One might argue that critical writing about games is difficult because most games are not able to withstand thoughtful criticism. For their part, game magazines publish game review after game review, some of which are spritely and sharp, but they tend to focus on providing consumers with a sense of whether their money will be well spent. Game magazine reviewers rarely ask: What aesthetic tradition does this game fall into? How does it make me fell while I'm playing it? What emotions does it engage with, and are they appropriate to the game's theme and mechanics?

 

Due to my Master thesis' theme - games and gamification in the context of contemporary art museums - lately I've been reading a lot about games and, specifically, videogames. In fact, I've read so many books of varying quality that touched upon many of the same ideas, that I admit I may be getting somewhat jaded and difficult to please. Maybe that explains why I was disappointed by this book.

 

The problem with Extra Lives is that it doesn't deliver on what it promises. The book's subtitle, "Why Video Games Matter", is completely superfluous, since that theme is hardly touched upon. The quote that I included above promised a book filled with thoughtful videogame criticism, but that too was misleading. The chapters were mostly personal anecdotes sprinkled with a bit of criticism. I normally don't mind when authors get personal, unless it veers dangerously close to being narcissistic, and after a while, that's exactly what this book felt like. 

 

Still, the book has interesting parts, and it's always nice to see attempts at videogame criticism.

I was pretty surprised with this one. I honestly didn't think I'd like it. I thought it'd be just another cash in on "nerd culture" and "gamers," pandering to 12 year old kids with an Xbox LIVE subscription. And to be perfectly honest, at times it does feel slightly like that. Only slightly though, and fortunately there's a lot more good here than there is bad.

The first thing you must understand is that Extra Lives is by no means a strictly academic or ludological work. There's far more books about video games that are more thorough and explore games as a medium in much more depth. What Extra Lives is, and what it does mostly well, is a mix of accessible video game analysis, accounts of video game experiences, and autobiography.

Why do video games matter? It's not an easy question, and this book gives no easy answers. But what it does is show the potential, ambition, and excitement that games hold. The video game as a separate art form is becoming more and more accepted and will only get more and more impressive. And if that doesn't make video games "matter," then I don't know what does.

A lot of the stuff Bissell discusses in here is stuff I'm already very familiar with, like the inherent unnaturalness of cutscenes, or the conflict between challenge and story, or the difficulties in "writing" a game. Bissell isn't exactly breaking new ground here, and a lot of what he says is little more than parroting other people, Jonathan Blow especially. But I still found it worthwhile to see my thoughts articulated by someone else, and it helped me better understand a lot of the beliefs I hold about games.

There is, of course, some things I disagreed with in here, but every bit of it was still interesting. The main games of focus in this book are almost all popular, blockbuster games, like Fallout 3, Mass Effect, Far Cry 2, Grand Theft Auto IV, etc. But the analyses of each game are consistently insightful. I've a completely new perspective on Left 4 Dead after reading this.

Bissell provides good descriptions of gameplay. He conveys the feel of a what it's like to play certain games better than most trailers do. So it's certainly not necessary to have played all the games that are discussed. Indeed one doesn't even have to be much a gamer at all to enjoy this.

Finally we come to the autobiographical elements of the book. Bissell often gives brief insights into his life; you'll discover he was in the Peace Corps for a very short time, he's a casual marijuana user, and when he was a kid he and his friends used to play an awesome game called "Who Can Die the Best?" in which "one boy would announce the type of weapon he was holding... and then use it to kill the other boys around him. Whoever dies 'the best' (that is, with the most convincingly spasmodic grace) was declared the winner by his executioner and allowed to pick his own weapon, whereupon a new round commenced." Pretty fucking awesome, huh?

The autobiographical elements are fine; they give the book a personal feel rather than an academic one. I mostly ignored them. However, the last chapter, which deals with the Grand Theft Auto series, overdoes it a bit. He talks in great length about his frequent problems with cocaine. I understand the parallel he was trying to make between games and drugs (albeit it wasn't a very good parallel), but it ended up just being him talking about cocaine for far too many pages, turning from casual ludology to drug memoir. The last chapter was by far the worst, and hurt the book significantly. (For comparison, in every chapter I highlighted something on nearly every other page. In the last chapter I think I highlighted only one thing.)

All in all though I'm very pleased with Extra Lives and I'm glad to have read it. If anything it serves as a nice primer to more serious and academic game studies, which will surely be my next venture.

If you're looking for (very) entry-level ludology, look no further.

There is very little of why games matter and too much gaming review fluff.

Having played video games for most of my life, on both consoles and computers, I expected to absolutely LOVE this book. However, I did find it a bit boring.

The author writes about the various games he has played during his lifetime. Grand Theft Auto seemed to be his favorite while he was high on cocaine, which makes perfect sense.... He says that video games have both enriched and damaged his life.... They gave him experience he would not otherwise have had.

Interesting interview with Peter Molyneux at the end.

Overall, a decent read, but definitely not what I was expecting.

The thing is, if you're going to write a nonfiction book and include some autobiographical elements, like your own experiences playing video games, you've got to face the fact that it can either enrich your narrative, adding a personal voice to the information you're presenting, or it can drive your reader absolutely ballistic because you're being kind of annoying.

Unfortunately, Tom Bissell's Most Favoritest Moments in Video Games falls under the latter category. Rather than answering the question asked in the subtitle of this book, "Why video games matter," he instead takes the reader on an occasionally drug-laced trip through why he likes video games. Along the way he peppers in references to the fact that he's single and can't hold a relationship, he's traveled all over the world, and (totally randomly) he was addicted to cocaine while he played through Grand Theft Auto IV who knows how many times.

That book could have been good, but this book as it is is trying too hard. It's part that, and partartsy-fartsy commentary on video games and how they make us (er, Tom Bissell) think about violence and character and story. It's the latter that I liked the best despite it occasionally being extremely heavy-handed and smug. I don't think Far Cry 2 is some kind of amazingly well-crafted love letter to violence and escapism and man's inhumanity to man, and I don't think the people who made the Grand Theft Auto games are making particularly clever statements when they put a coffee cup in the Statue of Liberty's hand or call Metlife Getalife. He says himself that so many people go into making a game, from the water streaks on a car window to a character's expression to the cutscene dialogue, that you break away from the individual hand of the author in a novel or the coordinated efforts of screenwriter/director/producer/etc. of a movie. I would say it is really very difficult for a game that has dozens of people working on it to come together to create something as artistic as Tom Bissell thinks video games are.

I do love video games. Video games brought me some fond memories: playing rented games on my dad's Xbox, obsessing over the winding plot of Tales of Symphonia with my then-boyfriend in my college dorm, beating Castlevania: Curse of Darkness with my little brother, and more. But I don't think that talking about them the way Tom Bissell does is going to advance them in anyone's mind quite yet. Yes, some people are devoted to games the way they devote themselves to any true artistic measure. The indie games on the PlayStation Network, WiiWare and XBox Live attest to that. But I don't think you can put a game churned out by a big company up on a pedestal. (Except Mass Effect. I'll put Mass Effect right up there with all the love Tom gives it. Even if he played Shepard totally wrong.)

Up there I said the trip through this book is "occasionally drug-laced," but I think that's the wrong choice of words. Drugs are only mentioned in the very last chapter, which is why it seems so random once he starts to wax poetic about cocaine. He tries to tie his journey through Grand Theft Auto IV to his cocaine addiction, and it just falls flat. You cannot yet compare a video game to real life. He just comes across as a total loser in that chapter and it was a really awkward way to end the book.

I'm waiting for a really good book on this topic.