Extra Lives book review

Extra Lives is the best writing about video games I've read. It's so good that I'm not even mad that it's only 200 pages long and about a quarter of that is slightly expanded versions of articles I've already read (his piece in the Guardian that I wrote a post about in March and his New Yorker article on Gears of War 2.) Partly, this is because the quality of Bissell's writing is head and shoulders above even the more talented games writers currently working, but mainly it's because he understands that subjectivity is the special sauce of video games. Extra Lives's subtitle is Why Video Games Matter, which makes it sound like some sort of polemic entry in the "games as art" debate, but it's actually a gaming autobiography of sorts. That's a risky approach - somebody telling you what playing video games is like for them isn't the most immediately compelling hook for long-form writing - but Bissell captures it beautifully and comes closer than anyone else yet has to capturing what the experience of playing video games is like.

In the first chapter of the book, Bissell relays an anecdote that hooked me completely. He writes about living overseas and finally getting his hands on a copy of Fallout 3 on Election Day 2008. Intending to try it out for an hour or so before tuning to the news coverage, he winds up playing for 7 hours and missing the returns and Obama's victory speech. This made me smile, because although I did watch the evening coverage in full with a group of jubilant friends, I spent the majority of that day (which I had off from the state mental health facility I was interning at) trying to finish Dead Space so I could give it back to a friend I had borrowed it from. I didn't quite do it - Dead Space is a lengthier game than it probably needed to be, and I had to keep it until the end of the week - but the modest perversion of focusing so intently on a video game at the culmination of a historic and consequential presidential election was something that struck me at the time, and I liked reading Bissell's version of the experience.

The smartest decision Bissell made in writing Extra Lives, focusing almost exclusively on contemporary games, is the one that will by his own admission almost certainly date the book quickly (it was just published last month). With one exception, all the games he writes about have been released in the past three years or so and are on the current generation of consoles. Part of my admiration for this decision almost certainly comes from the fact that every game he writes about at length, with the exception of LittleBigPlanet is one that I've played, which is a nice frame of reference to have. There's also something to be said for the idea that examining the latest and greatest is the only way to get a good understanding of a developing medium like video games. More to the point, though, focusing on recent games allows Bissell to sidestep the influence of nostalgia. This is the single biggest Achilles heel of writing and thinking about gaming; as with any medium, there's a strong contingent of enthusiasts who have a marked preference for past eras. This usually manifests in the insistence that a bunch of BS Super Nintendo RPGs (or more pretentiously, PC adventure games) represent the apotheosis of the form. The problem with this is that unlike other mediums, the formal qualities of video gaming are still very much in flux, which means that 1990s games held up as The Godfather-style masterworks actually seem like charming but primitive Georges Méliès short films.

I think that the most valuable aspect of Extra Lives is the manner in which Bissell grapples with the shortcomings of games as a medium and the resulting unease that comes with being both an intelligent adult and a gaming enthusiast. Here's the paragraph in which he captures this most succinctly:

" ...I was then and am now routinely torn about whether video games are a worthy way to spend my time and often ask myself why I like them as much as I do, especially when, very often, I hate them. Sometimes I think I hate them because of how purely they bring me back to childhood, when I could only imagine what I would do if I were single-handedly fighting off an alien army or driving down the street in a very fast car while police try to shoot out my tires or told that I was the ancestral inheritor of some primeval sword and my destiny was to rid the realm of evil. These are very intriguing scenarios if you are twelve years old. They are far less intriguing if you are thirty-five and have a career, friends, a relationship, or children. The problem, however, at least for me, is that they are no less fun. I like fighting aliens and I like driving fast cars. Tell me the secret sword is just over the mountain and I will light off into goblin-haunted territory to claim it. For me, video games often restore an unearned, vaguely loathsome form of innocence - an innocence derived of not knowing anything. For this and all sorts of other complicated historical reasons - starting with the fact that they began as toys marketed directly to children - video games crash any cocktail-party rationale you attempt to formulate as to why, exactly, you love them. 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."

Bissell doesn't shy away from this topic, to his immense credit. Some of the most intriguing parts of the book are when he explores the mixed-bag role gaming has played in his personal life, such as when he spent 200 hours playing Oblivion in the grip of a depressive episode or the lengthy cocaine and Grand Theft Auto IV odyssey detailed in his Guardian article. I think that even someone relatively sympathetic to gaming could read these parts and justifiably come to the conclusion that it's a fundamentally problematic social pursuit. Despite my clear enthusiasm for it, it's something I question myself some days, and while Bissell comes out clearly in defense of his hobby, his admission that the issue remains open to interpretation is an admirable display of intellectual seriousness. This book is highly recommended.