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Jerry's Reviews > Mogworld
Mogworld
by
by
This was an audiobook I picked partly because Audible had a sale and partly out of curiosity to see how badly someone who's mostly known for making fun of video games online would fare as an attempted novelist. And it's pretty much what I'd expected. The quailty of the prose isn't anything to write home about and the first-person narration is loaded with metaphors that reference to things that wouldn't exist in a fantasy world. Maybe he intended that to be a running gag, but that's not how it came off to me. It just felt like lazy writing to me.
The humor mostly consists of pointing out that fantasy tropes are silly when you stop and think about them and, when about halfway through (in a twist that the synopsis of the book completely gives away) when the world is revealed to be an MMORPG pointing out that MMO tropes are silly when you stop and think about them. Some moments and situations have inherent humor beyond making fun of video games that actually made me chuckle, but it was more miss than hit.
The banter between the characters was clearly intended to carry the weight of keeping the humor up outside the references, but it quickly got tiring because it relies too heavily on the main character making a sarcastic remark to everything that everyone says to him all the time. So what should be witty banter is just tiring. I think the concept of him being an unlikable protagonist kind of worked out in the end when everything wrapped up, but it's laid on very thick.
So just when I'm about to write the whole thing off the book takes a darker twist near the end and becomes more about the fact that, if we gave the characters in a video game strong enough AI, they'd take a look at the world they were in and think we were complete assholes and how horribly we'd fuck up playing god if we'd actually gotten the chance. It feels like Yahtzee got a better feel for the story near the end and never went back to rewrite the story to fit it. So while this book ended up falling flat I did feel like Yahtzee has the potential to be a decent novelist with enough practice.
The humor mostly consists of pointing out that fantasy tropes are silly when you stop and think about them and, when about halfway through (in a twist that the synopsis of the book completely gives away) when the world is revealed to be an MMORPG pointing out that MMO tropes are silly when you stop and think about them. Some moments and situations have inherent humor beyond making fun of video games that actually made me chuckle, but it was more miss than hit.
The banter between the characters was clearly intended to carry the weight of keeping the humor up outside the references, but it quickly got tiring because it relies too heavily on the main character making a sarcastic remark to everything that everyone says to him all the time. So what should be witty banter is just tiring. I think the concept of him being an unlikable protagonist kind of worked out in the end when everything wrapped up, but it's laid on very thick.
So just when I'm about to write the whole thing off the book takes a darker twist near the end and becomes more about the fact that, if we gave the characters in a video game strong enough AI, they'd take a look at the world they were in and think we were complete assholes and how horribly we'd fuck up playing god if we'd actually gotten the chance. It feels like Yahtzee got a better feel for the story near the end and never went back to rewrite the story to fit it. So while this book ended up falling flat I did feel like Yahtzee has the potential to be a decent novelist with enough practice.
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Reading Progress
January 9, 2014
–
Started Reading
January 9, 2014
– Shelved
January 18, 2014
–
Finished Reading
