Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter [Paperback]

Tom Bissell (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 14, 2011

In Extra Lives, acclaimed writer and life-long video game enthusiast Tom Bissell takes the reader on an insightful and entertaining tour of the art and meaning of video games.
 
In just a few decades, video games have grown increasingly complex and sophisticated, and the companies that produce them are now among the most profitable in the entertainment industry. Yet few outside this world have thought deeply about how these games work, why they are so appealing, and what they are capable of artistically. Blending memoir, criticism, and first-rate reportage, Extra Lives is a milestone work about what might be the dominant popular art form of our time.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Grand Theft Auto IV is both a waste of time and the most colossal creative achievement of the last 25 years, according to this scintillating meditation on the promise and discontents of video games. Journalist Bissell (Chasing the Sea) should know; the ultraviolent car-chase-and-hookers game was his constant pastime during a months-long intercontinental cocaine binge. He's ashamed of his video habit, but also ashamed of being ashamed of the dominant art form of our time; by turning the eye of a literary critic on the gory, seemingly puerile genre of ultraviolent, open-ended shooter games, he finds unexpected riches. Bissell bemoans the uncompromising stupidity of their story lines, wafer-thin characters, and the moronic dialogue, but celebrates the button-pushing, mesmeric qualities and the subtle, profound depths these conceal—the catharses of teamwork and heroism in the zombie-fest Left for Dead, the squirmy moral dilemmas of Mass Effect, the mood of wistful savagery suffusing the rifles-and-chainsaws-bedecked denizens of Gears of War. Bissell excels both at intellectual commentary and evocative reportage on the experience of playing games, while serving up engrossing mise-en-scène narratives of the mayhem. If anyone can bridge the aesthetic chasm between readers and gamers, he can. (June 8)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Might as well get this out of the way: Bissell is addicted to video games. So much so that he pretty much missed the last presidential election because he was playing a new and highly anticipated game. Here he explores not just his own affection for video games but also the games themselves. What separates good games from bad? Where do video games fit on the sliding scale of art? A video game, Bissell tells us, is a form a self-surrender, but a different form than, say, a movie. We have no influence over what happens in a movie, but we do in a video game. In playing a video game, we are, in a sense, the authors of the stories we’re acting out. Bissell explores the key elements of video games: dialogue, character design, voice performance, visual appearance. Do the best games approach something akin to virtual (or perhaps alternate) reality? Not just for gamers, the book should also appeal to readers who have some serious questions about the nature and impact of video games and their increasing popularity. --David Pitt --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (June 14, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307474313
• ISBN-13: 978-0307474315
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (86 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #221,289 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 43 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A book for all seasons April 28, 2010

By Aaron C. Brown TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

This is a book that tries to be four different things and, surprisingly, manages to succeed at all of them. Bart Motes took it as a series of essays to be read for enjoyment and insight into the experience and meaning of video games. I agree with what he wrote from that perspective.

My interest is broader and shallower. I am interested in games and play in general, and also in the technology used to create deeply interactive computer software. I only dabble at games at low difficulty levels and short attention span, more to satisfy curiosity than for enjoyment. I have never been stirred by in-game events, it's all pixels to me. Nevertheless, I see their great power, and respect that they are an important part of our evolving culture. You don't understand the world today unless you have at least nodding acquaintance with these games, and this book offers considerably more than a nodding acquaintance. The less you know about video games, the more you need this book.

The ostensible topic of the book is critical analysis of video games. It is an exploration, not a conclusion, and as such it is tentative and dialectical at many points, but can suddenly switch to positive certainty, backed by the authority of the native speaker. I disagree with Bart Motes that the author is apologetic, he is a rigorous advocate for both the games and traditional standards of criticism. The two often conflict, and the book makes only suggestions about potential resolutions. You won't find the answer here, but you will find the question poked hard from a lot of non-obvious angles.

Finally this book is a fascinating piece of autobiographical fiction.... I don't mean that I disbelieve the personal anecdotes, only that they are clearly chosen for dramatic effect rather than illumination of the author's personality or career. I was strongly reminded of one of my favorite works, A Drifting Life. The parallel is not obvious, as Yoshihiro Tatsumi wrote his explanation of what fascinated him with manga and how it fit into the world as a whole after a 60-year career of extraordinary achievement in what is now universally acknowledged as a serious art form. At one third the age, with zero achievement in creating video games, which are still more often classified as silly or dangerous commercial toys for kids and slackers than culturally important art; Bissell is no grandmaster. But the Bissell-point-of-view that narrates this book gripped me in the same way that the young Tatsumi did. Tatsumi draws a cherry blossom to describe how he felt trashing his university entrance exams, and goes brilliantly outside panel to evoke the facial expression of the older waitress who tries to seduce the drunk and inexperienced teenager. Bissell uses his exceptional writing talents to make running a virtual semi truck over a helpless virtual derelict or diving into a virtual pool in a desperate search for a virtual sword (inadvertently virtually dropped) convey both personal and general meaning. I remain more impressed by the former than the latter, but Bissell is young yet. There are also echoes of the disruptive cultural analysis of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

I won't argue with anyone who gives four stars from any of the individual perspectives, but I think it takes a five-star book to do this many things, this well. Read more ›

83 of 108 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars So...why DO video games matter? June 11, 2010

By J. GARRATT VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

The subtitle for "Extra Lives" is "Why Video Games Matter." I feel like I never really got a clear answer for that statement.

Tom Bissell is a pretty good writer, but his approach is entirely too academic in order to establish any flow in the reading process. Consider this sentence from page 112:

"Despite science fiction's sui generis presumptions, most sci-fi worlds -- imagined at the balance point of the evolutionary and point-mutational, the cautionary and the aspirational -- imitative."

It's sentences like the above, even if I know the meaning behind a majority of the words here, that make me have to reread them again and again, stifling any momentum. Bissell seems to be afraid that games aren't urbane enough for the academic crowd. But he also feels that he's in danger of being too sophisticated for the gaming community. Thus, his persona goes back and forth between I'm-a-very-learned-fellow-and-know-of-what-I-speak versus I-like-to-digitally-shoot-people-in-the-head-while-I-do-cocaine-with-my-friend.

"Extra Lives" is largely unconnected theories on why people enjoy video games so much. Specifically, video games made within the past ten or fifteen years. There is no sociological umbrella theory at work here, just Tom Bissell's own experiences. I was interested in reading a book about video games and why they matter, but Bissell just seems to come up with a lot of armchair theories on why he likes them, phrased about as fancily as possible.

Here's another nugget of clarity from page 122:

"RPGs that lack Mass Effect's ear for dialogue are often written too broadly for any sense of potential gamer agency to take hold, in which cases interactivity becomes a synonym for 'cudgel....'"

Until Bissell makes his points a little more clearly, I'm waiting to hear some real explanations on why games matter. Read more ›

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Not worth reading August 13, 2011

By mistermrp

Format:Paperback

I'm surprised that this book is rated (relatively) highly by reviewers. In my opinion, the writing is slapdash, the research non-existent, and valuable insights few.

As other reviewers have noted, the title was a problem for me. "Why video games matter" implied to me a thoughtful discussion of video games as an art form, instead I found the book to be a disconnected, meandering series of personal observations about specific titles. It's like titling a book "why film matters" and then filling it with essays about how you really, really liked "back to the future" and "titanic." Yes, it felt that random.

The writing quality seemed contrived to me as well. The second chapter (about "Resident Evil" (aka "Biohazard")) switches to second person for no particularly good reason. It feels forced- like a precocious junior high school student showing off in an essay contest. I also made the mistake of reading the comments on the dust jacket of the hard cover edition. Bisell is described as an "award winning" author. While I read, I was haunted by the question "what awards? Can you take them back?"

There's much better writing out there about games- see the New Yorker magazine's 2011 profile on Shigeru Miyamoto for an example of good writing. That single article contains more insight and research than this entire book.

27 of 37 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Why Bissell Matters? June 11, 2010

By Michael J. Tresca VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Bissell is ashamed that he's a gamer.

That's the first impression I received from the author, who seems to have written much of the first part of the book as an apology: "I know I wrote that gaming wasn't art, but I was wrong."

Bissell's self-flagellation seems to be largely driven by his ego. Writing a book-length apology for castigating video games as low art assumes we cared about his opinion in the first place. Bissell is an accomplished author, but his gaming credentials are few - he seems to have decided to write this book because he can. I don't recall anyone clamoring for Bissell's head for turning up his nose at video games.

The picture Bissell paints of himself: of his knowledge of videogames (passable), of his approach to multiplayer (he's not much of a team player), of his drug-fueled binges (he's a coke addict), all paint an unflattering portrait of the author. His profile seems to be that of a solo player largely disconnected from his fellow gamers - as evidenced by his belief that an amazing experience in a player vs. player match of Left4Dead cannot be replicated by World of Warcraft.

I've played nearly all the games Bissell has played. He takes pains to introduce each of them with a chapter cleverly named after the game he's discussing. The problem is that this isn't really a book for gamers, because anyone who enjoys games doesn't need to be told "why videogames matter" or an introduction to each one. Bissell's prose is exhausting in its literary references - he's obviously an accomplished author, but he's writing at a level far beyond your casual gamer's capacity for patience....

Bissell is an accomplished journalist - his access to gaming gurus of all stripes is impressive - but he writes his introductory pieces as if he's a fashion reporter. We're repeatedly told that every gamer he interviews "doesn't look like your typical gamer" - a group, we get the sense, that Bissell secretly believes is far too uncool for him to be a part of. Bissell seems to be trying to elevate the gaming subculture -- that'd be you and me, the uncool kids who aren't as worldly as he is - so that being associated with us isn't so...embarrassing.

And that's a shame. Bissell flirts with some compelling arguments, like the fact that there are no writers on the staff of many gaming companies, or that his ability to personally connect with characters has an almost accidental, magical quality. But then he ties it all back to himself and we're reminded that this is Bissell's equivalent of a Dear Diary - he's annoyed that there are no writers on staff because, ya know, HE'S a writer! He's annoyed that there's no real sense of art in gaming, cause, ya know, HE knows art! Bissell's book is less an unbiased perspective on games as it is a counterargument to the hype machine that treats games like movies, all special effects and big budgets. He wants to experience an interactive world that makes him think - that is art, in other words - but he doesn't really have any answer as how to the rest of us gaming rubes will get there.

And so we come to what Extra Lives is really about: Bissell. We get glimpses of his weirdly disconnected but exciting life, from the formidable list of publications under his belt to his globetrotting adventures to his aforementioned drug addiction. Bissell never addresses these issues head on, which unfortunately means we get them filtered through his engagement of video games instead. Considering Bissell ends with the conclusion that a video game experience is in the eye of the beholder, the book would have benefited from a lot more about him. Read more ›