Systems Bigger Than Ourselves,Candy Apples Archives and Other News
By Dan Piepenbring
On the Shelf
From SimCity, 1989.
On SimCityand the value of games that dared to make complex systems their protagonists: “SimCityis a game about urban societies, about the relationship between land value, pollution, industry, taxation, growth, and other factors … the game got us all to think about the relationships that make a city run, succeed, and decay, and in so doing to rise above our individual interests, even if only for a moment. This was a radical way of thinking about video games: as non-fictions about complex systems bigger than ourselves. It changed games forever—or it could have … ”
Philip Roth’s misogyny is treated as a given these days; “the women are monstrous because for Philip Roth women aremonstrous,” Vivian Gornick once wrote. But: “Maybe Philip Roth loves women? Maybe he, who offers a three-page description of female masturbation, is in fact an advocate for female desire? … While misogynists try to shame women, Roth celebrates women’s sexual power. It’s the men he is out to get.”
“That sentence is shit. It’s got to be better. You asshole.” Matt Sumell on writing and doubt.
Today in German words that dearly need English equivalents: verschlimmbessert, which can be roughly translated as “ ‘ver-worsebettered.’ In essence, it’s a combination of verbessern(‘to improve’) and verschlimmern(‘to make worse’). Here, then, is a verb that is able to express the idea of something simultaneously improving and worsening.”
In which Benjamin Percy attends the dreadfully named Man Camp and enjoys a surprisingly rousing encounter with masculinity: “When men get together, they tend to speak with irony or rough-throated braggadocio, but [here] there was an uncommon sincerity to everyone’s tone. It caught me off guard.”
