Book Description
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A3CJ8R6
Free today and tomorrow (2/23 - 24) for Kindle.
I've worked in downtown D.C. for many years, and I like to take walks at lunch. Sometimes I walk to work from Union Station, and it's interesting the sorts of things and people you can see.
On some of my walks I started imagining a game that workers in cities could play on their lunch breaks and during happy hour. I have dabbled in programming and IT stuff over the years, so at first I thought about actually creating the game. It would be online, but also in a smartphone app. There would be real-world interaction too – almost like a role-playing game. You'd meet people for lunch, or at happy hour, and there would be strategies and intrigue involved. Players would be organized by guilds, and you'd get points for recruiting people to your guild, or finding people in other guilds.
But I'm more of a writer than a programmer, so instead of actually creating the game, I wanted to write a story with the game as the background. Then maybe some programmer could come along and make it! (If that's you, contact me.)
As I played with this concept of guilds and role-playing and whatnot, I was also reading some books about human nature. E.g., Pinker's book <i>The Blank Slate.</i> One thing he seems to have missed is the idea that different subpopulations of people might have different natures – so maybe there is no single, human nature.
Those two ideas come together in <i>The Hidden Village</i> -- the game, with its guilds, and the idea of "clans" with different characteristics. They're so different, in fact, that they don't feel any moral obligation to the rest of society. They think they're a law to themselves.
So in <i>The Hidden Village,</i> Geof Franklin gets caught up in all this. His son Alek has been recruited into one of the clans, and Geof is worried that he's involved in some sort of dangerous cult, so he investigates. But it gets him in all kinds of trouble.