In a quintessentially Web 2.0 statement, Cory Doctorow wrote in a June 2006 article for Locus magazine (“Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet”) the fundamental mantra for modern fiction writers:
An SF writer’s biggest problem is obscurity, not piracy. Of all the people who chose not to spend their discretionary time and cash on our works today, the great bulk of them did so because they didn’t know they existed, not because someone handed them a free e-book version.
Doctorow was one of the first writers to recognize that selling dead trees was sucker’s game for most novelists. In an economy of shrinking midlists and smaller sales for blockbuster fiction titles, the chances of a writer breaking out in Rowling style are increasingly small. If there’s anything the internet has taught us, it’s that there are thousands, perhaps millions, of talented writers out there willing to produce quality content for free in their spare time. There are fewer cultural touchstone artists in a social network driven by niche interests, where a deep discussion of any topic that tickles your individual fancy is just a few mouse clicks away.
Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about that has absolutely nothing to do with writing or fiction. When I was a kid, I was convinced that the greatest invention in the history of mankind was the random number generation button on my Texas Instruments calculator. I survived junior high and high school by figuring out that I could analyze baseball statistics over a few seasons and come up with a fairly reliable distribution of offensive and pitching categories that, when run through a sequence of procedures whose outcome were determined by random numbers, could simulate a baseball game. Over the years, my model became increasingly complex. By the final iteration, I was using real stats to individualize real life players within my overall gaming system. I filled dozens of notebooks with season after season of random number generated stats. And yes, most of those seasons ended with the Red Sox winning the World Series, just in case you were tempted to get the idea that I developed my system without bias.
In 1989, I got my first home computer. I don’t remember anything about it other than the fact that it had two 3.5″ drives, no hard drive and ran DOS. One of the first pieces of software I acquired was a baseball simulation of the 1983 season called Major League Manager (released by the now defunct Spinnaker Software). The game was a green ASCII text representation of a baseball diamond overlayed with the names of players. The outcome of an at-bat was scrolled into a text box on the right hand side of the screen.
I have no idea if the generated statistics were anything close to accurate. What I do remember was simulating season after season, one pitch at a time, and collecting more statistics than I could ever possibly sort through. I dutifully printed these out at the end of each season. I’ve still got them somewhere. How obsessed was I with these fake baseball statistics? I would set my alarm clock to go off every hour during the night because you couldn’t schedule games in advance. Once you set the lineups, the game would run itself, but team matchups had to be kicked off manually. It took about forty minutes to simulate a game. My alarm would go off and I’d roll out of bed long enough to start the next game running, then go back to sleep.
And yes, for some odd reason, the Red Sox won most of those World Series, too. I have no idea why.
Then came the internet, and I learned that there were other games out there. Games like Diamond Mind Baseball, Shaun Sullivan’s Puresim and Out of the Park Baseball. The latter two being not just season simulations, but career simulations. Not just one season’s worth of stat modeling, but games in which players aged, improved, declined, won awards, got injured, got traded, got pissed off at management and demanded to be shipped to Cleveland. Games in which I could simulate the entire history of baseball or simulate a century into the future.
(So that, yes, the Red Sox could win even more World Series championships. I call it “Setting History Straight”.)
Not long after I discovered this new generation of computer game simulators, I found that I wanted to be able to talk about them to other people who liked sports simulations. I also found out that there were simulations for sports other than baseball.
That’s how I stumbled across Front Office Football Central in early 2000. I was looking for a community to talk sports text simulations with. I was looking for tips and tricks to find better ways to set my offensive and defensive schemes for a game called (oddly enough) Front Office Football.
Here were these guys — Quiksand, Morgado, SkyDog, Subby, TRO, CubsFan — from all over the country (and in some cases, all over the world) writing bulletin board posts thousands of words long in an attempt to study the model of football presented by FOF and figure out the best way to beat it. They spent hundreds of hours designing offenses to replicate the Coryell air assault or defenses that would mimic the success of the Chicago Bears’ 46 Zone.
And I ate that shit up. I printed it out. I experimented with their results and tried to tweak their work to fit my preferred playing style.
And somewhere along the line, I started looking forward to reading Quiksand talking about politics or SkyDog talking about his wife. CubsFan opining about Next Year and why it would never really come. Morgado enlightening everybody on how salary caps should work, and what an ideal financial model for a professional sports league would look like.
In other words, I became avid readers of those writers, because within their niche, what they had to say was valid, well written, well argued and deeply considered.
Most of you reading this have never heard of any of these people. But they are stars in the smallish universe of sports text simulations. When they speak about sports sims or other topics about which they’ve proven their gravitas within the context of the FOFC community, people take note.
In the Doctorow article above, he wrote:
But what kind of artist thrives on the Internet? Those who can establish a personal relationship with their readers — something science fiction has been doing for as long as pros have been hanging out in the con suite instead of the green room. These conversational artists come from all fields, and they combine the best aspects of charisma and virtuosity with charm — the ability to conduct their online selves as part of a friendly salon that establishes a non-substitutable relationship with their audiences. … The least substitutable good in the Internet era is the personal relationship. Conversation, not content, is king.
This is the model for artistic success that most resonates with me in the age of the Internet. Not a universe populated with light-bending singularites rubbing against one another in a trackless void, but a constellation of smaller stars brilliant within their own vibrant galaxies. Smaller platforms, independent labels, and terabyte after terabyte of conversation about content. And more than that, artists themselves improving and growing as they’re exposed to more and increasingly diverse influences — many lesser luminaries rather than a finite canon of supernovae — than they would have been otherwise.
Not brighter stars, but a brighter universe of innumerable stars.
Filed under: Writing
