The Nexus Game

The Nexus Game manuscript is complete, and I am currently looking for an agent to represent this project. In the meantime, enjoy the following samplings of all things "Nexus."

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To read the first chapter of The Nexus Game, click here.

To play some puzzles associated with The Nexus Game, click here.

Behind The Nexus Game: the Inspiration for the Novel      Back in the early 80’s, when music was sold primarily on black vinyl record albums and the IPOD hadn’t even been conceived of yet, I picked up an album called Tales of Mystery and Imagination by the Alan Parsons Project. The album was based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. It was lushly produced and, typical of progressive rock, the music was a mixture of guitars and orchestras, electronic chords and wailing vocals. It was the album that set Alan Parsons on a musical career spanning over a quarter of a century. That, in itself, was impressive enough, but when reading the liner notes, I discovered several other facts. Alan Parsons had previously been the engineer on Pink Floyd’s legendary Dark Side of the Moon, and he had worked with the Beatles in Abbey Road Studios on projects such as the album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.      The connections between these bands and their music were akin to something I had encountered many times before. As a person with a degree in radio and television communications, I was constantly discovering links between musicians, bands, and record producers, so that I no longer thought of the music industry as a group of individuals, but as a latticework of connections. But I had also realized that the same could be said of actors, of artists, and, of all humanity in general. One of the examples that always struck me was the relationship between the composer Richard Wagner and King Ludwig of Bavaria, the creator of the picture-postcard-famous Castle Neuschwanstein. But there were many more such links, especially when you began to think of artists of all types who were inspired by their predecessors, as well as by their contemporaries.      About ten years after I purchased Tales of Mystery and Imagination, three college students (Mike Ginelli, Craig Fass, and Brian Turtle) came up with a game called The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. This game was based on an idea that had a history harking all the way back to 1929 and a story called “Chains,” written by the Hungarian writer Frignes Karinthy. Frignes had proposed the idea that between any two people there is a connecting chain of acquaintances that is no more than six in number. In the 1960’s, a psychologist by the name of Stanley Milgram performed an experiment that validated this idea, and in 1990, playwright John Guare wrote a play that made use of the concept. It would later become a movie, the name of which would later inspire spawn the idea for the Kevin Bacon game. Here, too, it was all about connections, and it meshed beautifully with the assemblage of relationships I had already begun to mentally compile.      Somewhere along the line, I began to write it all down, and when the technology became available, my ongoing list of interrelations became a spreadsheet. Then came the Internet. With the advent of Google and Wikipedia, my chart of these connections took off exponentially. It was almost unmanageable. But the questions was, what good was it? How could it be put to use? The answer to this question came from two other long time interests.      The first was an obsession with theme parks. Having grown up in Southern California, I had been to Disneyland numerous times and had become enamored of the fantasy kingdom in the same way that millions of others have. But I also loved aquariums, museums, and water parks. Ever since I was a kid, I had been scribbling on graph paper, drawing out my own plans for parks that contained elements of the places I had visited. Using toothpicks, clay, and cardboard, I even assembled models of the places I had drawn. When the technology became available, I began to re-create these environments in 3D virtual space.      The second factor that was to play a major part in all of this, and was to steer it in a specific direction, was a direct result of computer technology. It was the computer adventure game. These games consumed many of my days and even more of my nights. They enabled many such as me to wander fantastic worlds and interact with them, creating experiences unique to each individual who became involved in this new genre. Original stories were being told in a brand new way.      I remember walking through Disneyland and envisioning what many of the rides and attractions would be like if they were converted to scenarios from computer adventure games. Again, I was not alone. The science fiction writers Larry Niven and Stephen Barnes wrote three novels about a place called Dream Park, where visitors took part in real time, fully three-dimensional role-playing games. It was similar to my vision, but with an emphasis on combat, and with the caveat that holographic technology would make some of the fantasy become real. I wanted something feasible that could be done with the technology available now.      And so I wondered, what if someone were to wake up and find themselves in such a place, with no idea of how they got there and no idea why. What if they were faced with a series of puzzles and some of these contained references to historical figures, artists, and pop culture icons that were, in themselves, the foundation for a much larger puzzle?      That is the premise of The Nexus Game.