JPod: the review

"When you read a book, you're totally lost in your own private world, and society says that's a good and wonderful thing. But if you play a game by yourself, it's this weird, fucked-up, socially damaging activity. What sort of narrow-minded moron propagates this lie? When your grandfather plays solitaire, is he isolating himself? Get a grip, people." - Douglas Coupland, JPod

My first warning should have been the tagline inside the dust jacket: "Douglas Coupland updates Microserfs for the Google generation." Is there even a Google generation? I assume that the search engine is so ubiquitous that it makes capturing a particular demographic irrelevant. More accurately, JPod reads like Coupland was using Google to surf for every meme to circulate the Internet in the years since writing Microserfs, and tried to transcribe it to paper. Where Microserfs was comfortable to tell a story at the beginning of the "new economy" wave, JPod desperately tries to catch up with it.

Microserfs started off innocently enough inside the soon-to-be omnipotent Microsoft, and inadvertently leads into the world of independent game development. But that contrivance doesn't bear the burden of moving the story forward; rather, the relationships between the characters are allowed to develop inside an entirely new environment apart from their corporate prison. It was evident that Coupland was more about putting forth interesting ideas in the book, with the characters able to carry them through the story.

Similarly, the story of JPod centers around six cubicle workers who sit next to each other - all with names starting with "J" (therefore, JPod) at a game development studio in Vancouver. They are stuck making an idiotic, game-altering change to an almost complete product at the whim of the project's head of marketing. It's clearly a jab at the companies too huge and out of touch to create anything but terribly uninspired games, even if they are playable. But these corporate antics only serve as a walk-on part to the rest of the book, in favor of creating storylines full of the oddest characters and situations one could think up, in the name of keeping the reader's attention.

By the first 50 pages, the reader is introduced to the characters by way of a series of fact sheets - labelled "Living Cartoon Profiles", no less - in preview of the shallow character development to come. At least Microserfs handled this contrivance with a little more tact through a series of "Jeopardy" categories for each character.

The characters are constantly worried about being boring or uninteresting, and ironically enough, the characters are boring; the entire group provides an excellent foil for John Doe, obsessed with being average because of his zany lesbian commune upbringing, which he tries to distance himself from throughout the story.

Coupland doesn't describe scenes or characters anymore; he places products and drops culturally significant items in an effort to fatten the text. The best he can come up with in the wake of the "Hot Coffee" and hidden game content is JPod setting out to create a secret area in the game they're working on, featuring a subservient Ronald McDonald who takes to arms in his thirst for vengeance against his fast-food consuming oppressors. It's a clumsily inserted interlude, and the story's focus jarringly shifts to developing this part of the game instead of what they're supposed to be working on. Given the excess of hours the characters have to work on the project anyway, it's not believable how much time is spent on their side project. Are video game programmers that spiteful? Coupland would like to think so.

While it was slightly tolerable to watch Coupland fumble his way through video game culture (his use of timing, comedy and modern colloquialisms is still impeccable), he still spends too much time intermixing an array of completely over-the-top social situations that seem constructed to shock than to add dimension to the book. And then the author makes an appearance himself. I couldn't possibly fathom the purpose behind it, but Douglas Coupland makes an appearance on the same flight as the protagonist, portrayed as some self-important prick that we're supposed to laugh along with as he humiliates the main character. The self-depreciating humour surrounding the Coupland character was too forced for me to wink and nudge along with the author; it served no purpose except to insert yet another cultural reference. He then goes on to save the protagonist from being stranded in a sweat shop in China, creating one of the lowest points of the novel.

About the only insight we get to game culture is a statement by one of the supporting characters about violent video games: "It's the best. It allows me to park my evil in one place so I can be a better person in the real world." I found it a little ironic that the character that says this is a criminal, but a likable criminal - he takes ballroom dancing and interior decorating very seriously, after all.

I looked forward to reading JPod. I thought the setting of a game development house would be a great vehicle for exploring game culture. Instead, Coupland mistakenly tries to duplicate Microserfs, with a message that sounds even more embittered with corporate culture. The story is played out by a cast of caricatures who seem to be made up of the last 10 years of cliches for the digital generation - ironically, ones that he probably helped form. JPod doesn't delve into game development either; rather, it simply exploits the mainstream headlines to forge only the weakest of links to its inspiration. I expected a lot more from Coupland; it's unfortunate he's simply feeding off of his own hype and getting caught up in the zeitgeist he used to be able to interpret.