The Gameological Society: What are you playing this weekend?
Steven Johnson: Well, I’m on book tour, so there’s very little play. When I get home, I will no doubt be watching my children—who are obsessed with Uncharted 2, or Uncharted 3, I guess—on the PlayStation. Which I might join them a little bit for. Book tour tends to suck up all your spare fun time.
Gameological: Is it a different experience for you, playing games with your kids? As opposed to gaming before they were around?
Johnson: The coolest thing that we had for a while there—they haven’t been playing it as much—we had this great thing going which one of these days I want to write about. We both were playing kind of separately that game Dawn Of Discovery. It’s a beautiful game that simulates a 14th-century trading empire. It’s a classic simulation, very complicated, with lots of variables. One of the things that’s so powerful about it as an intellectual exercise is that you have to think on all these different scales and from all these different perspectives. So you have to think like a city planner, an admiral, a spice merchant, some industrialist type who is building an iron mine, and this is what they’re doing for fun, building this little trading empire.
What are you playing this weekend? Steven Johnson (Via The A.V. club)
