I’m a little miffed that it took me this long to notice the SF Weekly review of World Leader Pretend that came out last month. It was positive and insightful. (They took a slap or two at the end, but that’s pretty much boilerplate review writing.)
I do have to say that there’s this funny premise that appears in reviews of World Leader Pretend where people assume that since I wrote a book about online gaming I’m some sort of technology guru.
Frost (himself a refugee from the S.F. dot-com world) shows definite promise as a writer, with a better grasp of emotional and linguistic nuances than one would expect from a techie, and knack for poetic use of cadence and repetition in his lengthy sentences.
They’re surprised when they find out that the book carries an emotional punch. The truth is that I’m a psychology major who spent his early twenties attempting to save the world, who subsequently failed, and who came to San Francisco at the beginning of the dot-com boom when tech firms were hiring everybody with a pulse. I’m so not a techie. I always tell people (in jest) that my book is for the girlfriends of gamers, not the gamers themselves. True gamers would pick apart all the book’s implausibilities. I was merely fascinated by how online gaming sort of inadvertantly caused the formation of these impromptu international communities, and the possibilities this created in terms of global understanding and togetherness.