Spending time with the material

A wild find at a comic book store yesterday: The Making of Orig­inal Dun­geons & Dragons, a doorstop volume, devoted almost entirely to repro­duc­tions of early ver­sions of the game, from type­written drafts to pub­lished booklets. This isn’t just a breezy review, but a pre­sen­ta­tion of deep archival mate­rial. I pored over the book for hours, enjoying the edits in pencil, the 1970s paste-up design. I read out of order, flipped back and forth, skimmed and scanned, jotted notes on my phone.

It occurred to me, deep into a really won­derful experience, of reading and thinking and feeling and pondering, that if Wiz­ards of the Coast had pub­lished exactly the same mate­rial online — and you can imagine this easily: you can imagine the web­site, as slick as one of the Google Arts & Culture sites, or the dig­ital book from the Steve Jobs Archive — I would have clicked over; said, “wow, cool”; then moved on to the next thing.

Dig­ital reading just cannot sup­port engage­ment of this kind — call it “spending time with the mate­rial”—at least not for me. I know I am not alone.

Is there some imag­i­nary dig­ital inter­face that would change my assessment? Could I skim and scan a vir­tual book spread on my vir­tual lap using the Vision Pro? Maybe. It comes down to speed: show me the simulated, high-res book with pages I can handle and access exactly as fast as the real phys­ical book in my real phys­ical lap, and we can begin the conversation. The AAA video game players will want to say “easy, no problem”, but a moment’s reflection — how do I manip­u­late a book? What kind of phys­ical feed­back does that require? — reveals that it is, in fact, a huge problem.

Here we can see plainly the value of the book as infor­ma­tion technology: a mech­a­nism for accessing a bundle of mate­rial, for spending time with it, for inves­ti­gating and con­sid­ering it. Still unmatched!

(My meta point here shouldn’t obscure the sim­pler one, which is that The Making of Dun­geons & Dragons is fabulous. It costs a hun­dred bucks, so it’s not for everybody, but I was happy to pay, if only to cast my vote in the marketplace. I sort of can’t believe they pub­lished this at all, so it’s like, yes! Allow me to reward your courage!)