The 'Bad' Guy

But Johnson was something else as well. He was the kind of kid who'd sit in his room for hours playing baseball simulation games -- the pre-electronic variety, which featured sets of dice and sheaves of complex statistical data. He was the kind who, frustrated by the flaws he found in these simulations, went ahead and designed his own.

When the first electronic games appeared, he played them, too. Still, he was no obsessive -- until Myst and Sim City came along.

This was in the mid-'90s, during his grad school days. Exploring the vivid worlds of the new games "was, like, oh my God, I feel like I fast-forwarded 10 years." The second version of Sim City, in particular, gave him the feeling that the urban landscape he was shaping on his computer screen was "almost like a life form."

If a single game could come alive that way, what would a whole computer-connected world be like? It was the perfect question for a tech-loving guy who wanted to write.

Goodbye, "Middlemarch"; hello, Feed magazine.

Johnson never finished his dissertation. Instead, he helped start one of the first significant general interest publications online -- joining others in his tech-savvy generation who "saw opportunity where a lot of other people saw something confusing and scary," as Feed co-founder Stefanie Syman once explained.

The magazine had a classic new-economy roller-coaster ride. It was hand-to-mouth at first, Johnson says: "Oh, we raised $20,000! Oh, we can pay the rent!" A few years later, having added a couple of other Web ventures, his company was doing well enough to raise a few million dollars and hire a real CEO -- just in time for the market to crash.

Feed was history. But Johnson came out just fine. The magazine had helped establish him as a chronicler of the networked world. He had one book out and another poised for publication.

We're not talking thrillers here: Johnson has made a career of popularizing the complex.

In "Interface Culture" (1997), he explored the idea that because we're now sharing so many communal spaces online, interfaces and the folks who create them are hugely important. In "Emergence" (2001), he looked at self-organizing systems in everything from ant colonies to computer simulations. In last year's "Mind Wide Open," he offered a lively tour through the workings of the brain.

For years, meanwhile, he had been charting the "incredible growth in complexity and challenge" of those video games that non-gamers still thought of as moronic, immoral or both. Then he thought: Isn't television evolving the same way? Weren't shows like "The Sopranos," "The Simpsons," "Seinfeld" and "24" demanding more of their viewers at the same time the tube was under attack for producing sleazy, lowest-common-denominator fare?

"It occurred to me that there was a bigger argument to be made," Johnson says.