Losing Focus

So, I'm back at work, albeit on short hours for a couple of weeks, hence the sudden drop-off in posts here. That said, after several months of continually finding more to write about than I had the time to get to even with all day to myself, things seem to have gone somewhat off the boil.

Something that Wilhelm said in a comment on a recent post about WoW Classic chimed with another something that I noticed, going back to work after four months away: talking about the Blizzard Boycott he observed "I can’t tell what impact the boycott is having, if any ... Of course, there is a very good chance that this is just another thing that the weirdo hardcore players like us have noticed and nobody else cares."

Having worked in the book trade for over twenty years, I have always had a fair idea what's trending in both popular and serious literature, who the hot, new names are and whose star is fading along with their sales. I keep up with what the current "must read" titles are for the dinner party circuit and what's being read on the bus today, only to be found clogging up the second-hand shelves tomorrow.

In that bubble it's easy to believe that all these things are central to the culture; that everyone is talking about the new, break-out young adult title or the debut novel by that woman fresh out of university. They're not.

In a long summer of absence from the trade, I spotted just one newsworthy publication that struck the wider culture with sufficient impact to penetrate the wall of disinterest that holds the written word penned in its largely forgotten corner. When I got back to work and read the lengthy in-house guides to the titles that had done well this year and of which we should be aware for the coming peak sales period, the one and only name I recognized was "The Testaments", Margaret Atwood's belated sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. I very much doubt I'd have heard even of that one title had it not been for the original novel's strong afterlife as a movie and a t.v. series.

That's not to say that people aren't buying and reading books; they are, albeit in smaller numbers than they once did. Nor am I suggesting that those who read don't talk to each other about their experiences with the printed page. Were it not for the visual media's strip-mining of published fiction for source material for movies and television, however, I strongly believe that most of even the best-known stories and characters would have very short and subdued lives indeed.

If you doubt it, take a look at the New York Times' best seller lists going back a few decades and see how many names you recognize. Then subtract all the titles you know mainly from the movies and tv shows they spawned.

The whole Blizzard fiasco has seemed like a big deal because we've all been talking about it or choosing not to talk about it, and it has had some currency outside of the gaming bubble: undeniably the involvement of elected politicans has brought the issue into the wider political arena. That said, I very much doubt that I could walk down the high street of the city where I live and find one in a hundred people who could even tell me the name of the company responsible for World of Warcraft, let alone give me a summary of the trouble that company is in right now.

What's more, based on my long familiarity with the deep lack of interest of most players in the origin of the MMORPGs they are playing, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to discover that hardly anyone playing WoW these days even knows there's a problem. I'm so used to people acting  surprised by the content, or even the existence, of regular game updates that the idea the average player pays any attention to anything beyond whether the servers are up or not seems notional to me.

Video games are big business but I wonder how many gamers know or care who makes them? I can say from personal experience that it's a rare book buyer who can name the publisher who puts the work of their favorite author into their hands. What does or doesn't happen at Blizzcon will tell us how upset or otherwise those who've been paying attention are but what would really interest me is finding out how many of WoW's millions and millions of current and former players even know Blizzard runs an annual convention for fans of its games.

Maybe most of them do. It's on the log-in screens, after all. But how many players read that stuff? And of the ones who do, how many pay any attention to what goes on at the convention itself?

It's a big world, after all, and there's a lot going on. All the time. Taking a few months out really brought it home to me how specialized and insulated my own professional sphere of interest is. When I retire in not too many years from now I imagine that will be about the last I ever learn of what people are reading these days. I could make the effort to keep up with those trends but you can bet I won't.

I'll be just like everyone else. If it's not advertised on the side of a bus I won't know it exists.