What's on your bookshelf?: former Zachtronics’ Zach Barths and Matthew Burns

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Booked For The Week is our weekly chat with industry folk about the books they love, have loved, and are hoping to love in the future.

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! It’s a double feature this week - Zach Barths and Matthew Burns of former Zachtronics fame! (Do read Edwin's interview with Zach on their unrealised 40K factory game). Cheers Zach and Matthew! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelves?

What are you currently reading?

Zach: I started reading Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series during COVID lockdown, which is somewhat out of character for me. I’m usually pretty skeptical of long-running genre series (or snobby?), but there’s something about Discworld that is just the right kind of comforting when I’m looking for an easy read. I’m currently on my 17th book, Making Money. It’s fine. Not the best in the series, but hardly the worst. It’s not really about that!

Matthew: I just finished Takaoka's Travels by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, which is equal parts delightful, surreal, and disturbing. I enjoyed it so much I found myself wishing for more, but it also feels right that it’s as short as it is. This might sound strange to anyone who is familiar with either one of these works but in a way its playfulness and humanity reminded me of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis.
In nonfiction I am slowly making my way through Uncommon Ground, edited by William Cronon, a collection of academic essays about environmentalism, its origins, its popularization, and its commodification at the hands of various corporate interests. It was published in the 90s, when interest in “nature” and natural products moved into the mainstream. Originally I picked it up as research for a project that did not go anywhere, but it’s interesting enough on its own for me to keep going.

What did you last read?

Zach: The last fiction book I read was The Counting House by Gary Sernovitz, which is basically what you’d get if someone turned Matt Levine’s Money Stuff column into a novel. It’s about the Chief Investment Officer at a prestigious university, and how his life falls apart as he begins to question his job and, by extension, the nature of the modern finance-driven economy. Even though the book is technically about finance, I felt like everything in it completely applied to my life in games - the obsession with financial performance, the fear of losing your edge, the nihilism that may or may not be at the core of it all - in a way that totally consumed me.
The last non-fiction book I read was Hella Nation by Evan Wright, a 2009 collection of essays that each focus on a different subculture, like eco-anarchists and neo-Nazis and porn creators. My favorite part about it was how in every essay, without fail, you’d find that Evan Wright was somehow also a character in the story. My favorite kind of journalism!

Matthew: I read The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino. These stories are funny, imaginative, and filled with strange imagery. They’re more lighthearted than Calvino’s more formally experimental works and I think I enjoyed them more for that reason.

What are you eyeing up next?

Zach: I’m curious about Uncertain Ground: Citizenship In An Age Of Endless, Invisible War by Phil Klay, which I guess is about exactly what it sounds like? As an American I think a lot about complicity (our previous game Mobius Front ‘83 touched on this) and would love to read something modern on this topic.
As someone who loves David Foster Wallace’s essays, I also want to take a swing at Infinite Jest, but there’s no way I’m actually going to make it through that book…

Matthew: I’d like to read The Apple in the Dark by Clarice Lispector. I read Benjamin Moser’s translation of The Hour of the Star over the summer, where he talks about trying to preserve Lispector’s unusual word order and other characteristics, and that sufficiently motivated me to seek out more.
In nonfiction, I’m interested in reading Werner Herzog’s memoir, Every Man For Himself And God Against All.

What quote or scene from a book has stuck with you?

Zach: Everyone remembers the opening line from Neuromancer (“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”) but what about that terrible sex scene that comes out of nowhere! My wife and I joke about it sometimes. I have to imagine that after Neuromancer came out, everyone told him it was terrible and then he basically never tried again in any of his books. It’s okay, William Gibson, you’re still my favorite author.

Matthew: In The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa writes, “To express oneself is always a mistake.” I try to remember this before I make a social media post, or do an interview like this, or before I get my own book ready to release, as I’m doing right now (that’s a little tease, I guess).

What book do you find yourself bothering friends to read?

Zach: There is a book called Legal Systems Very Different from Ours, by David Friedman, which is about, unsurprisingly, legal systems that are very different from ours. I promise, it’s much more exciting than it sounds, and is very readable and full of fun anecdotes like how in A
ancient Athens you were allowed to go into someone’s house if you thought they stole something from you, provided you did it naked so that you couldn’t plant or steal anything yourself!
It also includes examples of situated legal systems (legal systems that exist within other legal systems) and anarchist legal systems (legal systems where no one is in charge, but laws still exist) that got me thinking about company structures and led directly to the creation of Coincidence, our new anarchist game studio where all the ex-Zachtronics developers are working on new games, including some proper puzzle games! People can sign up for our mailing list to find out when we announce and release them.

Matthew: I don’t find myself recommending fiction much, since tastes vary so widely. For game designers, I recommend Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll, an investigation into how casinos and the gambling industry design their products to create compulsion loops, and the effects that these design choices have on the lives of people who are at risk of becoming problem gamblers.

What book would you like to see someone adapt to a game?

Zach: That is a tough question for me, because I feel like any game adapted from a book would probably turn into something that is much too long and drawn out for me to want to play it. But, looking through my Goodreads history… I think I could get behind a Transmetropolitan game. I can picture it in my head, where I guess it’s a mid-90s voice-acted point-and-click adventure game? You play as outlaw journalist Spider Jerusalem, walking the city, talking to people, searching for what’s really going on, taking pictures and filing stories to let everyone know the truth… if anyone wants to publish this, get in touch!

Matthew: People may know that Black Myth: Wukong (and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West before it) loosely adapts a Chinese historical fantasy novel, Journey to the West.
Interestingly, Journey to the West itself was inspired by a real historical pilgrimage conducted a thousand years earlier, in the seventh century, by the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzhang. He recounted his journey in a work called The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions in 646 CE. Instead of being a rollicking adventure story with lots of humor and hijinks, as Journey to the West is, Record of the Western Regions is a much drier but important historical chronicle of a religious pilgrimage by a devout follower who ventured the long way around the Himalayas, through what is today Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, in order to reach India in search of Buddhist scriptures that had not yet made their way into China.
I couldn’t help but feel that Xuanzhang’s descriptions of the numerous small kingdoms he comes across have a procedurally generated quality to them: he ritually mentions the name, the circumference and population of the capital city, the temperament of the people, local crops and fruits, how many temples and monks there are and of what denomination, and other facts. Interspersed with the straightforward description of lands and peoples are credulous retellings of fantastical legends and religious miracles. It’s fun to imagine a game like 80 Days set in this time and place. More generally, I’m interested in the way narrative games can follow the form of a pilgrimage, and I think The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions would be a rich and unique source of material for something like that.

Zach’s mention of Neuromancer’s opening line reminds me of something I’ve thought about before. It’s a little shaky but here goes. I’ve heard it said that the opening line of Eliot’s Prufrock (“spread out against the sky, like a patient etherised upon a table”) marked the birth point of modernist poetry. If we also take for granted that Gibson’s sky simile was the origin of Cyberpunk, might we create some more literary genres simply by comparing the sky to various vividities that encapsulate the age? I say yes.

‘The RPS comment section where several dozen genres were invented through sky similes’ is something I’d love to be able to reference in the future. Of course, the more genres there are, the more books will be written, moving the invisible goalposts that mark this column’s very secret goal further into impossibility. Sucks for next week’s guest, I suppose. Book for now!