Extra Lives

Starred review from April 5, 2010
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-scene narratives of the mayhem. If anyone can bridge the aesthetic chasm between readers and gamers, he can.

February 15, 2010
Harper's contributor Bissell (Fiction Writing/Portland State Univ.; The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam, 2007, etc.) considers the importance of video games.

Parts of this uneven investigation into the aesthetics of the gaming experience are as thrilling and fresh as the best writing on any subject—particularly his confessional chapter on Grand Theft Auto IV—but most of the chapters fall short of that high standard. The questions Bissell raises and seeks to answer via interviews with leading game designers like Sir Peter Molyneux, Jonathan Blow and Cliff Bleszinski are not without general interest—what role does story play in a game's aesthetic experience? how do games (and the gamers who play them) create meaning? how can something that never plays out the same way twice even have meaning?—but too much of the book is surprisingly amateur, as awkwardly expressed as a bright but underachieving fan-boy's private journals. Often affecting the fussy grandiloquence of a doddering classics professor, Bissell promises substance but mostly delivers only empty style. Perhaps this is the author's way of reifying for the reader the central paradox of his thesis: that his favorite video games (Resident Evil, Left 4 Dead, Far Cry 2) come so close to providing him with his ideal aesthetic experience, sometimes even more than works of literature or film—yet in the end, most of them are"just" toy worlds populated by elves, zombies, soldiers and little green men.

More a collection of profiles and game reviews than a focused thesis, this little book never answers the question implicit in its subtitle—best appreciated by serious game junkies.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 15, 2010
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 were 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)