Video Games: Noble Pursuit or Time Suck? [Book Review]
Imagine you are a writer with a secret addiction - an insatiable urge to play video games morning, noon and night, actively ignoring your deadlines, your family, your life. Imagine your mission within these games is to try to convince those around you who expect more than a high score or game completion that what you just did for the last nine hours was actually quite relevant to your work. It would be, if you were Tom Bissell, author of Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter; but since you're not, what's your excuse?
This question of video games as culturally relevant and subsequently, as artistic objects is not a new topic and as Jonathan Lanchester pointed out earlier this year at the London Review of Books, it is a hard question to answer as the world of video games is difficult to penetrate by people who do not play them. For those who do play them, their relevance is hardly even a question. Or is it? The apparent challenge of video games in Extra Lives is for the author to convince himself that the countless hours he has spent playing multitudes of them has been worthwhile. To do so, he divulges many personal anecdotes which illustrate his fascinations and frustrations with video games.
Aware that non-gamers will only experience video games as an over-the-shoulder-of-the-gamer viewing experience, Bissell spends much of the book lamenting and then finally, defending the storylines of popular games. Early on, he notes the Resident Evil series as being the most influential game in terms of setting the plot bar so low, to which he says "Without a doubt, Resident Evil showed how good games could be. Unfortunately, it also showed how bad games could be. Too amazed by the former, gamers neglected to question the latter. It rang a bell to which too many of us still, and stupidly, salivate."
This type of self-deprecation is used throughout the book, if only to show that Bissell is at once too smart and too stupid to be trying to explain what he is. In the chapter "The Unbearable Lightness of Games," he says, "Frequently in work with any degree of genre loyalty-this would include the vast majority of video games-the more explicit the story becomes, the more silly it will suddenly seem," somehow defending this notion later he writes, "The impulse to explain is the Achilles' heel of all genre work, and the most sophisticated artists within every genre know better than to expose their worlds to the sharp knife of intellection."
Video games differ from other genre work with their collaborative nature; "modern game design", Bissell writes, "is too complex and collaborative for any individual to feel proprietary about his or her own ideas." Helping us understand this creative process, Bissell speaks with some of the top minds in gaming today, such as Epic's Cliff Bleszinski, Braid designer Jonathan Blow, former Ubisoft designer Clint Hocking and Austin transplant Drew Karpyshyn, the head writer of BioWare's Mass Effect. Karpyshyn explains the compromising yet fulfilling aspects of teamwork: "With a collaborative medium, it's much easier to get bad art. Games have gotten so complex that you need this huge group of talented people. Mass Effect had a team of about one hundred and twenty. With games, you take a lot of pride in saying, 'I was part of this great team.'" Alternatively, not all designers take this approach; Blow, for example, is an independent developer whose game Braid is what Bissell refers to as an art game and is "purposefully old-school". "A game doesn't need to be difficult," Blow has said, "it just has to be interesting. It has to convince the player that their actions matter."
As the search for meaning within video games and for their place in culture continues, Bissell's book does provide a nice jumping-off point for non-gamers to become acquainted with the industry's basic arguments. Though the self-consciousness in Bissell's writing ("the part of me that loves video games wants to forgive, the part of me that values art cannot") may feel over-wrought at times, it also feels necessary in that he needs to channel both his gamer and non-gamer selves to reach his point. A compelling description of what it means to be a gamer with intentions, Extra Lives will no doubt speak for many.
Extra Lives comes out today from Pantheon Publishing.
