Both Barrels

Reading, video games, and reading and video gaming.

It’s not a surprise that I read an insane amount of text. From the minute I wake up until the very end of my day, I’m almost assuredly looking at some sort of words. My childhood literary bona fides are unimpeachable, and I carried this appetite throughout my life.

But while I love having read, I don’t necessarily like reading itself — the mechanical act of it. I’ve often found the process of parsing strings of letters into legible meaning within my mind to be uniquely cumbersome and exhausting. It’s a slog.¹

My most common failure point for uninterrupted sustained reading is just distraction. Unless I can get a piece of text to occupy my mind’s bandwidth thoroughly, I will inevitably start to drift off.

Jon Shafer is a game designer whose big break was being the lead for (the very excellent) Civilization V. He thereafter went solo to work on his own strategy game, At the Gates, which, after seven grueling years and several mental breakdowns, unfortunately turned out to be a failure. His detailed retrospective on its development is worth reading, but this particular passage resonated with me:

There are always a thousand design ideas working around in my head: small optimizations I could make to my daily schedule; philosophical theories as to why human tribes behave in a certain way; whether blacksmithing should require any special tools for training and how any changes relate to the role of tools in the game more broadly; interesting phrases I’d like to incorporate into the diplomacy text; how Bismarck’s final conversations with Wilhelm II might have gone (a topic I still want to dig into!); ideas for my next game; even bits and pieces of this article. It’s all up in there. All at once. My mind is always wandering, always analyzing things, always considering possibilities both related to the thing I’m ostensibly paying attention to and everything else. Needless to say, this isn’t a great state to be in when concentrating on any task, let alone one requiring a fair bit of focus like building and running your own company.

Me too man.

It’s a humble grab for sure, but my distraction issue is fundamentally about having too much mental bandwidth. Shafer’s distraction was mitigated when he was prescribed stimulants (until he started abusing them and careened off the track again) but those only exacerbated the problem for me. Instead of previously trying to fill a wide boulevard, I now have an interstate highway’s worth of real estate to ping-pong off of.

---

This is probably why I glommed onto podcasts years before anyone heard of Serial. Podcasts were sort of like reading, except the words talk at you while you go do something else. There’s no fucking way I’d ever want to sit still in a room and listen intently to a podcast, but they were the soundtrack to my dishwashing adventures and bicycle rides.²

Around the time I started listening to podcasts was also when I really got into roguelike video games like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. This genre has two things that would prove fortuitous: turn-based gameplay and barebones aesthetics. In contrast to real-time gameplay that requires you to pay attention or consciously hit the pause button, turn-based gameplay meant you could walk or look away at any point without risking anything. The aesthetic barebones of the genre (games still regularly use simple characters like ‘D’ to stand in for Dragons) also meant it had no sound effects by default. This made the genre absolutely perfect for podcast multitasking. There were days where I’d play DCSS contently for hours on end, and just absolutely churn through dozens of podcast episodes.³

I loved it. It was absolutely one of my favorite pastimes, but it didn’t address my reading backlog.

---

When smartphones first really burst into the scene ~15 years ago, I didn’t quite understand their appeal. “Why would you need the internet on your cell phone?” was a thing I unironically said once. In my defense, mobile data speeds were really slow back in the day, and the first app I got obsessed with was explicitly not reliant on a bandwidth gravy train.

Instapaper was one of the first “read later” apps ever, using some voodoo to scrape the text of whatever website you were on for later (offline) viewing. Goddamn I fucking loved this app so much, very likely constituting maybe 90% of what I used my feeble iPhone 3G for. I’d rodeo through the internet on my computer, lassoing long-ass articles on whatever topic with the simple click of a button, ensuring my trove stayed brimming. Everywhere I went, I had my compendium with me. No matter where I was, no matter whether I had any internet at all, I could read. This thing made me love waiting rooms. I’d read and read and read, and would calendar every day I evacuated my Instapaper backlog as a crowning personal achievement.

Then mobile internet got faster, and the pocket portal to the world became increasingly irresistible. You could use your unlimited data plan to watch Netflix on your fucking telephone if you were deranged enough.

---

I bought a Kindle, but not for books, heavens no. I know it’s trite, but I have long shared the aversion towards reading books that is common in my sphere. Too many (nonfiction) book authors include too many filler pages to justify their work’s existence. But in addition to the padding, your typical long-form article published at a semi-reputable magazine outfit likely has gone through much more of a fact-checking battery than your typical nonfiction book. You’re lucky if your book has citation footnotes, but even then, I’ve seen contentious claims literally cited to the nebulously mysterious “Various sources”.

I bought a Kindle specifically so I could read my longform articles in peace, but it wasn’t really built for that. Instapaper’s Kindle integration remains kinda janky to this day, and it can only deliver articles in one direction, which means Instapaper can’t know if you’ve read something on your Kindle.

The Kobo Clara e-readers sounded more promising, heralding native Pocket (Instapaper’s main competitor) integration. I migrated my entire Instapaper library to Pocket but the problem now was that as websites got fancier with their styling, Pocket/Instapaper’s scraping tech struggled to keep up. I’d curl up in my reading nook (read: couch with back cushions thick enough for me to prop one leg up), excited to chow down, only to get confused because the parser wouldn’t distinguish the author’s text from a block quote, or couldn’t save images properly, or would interpret a new heading section as the end of the essay. And so on.

I’d submit support tickets hoping that my call to attention would help stem the tide back to usability, but it was hopeless. Since you couldn’t know what you didn’t know, reading any essay on Instapaper/Pocket risked missing something crucial. It meant that the best way to read any long-form article was almost invariably going to be the live web version, and at that point, why bother with e-ink readers who are meant to be the internet’s antithesis?

---

Except for when I had a suburban commute that was almost two hours each way, I couldn’t get into whatever few audiobooks I was interested in because I’d frequently lose my place within their vast length. The spoken words floated untethered in space, and I had nothing concrete to anchor them down. Sorry, I zoned out, is this a new chapter? Did the perspective change? Who’s talking again? Wait, where— when is this now?

Before it was shut down, Audm was the perfect app for me. It was a collection of professionally narrated longform articles from various publications. Crucially, it highlighted the text as it was narrated. I could follow without having to fixate my gaze, and if I ever got lost, a quick glance at the text body was enough to situate me. Wind me up and set me on a StairMaster with Audm in front of me and I’d climb 50 flights of stairs without noticing.

Audm got absorbed into NYT Audio, and Curio is still there if you want a much broader publication cross-section of narrated journalism, but it’s hard to maintain a single queue across so many ever-shifting silos.

---

So I’ve settled upon a solution now, but it looks completely unhinged to outsiders (sample size: my wife). On one monitor, I have an article being read aloud, and on the other I’m playing a video game that is tolerable enough to multitask with. I have solved my bandwidth headspace issue by running full bore on both barrels.

Disturbing footage caught by hidden camera

Text-to-speech has gotten much better lately with the help of AI at sounding normal and pronouncing things correctly, and I use NaturalReader’s browser extension to instantly create professional-sounding narration for any website (and yes, it highlights the text as it’s narrated…most of the time!).

I even started “reading” books now! Whispersync integration between Kindle e-books and Audible narration resulted in me chowing through several books whose physical copies remained untouched on my bookshelf for years. I’ve been eager to learn about the British public defense system and finally “read” The Secret Barrister⁴ at 2.5x speed and finished it in a few hours while mopping up stragglers in the orc genocide simulator Shadow of Mordor. I admit to being skeptical of having absorbed much of the material through such a ludicrous mental injection, but I absolutely destroyed the quiz chatGPT came up with to test my retention. The only real downside with Whispersync is that it requires buying both the ebook and the audiobook (even then not every book has the feature turned on) which can get expensive.

But it works, perhaps too well. My Pocket backlog up until recently had dusty entries cached way back in 2019 and I’ve cut through a ton just in the last week. I’ve cut through so much that now I’m running out of games to play.

Cataclysm DDA will always be the perfect reading companion candidate for me, but I’ve played it into the ground by now. Invisible Inc. is one of my most favorite tactical roguelikes of all time, but it’s too cognitively intense to play passively. City-building games have filled the niche really nicely though. Creating a 19th-century bonsai urban landscape in Anno 1800 works great when there are no competitors to contend with. Both Islanders and Terra Nil are almost perfect, but both suffer from having mechanics that are a little too shallow.

---

I get it. I know how this looks. This is all emblematic of the attention deficit generation — the folks who can’t even watch a TikTok video about Taylor Swift unless it’s split-screen with Temple Run gameplay or whatever. But in my defense…yeah.

At least I’m ✌️reading✌️and very much enjoying myself.

1. Don’t talk to me about speedreading. I’ve tried adopting it many many times but don’t believe it’s anything more than glorified skimming.

2. There’s long been an inextricable link between memory and location, and certain topics and locations have gotten indelibly glued together by virtue of me biking/walking through them while listening to a certain podcast. There’s a particular street that forever reminds me of Rupert Murdoch, and Murdoch forever reminds me of that street, all because I listened to a podcast about him while biking through it.

3. I’ve also used this exact set-up to plow through dozens of hours of bodyworn footage for work. I constantly procrastinate on reviewing discovery because it’s so damn tedious.

4. The author had given me a collegial shout-out way back when for Eleven Magic Words. I blushed.