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Max Barry is an Australian who pretended to sell high-end computer systems for Hewlett-Packard while secretly writing his first novel, Syrup (1999). In fact, he still has the laptop he wrote it on because HP forgot to ask for it back, but keep that to yourself. He put an extra X in his name for Syrup because he thought it would be a funny joke about marketing and failed to realize everyone would assume he was a pretentious asshole. Jennifer Government, his second novel, was published in 2003 with no superfluous Xs and sold much better.
Max’s third novel, Company, was published in 2006, and his fourth, Machine Man, in 2012, was based on a real-time interactive web serial written and delivered in real-time one page per day from this web site. It made more sense than it sounds.
Max’s fifth novel, Lexicon, was named one of the Best 10 Books of the Year by Time. His sixth novel, Providence, was published on March 31, 2020, right when everyone stopped caring about books and started caring about COVID-19, and his seventh, The 22 Murders of Madison May, was released in mid-2021.
Max also created the online political game NationStates, for which he is far more famous amongst high school students and poli-sci majors than his novels.
He was born March 18, 1973, and lives in Melbourne, Australia, where he writes full-time, the advantage being that he can do it while wearing only boxer shorts.
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I made a real video game
You know I like to
make games.
I also like
Australian Rules Football.
So obviously I made this Steam game:
Squiggle Football by Max Barry - on Steam
Now this blog’s readership is 85% non-Australian, and only a small percentage of those 15% care about football. So let’s be clear: This is likely of no interest to you whatsoever. That’s okay. You can still appreciate the fact that I did this.
I find making games fun. More fun than playing them. It’s similar to writing novels in that it’s stupidly ambitious and easier to start than finish, but different in that it’s much clearer whether what you just did was an improvement. They both require a kind of blind faith in the utility of forward momentum, but games don’t have you questioning your sanity and the meaning of life nearly as much.
I played a lot of PC games growing up and always wanted to make one, in the same way that I read a lot of books and wanted to add my own. Now I have! Squiggle Football has 110 reviews at 94% positive as I write this, which makes me happy, and less concerned that I was writing code for no reason beyond my personal gratification. Which, to be clear, I would have been fine with. The act of building is very rewarding. But I love that other people are enjoying this thing I made. It’s always a great feeling when you think the world is missing something—a book or an app, a web tool, an idea—and you make that thing, and other people do in fact want it.
There’s a free demo, which you can check out if you are not sure whether you will enjoy a game based heavily on a sport you know nothing about. (Look for the “Download Demo” button.)
I must warn you: The game contains generative AI graphics, i.e. the kind produced by computers that go around the internet vacuuming up art and replacing human artists. This is largely for practical reasons, i.e. I needed thousands of player portraits and can’t draw nor hire anyone for a hobby project. I don’t feel too bad about this, since (a) AI owes me after ripping off my work and hammering my websites for training data, and (b) the technology is clearly going to steamroll us all no matter what. Nevertheless I totally support your right to boycott, if you choose.
3 commentsNationStates Turns Twenty
So I normally keep my
NationStates
stuff separate from this blog. But it’s 20 years today since
I launched a little web game in the hope that it would promote
my novel Jennifer Government, and help prevent it from sinking without a trace like
my debut novel. So I’m cross-posting.
Twenty years! For perspective, the web itself is only thirty-three.
Here are some things that didn’t exist when I created NationStates: MySpace, Digg, World of Warcraft, Facebook, XBox Live, iTunes, Skype, Firefox, Chrome, iPhones, Reddit, Twitter, Wordpress.
NationStates began in a time where any idiot could make a website and people would go check it out, because there weren’t many to choose from. In 2002, I was that idiot, learning to code from a book, hacking the site together, and emailing a few friends. Then they told a few friends, and almost immediately, it was in the newspapers, even the New York Times, because that was newsworthy back then, some dork’s website.
Almost all the websites from 2002 are now gone. And like a geriatric who’s outlived his contemporaries, I marvel at the fact that this one is still freaking here. Everyone thinks you can put something online and it will just hang around forever because that’s how the internet works, but that’s not true at all, not even for the dumbest, most static pages like THIS IS TIM’S WORLD WIDE WEB PAGE, UNDER CONSTRUCTION, COOL STUFF COMING SOON, because sometime in the last twenty years, Tim’s web host got bought out and shut down, taking Tim’s dancing baby GIF with it, and now, at best, there are a few snapshots filed away in an internet archive.
Sites that do things, interactive sites, like NationStates, are hard to keep alive. They have so many ways to die. I’m incredibly proud that NationStates is here twenty years and eight million nations later, with as many players as ever. That’s magical. I credit:
Not selling the site. I came close. In retrospect, the buyer would have spent 12 months squeezing users for money before everyone left.
Moderators. Oh my god, moderators. They do so much, every day, for nothing, and without them, the site would almost immediately become somewhere you wouldn’t want to visit. Some mods have been here from the beginning. Many have clocked up over a decade. So much is thanks to mods.
The community. I can’t even explain this because I don’t fully understand it. I made a site where you could create a nation and talk to people. The community did everything else, i.e. turned that into something interesting, with political intrigue, relationships, lore, rules; basically the vast majority of what makes NationStates worth your time. This includes regional leaders, ordinary nations, World Assembly Delegates, admin, Roleplay Mentors, Founders, dispatch authors, World Census trophy chasers, forum regulars, forum irregulars, anyone who’s taken the time to explain something to someone new to the site, card traders, everyone.
The people who buy Site Supporter, Postmaster, Postmaster-General, and Telegram Stamps. Most people don’t, and that’s totally fine, but the lights wouldn’t have stayed on without those who do.
Managing the tech stack. All the tech from 2002 is slow, insecure, missing essential features, and three thousand times harder to work on that what’s available today. It also can’t be replaced without losing 20 years of bug fixes. So far we have managed to steer a path between killing the site from negligence and killing it from overly ambitious upgrades. And we keep adding features! To a 20-year-old codebase! Written in Perl!
Happy Birthday everyone.
Love,
Max.
I Don’t Believe in Free Will
Look I’m no philosopher, but in
the last blog, I mentioned I don’t believe in free
will any more, and Jeffrey was like, uh, what, so here is my take.
This isn’t going to be one of those dumb theoretical arguments where I make you accept that X is true and then aha then logically you must believe Y. Oh no no. This is pure feels. Here we go.
Chickens. I have owned chickens. Well, not owned. Rented. They are robots. I could write a 100-line program that generates behavior indistinguishable from a real chicken. If chickens have free will, boy, is it hard to tell.
Code. I program sometimes. The code has no free will. It does what I tell it. But it can be at least as unpredictable as chickens.
Brains. People are easily persuaded. I mean, frighteningly so. The older I get, the more the brain seems like a machine with a bunch of controls painted on.
Stories. People crave a narrative. You know that optical illusion where you see things out of the corner of your eye that aren’t there, because your brain sketches in something that would make sense? That’s all of us, all the time.
Probability. We don’t get it. We assign cause and effect to anything that moves. Like, real talk, the universe is an ocean of roiling chaos, where everything is determined by uncaring forces beyond our control. But we thirst for narrative order, so a thing can’t just happen, it has to have a moral purpose. And we are prepared to invent one.
Sports. I like running numbers on things. It turns out that all team sport is basically rolling a bunch of dice and shouting, “The blue dice have started to believe in themselves, they’ve got all the momentum.” This is really just an example of #5 but I didn’t want the paragraph to be that long.
Everything is the same. You’re not so different from a chicken. It’s just a matter of degree. The world isn’t merely non-binary but non-categorical.
Extrapolation. From time to time, I realize people are a bit more predictable than I’d thought. This happens much more often than the other way around. I can follow this trend to its logical conclusion.
Motive. Absence of control is scary. We like to believe we’re in charge of things. That’s suspicious.
And: Whenever I tell someone, they say, “Well, if I don’t have free will, how would I be able to do THIS?” and wave their hands about. They all do this.
That’s basically it. I could be wrong. It’s just the way I’m leaning these days.
It doesn’t change anything, by the way. I don’t like people any less just because they’re wet determinism machines. If anything, it’s endearing. I mean, look at the humans, waving their hands, thinking they’re making choices. That’s adorable. And I’m not going to murder anyone. Even if I can’t avoid it, I feel like I can, and want to avoid that situation. Just like if we’re all living in a computer simulation, being mean to people remains bad, and has exactly the same consequences. Not that we’re living in a computer simulation. That idea is just crazy. It would be a simulation on some kind of device we’ve never heard of.
P.S. I have also read a lot of Philip K. Dick. That could also be a factor.
These Lads Don’t Try to Walk It In
I get a Google Alert whenever my name pops up in articles,
which I use to find reviews of my books, and (if they’re good) link them from my website,
or (if they’re bad) update my list of people to turn my back on should we find
ourselves some kind of post-apocalyptic scenario and they’re all like, “But we
need water.”
That works great so long as there aren’t other Max Barrys out there being notable. The last thing I want is to hear about some other Max being newsworthy. Even if the other Max is being a giant dick, sure, I can feel like, “Well, I’m doing better than that,” but I don’t want people wondering if I’m, for example, that duct-taped breast-touching Max Berry.
A few months ago I started getting alerts about a soccer-playing Max Barry. At first, I ignored them, because I don’t care about soccer. I once went to a game in England and the Prime Minister was there and a team kicked three goals and everyone passed out with excitement. That was fun. But I have no desire to see another game. One was enough. For me, soccer is no netball.
But these Max Barry alerts kept coming. Every few days, a new email. Max scored a goal. He scored two goals. His team was setting records. I got interested despite myself. If you spam me with parts of a story, it turns out, I need to see how it ends. So finally I looked him up. He plays for Buckie Thistle Football Club in Scotland. “Scotland” is probably redundant in that sentence. But, get this, Buckie Thistle is on a massive tear. They’re about to play Rothes for their 20th win in a row. Twenty wins in a row! Who are Rothes? I have no idea! But that’s exciting!
Buckie could win this whole thing, whatever it is. I’m not sure if there are finals, but if there are, I want to tune in, if they broadcast games from the Highland Football League. Possibly not, because the Highland Football League is, I read, level five on the Scottish pyramid of league rankings. The best league, the Scottish Professional Football League, is level zero. That’s really on the nose, in my opinion. They measure every other league by how many rungs it is below the best one. But anyway, I’m invested. I care about this now. Go Buckies. Buckies? Thistles? You go.
P.S. It just occurred to me that this blog will mess with people’s ability to search for “max barry buckie thistle.” Sorry about that. By way of apology, here is a profile of Max where he talks about how he’s out for revenge against the club that released him (booo, Aberdeen), and I think this is Max Barry’s Buckie Thistle page, although they haven’t updated it since 2021. Come on, Buckie Thistle web team. The boys are making history out there. Pull your finger out.
Being Wrong is Okay
I got some hot mail following my last blog. Some really hot mail. To summarize:
You (Max) said it’s wrong to do nothing about feminist issues
I (a good guy) do nothing about feminist issues
You think I’m a bad person so SCREW YOU IN THE FACE
This feels like a real misunderstanding. Sure, I think you’re wrong, but that doesn’t make you a bad person. We all believe wrong things. I have a bunch of wrong beliefs right now, I bet. Not this one. This one, I feel confident about. But I’m sure I have others, which I’m yet to identify. Because we’re not born with the answers; we have to figure this stuff out.
Curiously, almost all the hot mail focused on how I should stop apologizing and feeling guilty for being male. I say “curious” because at no point in my blog did I apologize or mention guilt. People just assumed that’s what happens if you’re wrong: You feel shameful and want to apologize.
This is a pretty dramatic view of wrongness. We’re not wrong every few years. We’re constantly wrong. We generalize; we don’t pay attention; we are a wacky collection of hilarious biases. Being wrong doesn’t make you a bad person: It makes you a person. It’s what we do on the regular so we’re not stuck with the same ideas we had when we were fourteen.
I think a lot of dudes, including me, haven’t done anything particularly terrible, but haven’t been particularly helpful, either. That’s not a crime. But it’s not great, either. When we see entrenched unfairness—even the quiet, casual kind, which is surprisingly hard to spot, when it doesn’t directly affect you—the right thing to do is call it out. And to try harder to see it.
That’s it! Because, and I may be off-base here, I don’t think a whole lot of women care about men apologizing or demonstrating guilt. I think mostly they’d just like us to be more helpful. Nobody’s end goal is to make dudes feel bad. This isn’t even about dudes: It’s about making the future fairer. If all that means to you is shame and guilt, well, okay, you can feel that way, but it’s probably not helping anyone, and no-one asked you do it.
Nothing Against Women
Boy we’ve become smart about feminism. Way back when I was young,
if you were a dude who wasn’t a feminist, you told girls to make
you a sandwich and sexually denigrated them in the workplace.
But actively vocalized misogyny has become pretty uncool since then,
so we had to come up with something new. And we did! It’s: Nothing.
Nothing is great. Nothing works almost as well as active misogyny, with the added benefit of not requiring you to do anything. Also people can’t complain about you doing nothing, because you’ve literally done nothing.
The way nothing works is you just go about your business and ignore anything not directly relevant to your own life. This is the default for most people, so it’s pretty simple. But you can really make it work when you’re operating in an environment set up in your favor. In that situation, doing nothing grants you benefits without requiring you to come out and explicitly endorse the system you’re benefiting from, which would be, you know, awkward and uncool.
There are lots of ways to profitably do nothing as a dude. One of my favorites is not to profile violent people for being male. If there’s a riot, a shooting, any kind of major crime, we’ll dive right into a conversation about whether it’s fair to observe that the perpetrators are a particular ethnicity or English soccer fans or whatever. We will be all over that discussion. We’ll hit it from every angle: transparently racist, excessively apologist, whatever. But we won’t say a word about how ninety-plus percent of the perpetrators are dudes.
I really want a riot with 95% women looting stuff and punching people, just to see how how fast the media fills up with hot takes. Not a women’s issues protest: a riot in which all the assaults and property damage just happen to be committed by women for no obvious reason. I don’t know what we’d conclude about that, but I guarantee we’d discuss it. We would discuss that to death.
Another great one this year is vaccines. I’m not sure if you heard, but a few of them (like AstraZeneca) have an almost-but-not-quite-zero chance of causing blood clots. This caused angst about whether they were truly safe, particularly in places where there wasn’t much COVID. But we forgot about contraception, and out came media pieces like: “Oh, we’re talking about unlikely but dangerous side-effects of medication? Can we discuss the pill?” Because the contraceptive pill causes blood clots (albeit far less dangerous ones) at a hundred times the rate of AstraZeneca, and has a list of other side-effects that are also very unlikely but serious.
Obviously we’re beyond the time when we could tell women to stop worrying their little heads about the pill while we deal with this unacceptably dangerous AstraZeneca situation, so instead we did nothing. We just didn’t say anything. We didn’t click the pill articles; we didn’t retweet; we didn’t post. They weren’t that relevant to us. Within a week, they all died from lack of attention, and six months later we’re still talking about AstraZeneca.
We closed the golf courses in my city for a while during lockdown. Holy hell, was that a discussion point. We filled the airwaves with talk about whether it was fair or a terrible injustice. I’m pretty sure other sports and recreational activities were in similar situations, but I barely heard about them.
I remember a time when I thought I shouldn’t have to cross a road to avoid alarming a woman walking alone at night. Because if we want equality, shouldn’t I equally be able to walk wherever I want? I marvel at that perspective now, because it requires almost total blindness to the inequities women face. I had a spotlight that only illuminated the part of each issue that directly affected me. An environment causing women to fear for their safety: nothing to do with me. My potential inconvenience: civil rights issue. I outgrew that, mostly, I hope, but still, it has been a journey of discovery, with each discovery looking very obvious in retrospect, so that I wonder how I failed to notice it earlier. I’m sure that isn’t over, and, of course, it’s part of a wider road that covers more than just feminism. But in the meantime, I aim to do less nothing.
You know—I was going to finish this piece there, but it struck me that I genuinely expect you to be satisfied that I’ll try to do better than nothing. That’s amazing, isn’t it? I can benefit from gender bias my whole life, and keep all those benefits, plus any I may accrue in the future, but so long as I try to avoid being a silent co-conspirator in any future oppression, that’s pretty good. That is one low bar.