Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

As a gaming aficionado myself this is a book that I read through from cover to cover with very few pauses in-between. Gaming as a hobby / interest is still something that many people don't necessarily approve of as a good use of time and anyone who loves games even more than a little bit must by necessity be a bit strange. In some cases they are right as not every game out there deserves anything more than a second of your precious time but the same can be said for movies or books or music.

What makes gaming unique when compared to a lot of other industries out there is the amount of control we as consumers of that medium are able to exert. Of course most games are strictly plot driven games that don't allow you to dictate the plot to any large degree other than choosing to be ‘good' or ‘evil' and selecting between two or three separate branches that might be offered to you. Nonetheless what they do allow you to do is take an active part in the telling of that story by creating your own stories within their worlds. Most of my fondest gaming memories are tied to open game worlds such as SimCity, Far Cry 2 and numerous others that let you go from point A to point B by way of point Z with little to no restrictions on how to go about it.

And the best thing about the gaming industry having been around for as many years as it has is that the older it gets the more maturity there is to find in it's offerings. For every game that has no semblance of plot other than shoving a gun in your hands and asking you to mow down hundreds upon hundreds of identical looking bad guys there are two or three sublimely crafted ‘experiences' that see you trying to save your son from drowning be trying to survive a serial killer's tests of your parenting (Heavy Rain), dealing with the atrocities of violence and it's justification (Spec Ops: The Line) and contemplating your death and what you've done with your life (Dear Esther).

After blathering on so much how does this have anything to do with Extra Lives? Well these are the sorts of things Tom Bissell seeks to answer. These are the questions he works through in the book and using his own life and experiences with gaming he tries to tell us whether gaming really matters. Of course it's not a simple black or white answer. For every person out there there will be a gray answer that determines whether gaming has had any affect on their lives. What this book can definitely say is that no matter how we might want to believer otherwise, gaming is here to stay and can provide us with some great moments that can be shared between gamers and non-gamers alike. If you've ever played a game of Pong or Dragon's Lair and lost yourself in a world of the game developers creating then pick this up and rediscover some of the wonders that gaming can bring to young and old alike.

Not a bad read, exactly, but doesn't really answer its own central question, or even attempt to.

It's a tough sell. The author has to make his book accessible enough for non-gamers, but still interesting enough for gamers of all levels. As a result, this book veers erratically between a genuinely entertaining ‘experiential' account of the author's video gaming habits, and a boring, dime-a-dozen primer on video games. For example, the blow-by-blow recounting of the opening minutes of Resident Evil might be interesting to someone who has never played the game before, but as someone who has played that game (and especially that section of that game) more times than he cares to admit, I found that there were very few actual insights in this chapter.

I recently listened to an interview with the author on the Brainy Gamer podcast. The pre-defined audience of this podcast allowed him to go into a lot of detail regarding his thoughts on the relationship between cocaine and GTA IV, and I was left wondering why he couldn't have included these thoughts in the actual book he was promoting? It would have made the book a lot more enjoyable.

In the end, I feel as if the author failed to show us ‘why video games matter', but rather told us why video games matter to him - and even then only weakly. For a more engaging and coherent argument on why video games matter, check out [b:Everything Bad is Good for You].