The host of PBS documentary series How We Got to Now time hops through his own life.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed / Courtesy of Nutopia
Best-selling author Steven Johnson hosts six-part documentary How We Got to Now , a series about everyday innovations and how they interlaced with history to form our modern-day lives. The last episode, "Sound," airs this Wednesday, Nov. 12, at 10 p.m. EST on PBS.
After ushering us through a few centuries, here are six ways Steven got to where he is now, as he wrote to us in an email.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
What childhood toy or activity was your absolute favorite?
Steven Johnson: I had a serious obsession for three or four years with the whole extended genre of dice-based sports simulations (APBA, Strat-o-Matic). I fell into an increasingly weird rabbit hole of "indie" baseball simulations that were allegedly more statistically accurate than the mainstream games.
I went back and bought a few of them on eBay when I was writing Everything Bad Is Good For You (which opens with a little reverie about this part of my childhood). They were effectively just an entire binder full of numbers; nothing remotely resembling a game in any their visual cues: no cards, or tokens, or illustrated boards to play on.
This was the late-'70s, early-'80s — just far enough into the digital age to have the computers design the games, but not far enough for me to actually have a computer of my own. Eventually I started designing my own games, which I'm convinced taught me more about simulations, statistics, and probability than anything I learned in school.
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How Steven Johnson Got To Now