For all you gaming fanatics out there, I have a quick bit of very cool news. Both Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy, which is about the aesthetics of games (and includes many cool references to the Amiga and the Commodore 64), and Julian Dibbell’s My Tiny Life have been released under the Creative Commons license, which basically means you can legally download them for free.
Yes, somewhere, a small sapling is crying because I murdered its mother by printing out these things. It’s like Bambi, but with trees.
For those not in the know, Julian Dibbell wrote one of the most important books on the economies of virtual worlds, Play Money (which the lab owns both real and virtual autographed copies of), as well as “A Rape in Cyberspace,” which is a seminal article about the nature and administration of early virtual worlds.
Steven Poole also wrote a fascinating book called “Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality,” which is essentially a book about how people attempt to say things without actually saying it by using linguistic framing techniques. Also a great read (but you folks are going to have to pay for that one).
Enjoy the free books and drop a donation to these excellent authors if you get the chance.
