Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter | By Tom Bissell | Pantheon | 240 pages, $22.95
Tom Bissell may be onto something when, near the beginning of Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, he compares his subject matter to religion. If, at the outset, you are not inclined to assign meaning to the pleasures and fulfillments of video games, hearing another guy’s rapturous interpretation of the gaming life probably won’t lead to conversion.
But Bissell is no reflexive proselytizer. He admits to ambivalence when it comes to spending hundreds of hours tapping away on his Xbox, GameCube and PlayStation controllers (the book deals with console games, which Bissell prefers to their PC counterparts.) Games, he writes, are “a digital dollhouse for adults,” and the compulsion to play them is “childish.” He is also brutally honest about their low cultural cred, at least in certain circles: “More than any other form of entertainment, video games tend to divide rooms into Us and Them. We are, in effect, admitting that we like to spend our time shooting monsters, and They are, not unreasonably, failing to find the value in that.”
So let’s first of all acknowledge that Bissell has chosen a fine subject for a book. If you’re going to argue on behalf of something, how much more fun when significant portions of the population—and, we might guess, a plurality of snobs—are convinced it is absolutely worthless.
For Bissell, the value of video games is self-evident and bolstered by copious experience: a kind of experience he believes to be, in its pleasures and potential, unique. Discussing the first time he played Resident Evil, he recalls a kind of breakthrough. Here was “the only instance in which I was acutely aware of being present at the birth of a genre (that of ‘survival horror’), and it was one of a handful of occasions that a medium I believed I understood felt objectively, qualitatively new—and not merely new to me.”
Resident Evil is a game where you shoot zombies. Bissell’s favorite games, and the ones to which he devotes the most time, are “shooters” like Resident Evil, Doom, and the popular GoldenEye 007, all of which allow for, and in some cases require, the player to do gratuitous violence to the world and its inhabitants.
So, how to humanize a medium that shows so little regard for life? Bissell interviews game designers and company founders, and his visits to their offices reveal a culture predominantly made up of young male engineers. The premises often carry what the author describes as “the aroma of lingering adolescence.” Like members of any profession, they discuss, quarrel over, champion and lament the direction the industry is taking. And they are careful to note that all is not, as they saying goes, fun and games. In one particularly funny moment, a designer fills Bissell in on his quasi-tragic plight. “I play a game that’s not as fun as it should be, that’s broken, until it’s no longer broken,” he sighs. “Then I give it to other people to have fun with.”
The book sags a bit during these journalistic chapters, since they largely sacrifice Bissell’s searching and occasionally boyish enthusiasm. But aside from providing glimpses into gaming culture, the interviews serve as a springboard for the author’s advocacy. Bissell wants better writing in video games. He concedes, with frustration, that the industry’s tech-centric minds generally do not treat it as a priority. Which is not to say that he is without hope. At one point, he describes the industry as “a bright millionaire turning toward poetry, [with] confident but uncertain aspirations toward art.”
Most people will grant video gaming certain merits. As a medium, it is capable of stunning visual beauty. And the popular “open world” games, in which players are untethered to traditional missions and free to wander, converse, create and destroy, are fictional laboratories of nearly limitless possibility. Yet Bissell, for all his caveats about the form’s lousy writing, takes the argument a step further. Indeed, his leap into the polemical void is worthy of a certain jovial and determined Italian plumber, who is unafraid of landing on a turtle covered in spikes.
Well-written and on a very interesting and contemporary topic. I enjoyed reading your article.
#1 Posted by Allie Mahler, CJR on Mon 21 Jun 2010 at 08:12 PM
"[I"t would be as unfair and condescending to doubt Bissell’s description as it would be to challenge the emotional probity of a believer."
Besides its clunky writing, this review and I suppose reviewer doesn't seem to want to make a decision about the book or writer, instead waffling along in that aloof, faux-savvy prose Joseph Epstein called blurbissimo, a kind of hackish, J-school grad Esperanto that, in the end, is disingenuous and makes no sense.
CJR: you can do better than this.
#2 Posted by Brian Patterson, CJR on Wed 14 Jul 2010 at 08:10 PM
"[I"t would be as unfair and condescending to doubt Bissell’s description as it would be to challenge the emotional probity of a believer."
Besides its clunky writing, this review and I suppose reviewer doesn't seem to want to make a decision about the book or writer, instead waffling along in that aloof, faux-savvy prose Joseph Epstein called blurbissimo, a kind of hackish, J-school grad Esperanto that, in the end, is disingenuous and makes no sense.
CJR: you can do better than this.
#3 Posted by Brian Patterson, CJR on Wed 14 Jul 2010 at 08:10 PM
Which part of that sentence do you find clunky? It sounds pretty straightforward to me. As for waffling, I think Bissell's book has encouraged a good many ambivalent reviews, partially because of his own deep ambivalence about the games he's describing. They're engrossing, they're puerile, they're visionary, they're embarrassing--it's hard to pin him down. But the reviewer did make his decision in the end: "In the context of Bissell’s impressive body of work, Extra Lives itself seems like an escape from the very adult complications and sorrows he has previously chronicled—and, we should hope, will continue to chronicle, between shame-fueled bouts of zombie-slaughtering heroics."
#4 Posted by James Marcus, CJR on Tue 20 Jul 2010 at 05:41 PM
Well, that sentence is as clunky as it comes, but to explain: the false-choice description (to "doubt" or "challenge" are two very different processes). the overuse of adjectives to look smart (is there anything other than an "emotional" probity?), let alone that the sentence itself arrives just when the author is to offer an actual opinion about the book. Oh, and the fact that Bissell himself is not comparing the experience to one found in religion, but an aesthetic event on par with reading a novel. And all of this is to set up the false point of children afraid of monsters in closets--again framed in moral rather than aesthetic or mimetic terms.
So not only is the sentence clunky, it's also wrong. Listen: ambivalence is one thing; being over one's head and riffing to cover up a real lack of learning and sophistication. The omniscient voice only works when there's some sophistication to back it up.
#5 Posted by Brian Patterson, CJR on Wed 4 Aug 2010 at 08:14 PM
Let's just say that clunkiness is sometimes in the eye of the beholder. As for "probity," there are many varieties--fiscal, judicial, textual--so I'm not sure why "emotional" is off limits. Finally, one's aesthetic response to a novel or video game is intensely subjective (speaking of the eye of the beholder). In that sense the analogy to religious experience is fine by me.
#6 Posted by James Marcus, CJR on Sun 8 Aug 2010 at 12:21 PM