Like the misfit musicians who bought the Velvet Underground’s first album, the young kids of the seventies who pored over the first set of D. & D. manuals all went out to make their own games. The ideas that bubbled up in the following decade flowed in a similar direction. Wiz-War had wizards hurling fireballs at each other in a maze. Titan had players commanding an army of mythological creatures like centaurs and griffons to attack the other players’ titans. Garfield himself made a game called Five Magics. He granted elemental characteristics to five distinct colors of energy that arose, as in many other fantasy games of the period, from different geographies. The colors shifted around, but, eventually, red aggression came from mountains, black ambition from swamps, blue rumination from islands, white orderliness from plains, and green growth from forests. Garfield never considered Five Magics publishable and, because of constant tinkering, he never played it the same way twice. Sometimes it was a board game. Sometimes it was a card game. “There were some versions where you collected victory points to win,” he recalled, “and some versions where you wiped out your opponents.”
It wasn’t until 1991, when a friend put him in touch with a gaming entrepreneur named Peter Adkison, that Garfield, by then finishing a Ph.D. in combinatorial mathematics at Penn, thought he could make something of his creation. Adkison lived in Seattle and worked a day job as a systems analyst for Boeing; he moonlit as the founder and C.E.O. of a gaming company called Wizards of the Coast. He met up with Garfield in Oregon, where the young mathematician was visiting his parents. The lives of these two men and what followed has been chronicled, especially in books like “Jonny Magic & The Card Shark Kids" by David Kushner and “Generation Decks” by Titus Chalk, with particular attention to what happened at this fortuitous moment: Adkison suggested that Garfield create something portable that people could pull out during their downtime at the conventions where nerds flocked to find rare comic books, purchase esoteric collectibles, and discover new games.
Longevity is the new reality and I am in the vanguard of an emerging demographic trend. Life expectancy soared from seventy-two for men and seventy-nine for women in 1982—the year my mother died—to eighty for men and eighty-four for women in 2015. I’m not afraid of dying. The legalization of medically assisted dying means that death is losing its sting, at least for the terminally ill. What terrifies me is old age. What’s the point of longevity if I run out of money or become socially isolated because I am deaf and immobile and have outlived all my friends? Or, far worse, if I am plagued with myriad conditions that rob me of cognition and autonomy and force me to linger like last week’s leftovers because I will no longer be competent enough to request an assisted death? That boomers like me aren’t leaving this mortal coil any time soon also has costly implications for younger generations, which will have to support us in our dotage either as caregivers or with their taxes, or both.
Three years ago, we hit a tipping point: for the first time, there were more Canadians over the age of sixty-five than under fifteen—16 percent of the population, or almost 6 million people. And that massive older segment was growing four times faster than the population at large. If that trend continues, demographers predict that by 2031, the year the earliest boomers turn eighty-five, nearly one-quarter of Canadians will be sixty-five or older. Will we as a society have the medical, social, and financial resources to cope?
In some way, generic styles are nothing new. Hotel brands promise a consistent, yet sterile, customer experience no matter where you are. Walk into a Hilton or a Holiday Inn and you know what you’re going to get. The clerk at the check-in counter will speak English and there will be a rotating waffle maker at the continental breakfast. Airports and shopping malls are similarly predictable.
The issue is this: hotel visitors know they’re getting something generic. That’s the point. Mid-tier hotels advertise safety and reliability. They sell risk minimization, not experience maximization. Algorithms, though, advertise authenticity while selling commodities. Algorithms trick us into thinking we’re getting real and authentic experiences, when in fact, we’re getting the opposite.
What Mr. Chang does with his chefs is something we may not have a term for. We understand chefs who are solo artists, and we understand cooks who uphold the standards of a major chef’s global chain, like the ones at L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon or Nobu.
What’s hard to grasp is the middle ground where Mr. Chang has put most of his chefs. They have to fit into the family, but they also have to be individualistic enough to deserve a place in the family.
By and by, the magic dwindled — as I had feared it would. I grew up. Along the way, I experienced all the regular things that siphon away a person’s sense of wonder: the world’s cruelty and its indifference alike; failure; trauma and pain. By the time my twenties came around, I had begun to sink into a deep darkness. Five whole years slipped by while I remained trapped in the quicksand of a bottomless sadness, completely inert and unchanging, which is its own horrible magic.
I fell into the habit of perseverating on thoughts of my mistakes, turning them over and over in my mind, like worrying a sore tooth with your tongue for the sharp thrill of pain. I played endlessly looping mental reels about going back in time and doing everything over again, from the small stuff (not popping zits) to the bigger stuff (working harder in school, finding direction sooner). I wanted so badly to go backwards that I had cut off all momentum to move forward. I was mired in regret.
What began as a vague apprehension — unease over the amount of time we spend on our devices, a sense that our children are growing up distracted — has, since the presidential election of 2016, transformed into something like outright panic. Pundits and politicians debate the perils of social media; technology is vilified as an instigator of our social ills, rather than a symptom. Something about our digital life seems to inspire extremes: all that early enthusiasm, the utopian fervor over the internet, now collapsed into fear and recriminations.
“Bitwise: A Life in Code,” David Auerbach’s thoughtful meditation on technology and its place in society, is a welcome effort to reclaim the middle ground. Auerbach, a former professional programmer, now a journalist and writer, is “cautiously positive toward technology.” He recognizes the very real damage it is causing to our political, cultural and emotional lives. But he also loves computers and data, and is adept at conveying the awe that technology can summon, the bracing sense of discovery that Arthur C. Clarke memorably compared to touching magic. “Much joy and satisfaction can be found in chasing after the secrets and puzzles of the world,” Auerbach writes. “I felt that joy first with computers.”
The voice of this book, the voice of Cercas, with its beautiful grain and restlessness, its swerves from pity to fury, from calm to hysteria, owe much to Wynne’s almost musical modulations.