Brian's Reading Biography

Escaping into Another's Mind

My introduction to the written word wasn't very traditional. The earliest books I remember are actually electronic in nature - a whole catalogue published by a company called Living Books. I had a shelf full of CDs instead of books, and they shaped the way I approached stories. Books were never dull, static things to me because of those early years reading/playing through Arthur's Teacher's Trouble, My Grandma and Me, In the Dark and other titles - they taught me to visualize, and when I finally outgrew the children's CDs and moved on to Enid Blyton (I've only ever read the entire Five Find-Outers and Dog series) books were vibrant worlds that I could lose myself in.

I think, though, that books would never have taken such a central part in my life if not for the fact that I had liver cancer when I was in K2. Books, whether digital or otherwise, were like portals for the fertile imagination of a child who could not go outside to play. I don't remember many of the things that I have read in those early years, but I do remember dreaming that I was somewhere else, away from the pain of the present world, out there in the shoes of someone more physically able than I, exploring the world and having grand adventures.

But this, again, is where my reading experience diverges from what is traditional. When I entered Primary school, my parents got me an Internet connection and I found the world of online gaming. I know this stretches the definition of a text, but bear with me.

I wasn't (and still am not) the kind of person who delights in straightforward shoot-em-ups and action games. I do enjoy them, but the primary draw for me in any game is always the narrative - the storyline. And to me, games were like a reader's paradise - being able to take part in and shape the world of the author (or in this case, the game design team). The official genre of what I enjoy is the RPG (Role-Playing Game), which was a genre of games that was created after the tradition of Dungeons & Dragons, which itself is a table-top system that has its roots in J.R.R Tolkein's work - the idea of a band of adventurers setting forth on a quest.

Indeed, my love for RPGs led me to books like The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion and The Hobbit. It planted my reader's feet firmly in the High Fantasy genre. More importantly, it led me to a community of people who call themselves roleplayers, who engage in a form of collaborative storytelling on whatever medium is available - custom maps in an existing game, an online forum, mIRC, even MSN Messenger. Basically, we wrote stories together, and as a result we also read each other's stories. And that was eventually what drove me to the printed word, because to be a good writer, you had to read. Since none of my contemporaries shared the same love for reading and writing, books and other texts continued to serve as a way to escape from the mundane; a way to delve into other worlds where people talked and thought about things which seemed more important than what my classmates were talking and thinking about; a way to step into someone else's life that was more meaningful and exciting than the one I was living.

Predictably, though, since my reading habits were tied firmly to my gaming habits and my roleplaying habits, I never strayed far from the Fantasy genre. When my writing interest led me away from medieval times into futuristic stuff, I started reading Science Fiction.

There are some texts, though, which are quite close to my heart because they have moved beyond being mere tools for escapism. The Chronicles of Narnia (the entire series) played an especially important role in my life since I read that when I was in hospital in Secondary 2 - they served the same function of escapism in my early years, but this time the content led me to ask some existential questions as well. And that was when reading and writing became less about living other lives - it became more about finding out why other people lived their lives the way they did. It was that new-found fascination that led me to Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire, The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned. I didn't agree with her worldview (or at the very least, Lestat's), but I wanted to know why she (he) thought that way. Then I read the Twilight series to look at how the same subject matter could be treated so differently, and to try and understand how the authors' worldviews led to that difference.

I found Alastair Reynold's work particularly interesting because of that. He writes Science Fiction, and critics have added the label "space opera" to his work because of his tendency to paint vast canvases; he could chart the rise and fall of an interstellar civilization in one chapter. In his work I found less of a way to escape from life, and more of a window with which I could peek into the minds of other people to understand what they valued and why they valued it.

At the same time, I continued playing games. And as the years passed, the sophistication of the narrative in even simple first-person shooters increased, which has led me to my present conclusion that some games should be considered as a type of text, or even (if it's not too out-of-this-world to suggest it) literature. I think it would surprise a lot of people to realise that you can break a game down just as easily as you can break down a book, because the fundamentals are the same - someone creates a world, and in so doing they inject their own ideologies and opinions into it. I think one of the best examples of this would be the Mass Effect series, an RPG which has blazed a trail both in the gaming industry and as a monument to good storytelling. And I think it says something that games are now turned into books, and vice-versa. There is a richness to the medium of games that can complement the traditional printed text, I think.

At the core of it, I still read books and play games to escape. The only difference is the purpose - once it was to run away from reality. Now it is more of a means for me to step out of myself for a moment to consider the perspective of the Other, so that I can understand it even if I may not agree with it.