Video games matured at a time when the traditional outlets that would have tracked its growth were in sharp decline. As a result, much of the good writing lives on the web, which has served as a wonderful incubator for young writers hashing out their experiences. Video games are still a bit of blue ocean in the world of non-fiction, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few titles worth recommending.
Adults tend to be very pessimistic towards play as it’s written off as childhood fancy. Video games tragically fall victim to this bias as well, but for those who doubt that play is an essential element of human nature, there are two books by the elder statesmen of “ludology” that merit your attention. The first is Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s “Homo Ludens,” from 1938, which traces play systems through linguistics, epistemology, art and law. He outlined five characteristics of play, the first of which should be inscribed in every classroom in America: play is freedom. Twenty years later, French sociologist Roger Caillois grappled and bolstered Huizinga’s work in “Man, Play and Games.” The book is best known for Caillois’s four play forms—agon (competition), alea (chance), mimesis, and ilinx (vertigo). Both books are instrumental to understanding video games.
Game studies is a blossoming discipline in academia, but the writing from that field has been directed, understandably, toward fellow professors and professional game designers. There are, however, two “mainstream” books by professors that I’ve found appealing, if only that they debunk popular wisdom about video games. To combat the idea that the only people who play games are teenage males and housemothers, Jesper Juul’s “A Casual Revolution” is a deftly argued and thoroughly researched recommendation. With the advent of the Nintendo’s Wii and social games like FarmVille on Facebook, video games of many shapes and sizes have become standard fare as swaths of previously ignored players now find themselves with controllers in hand. The result has been a muddling of the archetypes of “hardcore” and “casual” players. Juul, the visiting professor at New York University’s Game Center, paints a world of middle-aged women trying to kick fifty-hour-a-week-video-game habits and young professional men only clocking a few hours a week on their Xbox 360s before shuttling off to their cubicles.
The second grand fallacy—that video games are useless, at best, and dangerous, at worst—receives a calm rebuttal from James Paul Gee, a professor of reading at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy” passes for more than educational theory. Gee lays out the simple and systematic ways (forty-six, in fact) in which games teach those who play them, and what the significance of these learning behaviors is in the classroom and beyond.
A few years ago, a few video game writers attempted to create something called “new games journalism.” It positioned writing about games as akin to travel writing—video games were a place that you journeyed to and all who play video games should seek to report what they found there. The term never caught on, but the impulse—that video games deserved both observational and personal approaches—is quite valid.
It’s not surprising then that a former Peace Corps volunteer (and New Yorker contributor) would deliver the best work of literary non-fiction on video games thus far. Tom Bissell’s forthcoming “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter” is a fantastic first-person work about what the act of playing video games actually means. Bissell writes about video games with the same passion and mania reserved for love letters—they are his advocates, nemeses, and collaborators. Games like “Resident Evil” are objects that have consumed him completely and Bissell’s sharp and naked assessment of his profound affection for the medium is an exemplar of good writing about the genre. The Guardian posted an excerpt of the book on his tripartite relationship with Grand Theft Auto IV, drugs, and writing that merits a gander.
from: The New Yorker
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