“Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution“ is the first book from husband-and-wife team Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby. Chaplin, a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Fortune and Salon, agreed to answer some questions about the writing process for us.

Be sure to also check out my review of the book.

Video Game Media Watch: What inspired you two to write a book on videogames? How did you join together on the project?

Heather Chaplin: The book came to be when I came home and found Aaron installing a PS2 in the living room. “It’s for the DVD player!” he told me. In other words, I was not a gamer and my curiosity was initially inspired by wondering why my husband was. Actually, Aaron was rediscovering his gamer self around that time. While I was a journalist, he was a graduate student studying philosophy of mind. All the guys from all over the world in this fancy program spent most of their time playing Doom over the T1 lines.

I started looking into the subject - this was early spring of 2001 - and soon realized what an utterly fascinating landmind of a subject it was. I told Aaron I couldn’t write it without him, and he agreed to take a leave of absence from school. We thought it would make a good combination, actually - gamer as guide, outsider to bring to fresh eyes.

VGMWatch: What was it like writing with another person? Did you split up the chapters, or was it more of a collaborative process?

HC: As Aaron likes to say, once we got past throwing furniture at each other as a means of dispute resolution, things got much easier! Seriously, it was really hard. We had no idea how hard it would be, or probably would never have undertaken it. Initially we split up chapters, but it ended up being more collaborative. We tried to play off each other’s strengths. For example, I was a journalist by trade, so I felt pretty comfortable interviewing CEO-types. Aaron was an MMO fan - so every single person we profile in our chapter on virtual worlds are contacts Aaron made. I did a lot of the initial writing; Aaron, who’s former molecular biologist, actually knew the stuff Will Wright was talking about; I’m pretty aggressive at getting people to talk to me; Aaron could bring to life what, say, Miyamoto did that was so special, etc.

VGMWatch: You manage to craft some pretty detailed accounts of some major people and events in the world of gaming. How close were you able to get to your subjects? Were the people you shadowed generally cooperative?

HC: We did get to spend a lot of time with some really fantastic people. We feel beyond lucky. I felt like the videogame industry was really unique in that you can go to a conference and Will Wright or Sid Meier will just be walking by - unlike another entertainment field where the ’stars’ are always separate. With someone like Will, for example, i saw him walking by at at GDC at the very beginning of the book writing process, and just grabbed him. I asked him to sit down and eat the tuna sandwich he was carrying. He did, and we sat there and just talked.

I found Will and many others who you would think would be too “important” to bother incredibly available. I went to Berkeley and visited him a couple times. He was very gracious with his time. Same with Clifford Bleszinski, John Romero - any number of people. We also spent time with Sid Meier, Fumito Uedo, Kazamari Yamauchi, Tripp Hawkins, Steve Russell, Seamus Blackley, J Allard.

Shigeru Miyamoto was the big challenge. As anyone who’s ever tried to write about him knows, Nintendo guards his time pretty closely. We got a couple good long interviews, went to every speech or panel he gave during the four years we were reporting, interviewed everyone else we knew about him, read everything we could get our hands on, and had to go from there.

Also, as to why people were willing to talk with us, I think there are two particular reasons - one, I hate to say it, but being a woman in this industry really helped, if for no other reason that people remembered who I was. Also, I got the sense that a lot of these game makers were used to very fan-oriented questions, like “will the next Zelda be cel shaded.” I definitely got the sense that a lot of them were excited to talk on a bigger, cultural level, to discuss what it is they do, how they think of themselves as designers, and were the medium as a whole is moving. In other words, there were big advantages to being at work on a book and from being an outsider looking in.

VGMWatch: Who was the most interesting personality you ran in to in reporting for your book?

HC: There is no way to answer that question! When we went to our first E3, while still writing the proposal for the book, the very first thing that hit me (after getting over Booth Babe shock!) was how utterly and almost unbelievably fascinating the people were. I remember introducing myself to Sid Meier, and next to him was a 16-year-old from Norway who’d flown out by himself to try and get into the industry. I remember meeting Cliffy and David Perry and Ed Fries and a graduate student that was trying to sell a prototype of a device that wrapped around your head that could read your brainwaves. I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

VGMWatch: Your book covers a lot of disparate topics within the videogame world — First Person Shooter competitions, MMO communities, government-funded military trainers, Xbox launch parties. What would you say is the overarching theme of the book?

HC: Excellent questions. The reason we choose to tell a series of disparate stories was in the hopes that somehow poking into all these different corners of the industry would give people an overriding sense of the whole. We wanted to show how deep the industry is and how many different aspects to it there are. The three things we kept in mind on the most basic level were who makes them, who plays them, and who cares. Our initial idea for the book was to come into the industry without a hypothesis, and to simply report on what we found. It’s an interactive age, we felt people could make up their own minds. That said, I guess our overarching theme was a sort of wake up call to the mainstream. Our stance was “good or bad” is the wrong question. They’re here; they’re going to be the dominant medium of the 21st century; let’s pay attention.

VGMWatch: You reference many other video game books and authors in your text. How important was their work in supporting your research? How do you feel about the current body of gaming history books?

HC: Another good question. You know the saying we all stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before? I definitely think that’s true. The first book I read was Phoenix by Leonard Herman, a self-published history that is truly the bible of videogame history. We also read and interviewed a number of times Steve Kent, who’s work was an incredible resource. David Kushner’s Masters of Doom came out when most of the writing for our chapter on id was already done, but it was super-helpful for fleshing out some details, especially about John Carmack, who Kushner spent far more time with than us. Same with Dean Takahashi’s Unleashing the Xbox. We actually tried to stay away from some of the more theoretical stuff - like that coming out of MIT’s media lab - because we didn’t want to be unduly influenced. Also, books like Steven Levy’s Hackers was helpful - although again, we waited until after writing the chapter on Spacewar! to read it.

I think there’s a great body of history out there. With Smartbomb, we really wanted to do something a little different. We were not trying to compete with Steven Kent or replicate his work. We wanted to do something really narrative in nature that gave a sense of the character of the industry. We also didn’t want to go in the direction of, say, Trigger Happy, which had a lot of the author in it. We wanted to stay out of it as much as possible. We definitely took the fly-on-the-wall approach.

VGMWatch: Do you think coverage of videogames and their history is on the rise in the book publishing world? In newspaper journalism?

HC: Definitely. You have probably noticed that even the New York Times Arts & Leisure section hired someone this year to write about videogames. I remember when we interviewed Seamus Blackley in the fall of 2001 and he said he was just waiting for the day that happened. Everyone else in the room kid of sighed, as if knowing it never really would. And now it has! I see that as a real milestone. Other magazines and papers have also upped their coverage since we started. The New York Times Magazine has run a couple of features too recently. I think so many people play games today that the mainstream media just can’t ignore them anymore.

VGMWatch: Are there any subjects you wanted to get into the book but just couldn’t fit? If so, what were they?

HC: Absolutely. There’s more on the cutting room floor than made it into the book. We were particularly sad not to be able to get into AI issues, which we’d hoped to do through Peter Molyneux. Also, we wanted to talk more about gaming in other countries, especially the Asian countries. Also, people like Sid Meier didn’t get as much space as he deserves. There are so many stories in the industry, it was brutal trying to fit as much as we could in. It would have been great to include more about non-stars of the industry. We spent a lot of time talking to low lever coders and testers as well as the Porsche driving variety. We really would have liked to do more of an average day-in-the-life of type thing. God, I could go on forever about what else we would have liked to include.

VGMWatch: What’s next for both of you? Any more gaming books in the future?

HC: I’m working on a book about entrepreneurship and America right now, but I will very sad to let go of gaming entirely. I guess i drank the cool aid so to speak. At the last GDC I attended I realized, how sad I was to be saying good by to people I’d gotten to know and to the industry as a whole. I don’t know how, but i don’t ever want to lose contact. I hope to get the opportunity to use how much I learned on this projected on feature stories and the like.

Aaron is working on a new idea that has to do with games as well as some TV show development also within the subject.