Game Designers

"Bet you he’s a smart sociopath, the kind that does well in midlevel management, all fur coat and no knickers—and willing to shed blood without a second thought if it’s to defend his position."

"I’m beyond introspective self-loathing by now—you lose it fast in this line of work."

"Didn’t they know that the only unhackable computer is one that’s running a secure operating system, welded inside a steel safe, buried under a ton of concrete at the bottom of a coal mine guarded by the SAS and a couple of armoured divisions, and switched off?"

"“Thank you for that reminder, Jimmy,” says Alan. “Any more compelling insights into why the laws of physics are not our friends?”"

"Do you want me to strangle him now, or wait till he’s finished annoying you?"

"I hate it when people let their professionalism get in the way of real life."

"My impressions are of a huge stainless steel kitchen and Australian expat waiters on rollerblades beaming infrared orders and wide-eyed smiles at each other from handheld computers as they skate around the refectory tables, where earnest young things in tiny rectangular spectacles discuss Derrida’s influence on alcopop marketing via the next big dot-sad IPO, or whatever it is the “in” herd is obsessing about these days over their gyoza and organic buckwheat ramen."

"I don’t hate him—he’s just a bore but that isn’t a capital offense. Usually."

"“Fred was a waste of airspace and one of the most powerful bogon emitters in the Laundry.” “Bogons?” “Hypothetical particles of cluelessness. Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again. Hacker folklore—”"

"“Am I making myself clear?” I sit down again. “Yes, for very bureaucratic values of clear.”"

"Imagine a world where speaking or writing words can literally and directly make things happen, where getting one of those words wrong can wreak unbelievable havoc, but where with the right spell you can summon immensely powerful agencies to work your will. Imagine further that this world is administered: there is an extensive division of labour, among the magicians themselves and between the magicians and those who coordinate their activity. It’s bureaucratic, and also (therefore) chaotic, and it’s full of people at desks muttering curses and writing invocations, all beavering away at a small part of the big picture. The coordinators, because they don’t understand what’s going on, are easy prey for smooth-talking preachers of bizarre cults that demand arbitrary sacrifices and vanish with large amounts of money. Welcome to the IT department."

"I may not be a hero, but I'm not the fourteen-year-old H. P. Lovecraft either. Dealing with eldritch horrors is part of my day job. It’s not even as bad as the paperwork, for the most part."

"This is rural England, after all; please set your watches back thirty years…"

"Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.)"

"Had enough of my poetry yet? That’s why they pay me to fight demons instead."

"’Twas the night before Christmas, the office was closed,"

"I am sick and tired of reality refusing to conform to the requirements of my meticulously-researched near-future or proximate-present fictions."

"Most police work boils down to minimizing the impact on society of stupidity; of the remainder, the overwhelming majority is about malice and deliberate evil, but it’s still almost all stupid."

"Human consciousness isn’t optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild."

"“Prosthetic Morality Enforcement. The idea is that by analogy, if a part of your body is deficient or missing, you can use a prosthetic limb or artificial organ. Well, our ability to make moral judgements is hard-wired, but it’s been so far outrun by the demands of complex civilization that it can’t keep up. For example...have you ever wondered why discussions in chat rooms or instant messaging turn nasty so easily? Or wander off topic? It’s because the behavioural cues we use to trigger socially acceptable responses aren’t there in a non-face-to-face environment. If you can’t see the other primate, your ethical reasoning is impaired because you can’t build a complete mental image of them—a cognitive frame. It’s why identity theft and online fraud are such a problem: There’s no inhibition against robbery if the victim is faceless. So we need some kind of prosthetic framework to restore our ability to interact with people on the net as if they’re human beings we’re dealing with in person."

"“Well, moving swiftly sideways into cognitive neuroscience...In the past twenty years we’ve made huge strides, using imaging tools, direct brain interfaces, and software simulations. We’ve pretty much disproved the existence of free will, at least as philosophers thought they understood it. A lot of our decision-making mechanics are subconscious; we only become aware of our choices once we’ve begun to act on them. And a whole lot of other things that were once thought to correlate with free will turn out also to be mechanical. If we use transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the right temporoparietal junction, we can suppress subjects’ ability to make moral judgements; we can induce mystical religious experiences: We can suppress voluntary movements, and the patients will report that they didn’t move because they didn’t want to move. The TMPJ finding is deeply significant in the philosophy of law, by the way: It strongly supports the theory that we are not actually free moral agents who make decisions—such as whether or not to break the law—of our own free will. “In a nutshell, then, what I’m getting at is that the project of law, ever since the Code of Hammurabi—the entire idea that we can maintain social order by obtaining voluntary adherence to a code of permissible behaviour, under threat of retribution—is fundamentally misguided.” His eyes are alight; you can see him in the Cartesian lecture-theatre of your mind, pacing door-to-door as he addresses his audience. “If people don’t have free will or criminal intent in any meaningful sense, then how can they be held responsible for their actions? And if the requirements of managing a complex society mean the number of laws have exploded until nobody can keep track of them without an expert system, how can people be expected to comply with them?”"

"I think we may be mistaking the elephant’s tail for a bell-pull."

"Perforce, the family that preys together stays together."

"You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It’s one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause. Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith."

"But policing, crime prevention and detection, is a Red Queen’s race: You have to run as fast as you possibly can just to stand still. You can collar criminals until the cows come home, and there’ll still be a never-ending supply of greedy fuckwits and chancers. It’s like there’s a law of nature: Not only is the job never done, the job can never be done."

"You’re like a priest who awakens one day and realizes that his god has been replaced by a cardboard cut-out, and he’s no longer able to ignore his own disbelief. And, like the priest, you’ve sacrificed all hope of a normal life on the altar of something you no longer believe in."

"Policing, as with all procedural jobs, expands to fill all the time and consume all the resources available for it."

"Anwar is as bent as a three-euro note: just bright enough to think he’s smarter than everyone around him, just stupid enough not to realize that they’ve got his number. He’s a walking poster-boy for the Dunning-Kruger Effect: If he says he’s going straight, it probably means one of his idiot friends told him shoplifting is legal."

"“The programmers have a saying, you know? ‘If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore.’”"

"Truly the jaws of irony are agape!"

"Ninety-five percent of all human-readable traffic over the net is spam, a figure virtually unchanged since the late noughties."

"Some say the Internet is for porn; but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam. As communication technologies got cheaper, the cost of grabbing a megaphone and jamming it up against the aching ear-drums of an advertising-jaded public collapsed: Meanwhile, the content-is-king mantra of the monetization mavens gridlocked the new media in an advertising-supported business model. The great and the good of the Academy have been fighting a losing battle against the Anglo-Saxon hucksterization model for the past thirty years: But the sad truth is that the battle’s lost. The tide of war was turned in Beijing and New Delhi, when the rapidly industrializing new superpowers climbed on the MAKE MONEY FAST band-wagon and gave free rein to the free market, red in tooth and claw—just as long as the sharp bits were directed outwards. And today the entire world is still drowning in a sea of attention-grabbing unregulated unethical untruthful spamvertising."

"You say paranoia, I say surveillance state. Worried about being tracked by hidden cameras stealthy air-borne remotely piloted vehicles, and chips implanted in your skull? You’re merely a realist."

"Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave."

"Policing is one of those jobs that will always revolve around a meatspace hub, if only because you can’t build a cellblock in cyberspace."

"Privacy is a luxury; to buy it you need to be able to buy space and fit locks, to switch off the phone and live without fear of dependency on others. Privacy is a peculiarly twentieth-century concept, an artefact of the Western urban middle classes: Before then, only the super rich could afford it, and since the invention of e-mail and the mobile phone, it has largely slipped away."

"The unspoken ideology of capitalism didn’t admit, back then, of any corporate duty beyond making a return on investment for the shareholders while obeying the law. Then the terrible teens hit, with a global recession followed by a stuttering shock wave of corporate scandals as rock-ribbed enterprises were exposed as hollow husks run by conscience-free predators who were even less community-minded and altruistic than gangsters. The ravenous supermarket chains had gutted the entire logistic and retail sector, replacing high-street banks and post offices as well as food stores and gas stations, recklessly destroying community infrastructure; manufacturers had outsourced production to the cheapest overseas bidders, hollowing out the middle-class incomes on which consumer capitalism depended: The prison-industrial complex, higher education, and private medical sectors were intent on milking a public purse that no longer had a solid tax base with which to pay. Maximizing short-term profit worked brilliantly for sociopathic executives looking to climb the promotion ladder—but as a long-term strategy for stability, a spiraling Gini coefficient left a lot to be desired."

"It turns out you left something rather important off your career plan: for example, there’s no ticky-box on the diagram for HAVING A LIFE—TASK COMPLETED. And so you kept putting it off, and de-prioritized it, and put it off again until the law of conservation of shit-stirring dragged it front and centre and lamped you upside yer heid, as your clients might put it."

"No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent."

"See? Interstellar colonization is easy! You just need to devote a visible percentage of the resource of an entire interplanetary civilization to it for several hundred years, placing it in the tireless and efficient hands of robots ordered to strive for the goal for as long as it takes."

"Let me give you a handle on that. Say the distance between the Earth and the sun is, oh, one centimeter. Mercury orbits the sun at a range of a toasty two millimeters. Jupiter is six centimeters out; the span of your outstretched arms, fingertip to fingertip, will just about encompass the orbit of Eris, which it’s taken me so many years to reach. Got that? Well, on this scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, is two and a half kilometers down the road. And we’re going to Tau Ceti, three times as far away as that."

"The number one crime in any age: offending the money."

"He’s had a lot of practice helping families suffering from experiences that are simultaneously mundane and far more horrifying than anything in a movie: deaths from cancer and dementia, the loss of babies and young children, that sort of thing."

"Contingency time is useless wasted time, right until you need it."

"History is written by the survivors, a narrative they compose to explain events to themselves. So the historicity of journals like this one—their accuracy and authenticity—is a function of the reliability of the narrator."

"His Infernal Majesty leans towards me confidingly. “You have imposter syndrome,” He says, “but paradoxically, that’s often a sign of competence. Only people who understand their work well enough to be intimidated by it can be terrified by their own ignorance. It’s the opposite of Dunning-Kruger syndrome, where the miserably incompetent think they’re on top of the job because they don’t understand it.”"

"“Yes-yes!” Jon bounces up and down on the balls of her feet. “How much coffee did we have this morning?” Pete asks, suspicion dawning. “All of it!” Brains absorbs this fact slowly. The room he and Pete shared didn’t come with a filter machine, but there was an industrial-sized one in the motel lobby. If Jon drank the entire jug— “How many times did you refill it?” asks Pete. “Only three times! It kept running out!” Brains glances at the vicar. “Are we going to need a tranquilizer dart?” he murmurs."

"Anxiety loves company almost as much as misery."

"I’m not a politician, even though I play-act one when the boss tells me to—I’m allowed to change my mind when my understanding of the facts changes."

"American cops are so heavily militarized these days that the only way I can tell the difference between them and the army is the color of their body armor—that, and the army is less trigger-happy."