Last Saturday, coinciding with the 26th anniversary of my former company’s founding, I officially published “The Dao of Games”—the last of my works that had yet to be placed on 3ook.com.
In 1999, a year after graduating from university and starting work, I founded Lakoo Games with friends. I worked there for 20 years, until I stepped down from all positions in 2019.
The first half of this period was documented in my 2009 book, “Game 以載道” (The Road of Games), a humble work that now makes me cringe when I reread it.
As a sequel, “The Dao of Games” records the events, thoughts, and reflections of the second half of these 20 years of my life. The book contains 97 essays, all of which are publicly available on ckxpress.com. They are organized into six chapters: “The Dao of Games,” “On What a Startup Is,” “To Youth,” “I Want Real Games,” “It’s Him, It’s You, It’s Me,” and “Forbidden Words.” It also includes a special feature: a long-form interview with me from Stand News in 2015.
Soul Uploaded, Imperfectly Completed
What does “official publication” mean? Different authors have different interpretations. Some believe it requires coordination by a publishing house, others think it means printing a physical book, and still others see an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) as the benchmark. For me, it means using decentralized publishing to put my work on Web3. Decentralized publishing permanently stores metadata such as the book title, author, and publisher on a blockchain like Ethereum. Diverging from traditional concepts, my work is openly licensed under CC-BY. The text is stored openly on decentralized storage to achieve the widest possible circulation and preservation. This is an “official publication” not for the establishment, but for the world.
Since 1999, I have continuously shared my life’s moments, career ups and downs, and social observations through writing. The five works that have crystallized from this process are now all “officially published.” Since these works reflect my thoughts, in a sense, it means I have “uploaded myself,” putting my life on the blockchain and allowing my soul to transcend its mortal coil.
In early 2022, when decentralized publishing was still in its infancy, I “unofficially published” “The Dao of Games” on Kindle. If you are one of the few human beings on Earth who purchased it, please contact me. I would like to send you the official version. In the traditional publishing model, authors are accustomed to having no connection with their readers. However, the new paradigm of decentralized publishing remedies this shortcoming. With the publication of this book, I will bid farewell to the days of knowing nothing about my readers or where they are.
Before this official publication, Gemini and I each proofread the text once. It took me around 24 hours; it took Gemini a few minutes—and even then, it was only to simulate manual typing. In the process, I was ashamed to find more than a dozen typos. I also discovered that two articles were highly repetitive, so I deleted one that was originally a quick note. I have already come up with an excuse for these shortcomings: this is the official publication, after all. Besides correcting errors and omissions, the official version also standardizes a great deal of punctuation, features a new cover, and includes precious photos in the appendix.
While rereading, I did consider that if the editing priority was the reader’s experience, it might be more appropriate to cut a third of the content to save reading time and create a brisker pace. However, before considering the reader’s experience, I must first answer to myself. So, I decided to keep everything, even if rereading some articles was rather embarrassing. Since I genuinely had those thoughts and feelings at the time, it’s best to record them completely.
As for the reader, there’s no need to be rigid. There is no best way to read this work, and you don’t have to worry about spoilers. You can read it forwards, backwards, or even jump around to select chapters of interest from “The Dao of Games,” “On What a Startup Is,” “To Youth,” “I Want Real Games,” “It’s Him, It’s You, It’s Me,” “Forbidden Words,” and the Stand News interview.
Another feature of this book is that each article includes a link to the original URL, with the unfortunate exception of the Stand News interview. If you have any thoughts, feel free to click the link to my blog and leave a comment to exchange ideas in a way that is novel compared to a physical book, yet ancient compared to social media.
Invincible AI, Fragile Human
I previously translated the title of “Game 以載道” as The Road of Games. As “好 game 有好報” is its sequel, I conveniently translated it as The Dao of Games. I’m not suggesting there will be an English version; the English titles are just for filenames and URLs. The Chinese version hardly sells, so how could there possibly be an English one? But this logic is quickly becoming obsolete. AI is mature enough to generate high-quality translations at great speed, and it continues to improve and become cheaper. On the negative side, AI is taking jobs from translators and, eventually, everyone. On the positive side, niche works that no one would previously invest in translating and publishing can now be published at a small cost if even one person in the world is interested.
One of the goals of 3ook.com is to leverage AI so that new and niche authors can publish their works, even creating audiobooks and translations in multiple languages—enjoying the treatment previously reserved only for famous authors and bestselling works. I have no solution for the negative effects of AI. On the contrary, as AI can instantly write well-structured long-form articles, I am also one of its “victims.” My response is to focus on the human elements that AI cannot write: incorporating my life, my values, and my vulnerability into my work. “Write as genuinely as you can, write as deeply as you can.” That’s why the two titles, The Road of Games and The Dao of Games, are translations that are “very me.” Although, I wouldn’t be too surprised if one day AI can create a high-fidelity imitation of my very soul.
Some people skip the preface and go straight to the main content when reading a book, just as they skip the opening theme and recap when watching a Netflix series. I am the opposite. I particularly enjoy reading the author’s preface and cherish the opportunity to write one for my own work. After all, it takes a year, or even a decade, to write a book, and only then do you get the chance to write a preface. Sharing the meta-world of a work is a great blessing for an author. And yet, “The Dao of Games” is a book without a preface. If we consider a preface to be an essential element of a book, then this is an unfinished book that has been shamelessly published.
It’s not that I didn’t try to write a preface for this work. I didn’t just try for a few hours, but for several years. I just didn’t know where to begin, let alone how to conclude. I can only offer the lame excuse that my inability to share the meta-story is my preface. Leaving a trace of regret is the most faithful representation of this period of my life.
Coincidentally, last week D also published a not-for-sale edition of “物種源始．貝貝重生（下）：消失的可能世界”. It contains manuscripts from the uncompleted final installment of a natural history trilogy from over a decade ago, a continuation co-authored with AI, and other related texts. It explores the nature of “author,” “work,” and “book,” far ahead of its time, questioning the path forward for the publishing industry and the literary world.
My work doesn’t have this kind of groundbreaking significance, but on a personal level, I deeply resonate with D’s statement that the publication of this work is a sealing ritual. These two sentences from D’s preface, “What I have to say goodbye to is not just this unfinished book, but also the self who failed to finish it,” were spoken so lightly, yet they struck a chord deep in my heart.
p.s. For the publisher of “The Dao of Games” I used “ckx Press.” Please consider it just for fun and don’t take it too seriously, although at the moment I registered ckxpress.com name 20 years ago, I did indeed have this in mind. However, if you think this memory is an inception I’ve implanted in myself only recently, I have no way to prove it isn’t.
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