stevenberlinjohnson.com: The Kids Are Crazy For Resource Management Strategies

I'm doing a couple of fun game-related items for my friends at Nerve, starting with my contribution to their Holiday Gift Guide. It's a little riff about the brilliant new Age of Empires III, which is the most enjoyable game I've played in a long time. It got me thinking about the distinct pleasure of these sorts of games -- as opposed to the pure problem-solving approach that I took in Everything Bad. Here's the gist of it:

But there's a subtler pleasure to the game that should make the parents and cultural authorities happy: to succeed in the game, you have to maintain your essential resources -- food, timber, and gold. (The convention of resource management applies to all god games -- though the resources vary from game to game.) In Age Of Empires, you can dispatch a team of settlers off to a nearby forest to chop down trees, or send them off on a fishing expedition, or deposit them near a promising bush filled with ripe berries. And once you've dispatched them, you can just sit back and watch those precious goods stream into your main warehouse.
There's something uniquely satisfying about this process, something that is entirely unlike the pleasures of other popular entertainment: it's akin to the quiet satisfaction you feel when you've just cleaned the entire house, or when you get the report from accounting that says your business is finally in the black. Sending a settler off to chop down some trees isn't as exhilarating as sending your calvary off to attack the Spanish settlement next door, but the game quickly teaches you that you can't maintain a calvary if you don't have enough wood on hand to build a stable. It's not enough to be aggressive to succeed in Age Of Empires. You have to be responsible too.

The Basics

I'm a father of three boys, husband of one wife, and author of eight books, and co-founder of three web sites. We spend most of the year in Marin County, California though I'm on the road a lot giving talks. (You can see the full story here.) Personal correspondence should go to sbeej68 at gmail dot com. If you're interested in having me speak at an event, drop a line to Wesley Neff at the Leigh Bureau (WesN at Leighbureau dot com.)

My Books

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
An exploration of environments that lead to breakthrough innovation, in science, technology, business, and the arts. I conceived it as the closing book in a trilogy on innovative thinking, after Ghost Map and Invention. But in a way, it completes an investigation that runs through all the books. Sold more copies in hardcover than anything else I've written.
The Invention of Air
The story of the British radical chemist Joseph Priestley, who ended up having a Zelig-like role in the American Revolution. My version of a founding fathers book, and a reminder that most of the Enlightenment was driven by open source ideals.
The Ghost Map
The latest: the story of a terrifying outbreak of cholera in 1854 London 1854 that ended up changing the world. An idea book wrapped around a page-turner. I like to think of it as a sequel to Emergence if Emergence had been a disease thriller. You can see a trailer for the book here.
Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
The title says it all. This one sparked a slightly insane international conversation about the state of pop culture -- and particularly games. There were more than a few dissenters, but the response was more positive than I had expected. And it got me on The Daily Show, which made it all worthwhile.
Mind Wide Open : Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
My first best-seller, and the only book I've written in which I appear as a recurring character, subjecting myself to a battery of humiliating brain scans. The last chapter on Freud and the neuroscientific model of the mind is one of my personal favorites.
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
The story of bottom-up intelligence, from slime mold to Slashdot. Probably the most critically well-received all my books, and the one that has influenced the most eclectic mix of fields: political campaigns, web business models, urban planning, the war on terror.
Interface Culture : How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate
My first. The book I wrote instead of finishing my dissertation. Still in print almost a decade later, and still relevant, I think. But I haven't read it in a while, so who knows what's in there!