Yesterday, FirstSecond formally announced the publication of In Real Life, a graphic novel about gaming and gold farming for young adults based on my award-winning story Anda’s Game, adapted by Jen Wang, creator of the amazing graphic novel Koko Be Good. Jen did an incredible job with the adaptation.
Kotaku conducted a Q&A with Jen and me about the book and its themes, and lavishly illustrated it with art and panels from the book:
The book touches on points that some people who play video games don’t want to think about, like the social attitudes or economic politics surrounding the delivery and maintenance of these experiences. The reluctance happens because it’s not easy to think about these things. “I am as guilty of this as anyone is. It doesn’t feel good to think about it. I think that life in the modern world embodies all kinds of contradictions that are difficult to face,” Doctorow said over e-mail. “We don’t decide to abandon our principles in a rush—rather, they slide away in a series of incremental steps, each of which seems like a reasonable compromise based on the LAST compromise.”
“We are most capable of detecting relative differences. Once you’ve made a little compromise, another little compromise seems like not much, and another, and another. No one wants to admit that the fun bit of plastic he unboxed from Amazon this morning is awash in invisible blood, especially because, as an individual, there’s nothing he can do about the blood, and not buying the thing doesn’t make it any less bloody. So you draw the curtains.”
Gold farming is the kind of thing that captured the public imagination for a while and is now accepted as par for the course in massively online games. When asked why he’d want to re-visit the practice now, Doctorow said that “science fiction isn’t about the future, it’s always about the present.” “When you contemplate the microscale phenomenon of a world-in-a-bottle like an MMO and the toy economy within it, it equips you with a graspable metaphor for understanding the macroscale world of monetary policy. In other words: thinking about gold farming is a gateway drug to thinking about money itself.”
In Real Life [Amazon]
