What TNW is reading (week 19)

Ah, welcome welcome.

I see you enjoyed last week’s edition and are back for more. Well we won’t disappoint. For the uninitiated (go back and start at post one, please) the team at TNW has made a New Year’s Resolution to read a bit more. So every week, a select number of our team will share with you what’s currently living on their nightstand, or saved in Pocket, or is sitting in that browser tab begging to be read.

This week we have topics as diverse as food deserts in New York, how VR is helping kids work out what careers they’d like to get in to and the inventor of the pop-up ad meditates on what the internet would look like if it was free of advertising.

Happy reading!

How Steph Curry Broke The Way Basketball Video Games Are Being Built – Forbes

As a Basketball fan and with the NBA playoffs in full swing, the following article really caught my eye. It was an interview by Forbes with Mike Wang – the Gameplay Director of NBA2K , one of the best developed basketball game series available today.

Growing up in the 90s, I played a lot of sports video games myself. Back then we were always looking to have that competitive edge while playing with friends. In basketball games that was often abusing the elite shooters, to a point where it can become very frustrating for your opponents.

Even if you’re not a big sports fan, it’s likely that you have heard the name Stephen Curry lately. He has been putting up incredible numbers in the NBA and is especially known for his three-point shooting ability. Stephen Curry is making a high percentage of his three-point shots from a distance that is considered extreme, by all other players in the league.

Mike Wang talks about how this is affecting the gaming industry and the formula behind the gameplay. It fascinated me, how his performance is basically forcing game developers to completely re-think their entire formulas from previous games, since the goal is to make the experience as realistic as possible.

– Derk van Lomwel, Business Development Manager

Emma Watson calls on men to help fight gender inequality – Independent UK

Although this isn’t really recent news, a while ago my father unintentionally brought me back this thread raised by Emma Watson on the effects of sexism on men, a facade I’ve never considered before reading this article.

Emma called upon men to join the fight against sexism for it leads to unfair expectations on them too, as in the need to be the provider, or that taking care of children is a women’s job or even that having physical or psychological issues would diminish their masculinity.

So what does this all have to do with my dad? He told me, in a hospital bed, how depressed he’d been and that he didn’t know how to cope with it as a man.

I hope this reaches more people so we can end sexism altogether. Together.

PS: My pop is fine!

– Thais Neubauer, Back-end Developer at Index

Ready Player One: A Novel – Ernest Cline

Ready player one, a book written in 2012 is one of the tech classic must reads at the moment.

I’ve only started this book a week ago, and I am already half-way through. The book is exploring the way of how a virtual reality world is having an impact on our ordinary lives, even before we knew the existence of the Oculus Rift.

The book is of course, fiction, but it’s a fascinating concept to think about it. It’s written from the perspective of Wade, a young man on a quest to open the virtual gates to massive power and fortune. But there are a number of real-life obstacles he must overcome first.

– Jeffrey Kloezeman, Business Development

I Am Pilgrim: A Thriller – Terry Hayes

I finished reading I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes just last week. It’s a book that reads like a movie, which makes sense when you find out the author was a screenwriter.

It is a very basic spy novel on the surface, and you’ll enjoy it if you’ve enjoyed spy novels in the past, but it has so much more besides that. The story revolves around the ‘next 9/11’ and at times seems implausible, until you realize that flying planes into towers seemed implausible as well, until it happened.

The other interesting part is that I actually understood and liked the ‘bad guy’. The back story goes into great detail and doesn’t demonize as much as other stories might have done.

Okay, he’s still murderous and a villain, but you can’t help but wonder if you would’ve done the same, when put through all he’s been put through. That made it an extra interesting read.

– Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, CEO