Extra Lives – Giving life to the conversation.
I read Tom Bissell’s new book “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter” within a day – almost unheard of for me. My average is about one year per chapter. I do have a personal interest here – in the list of ‘books about videogames that I was preparing to write‘ this book pretty much destroys option B. (As a side note my highly-researched option A has also been crushingly destroyed recently by Tristan Donovan’s excellent new history of the medium “Replay”, which I will write about another time).
What Bissell does extremely well in this book is introduce the concepts that surround some of the most interesting debate about videogames. He gives a platform to the views of Clint Hocking, Peter Molyneux, Cliff Bleszinski and Jonathan Blow – basically the go-to guys for his subject. What I couldn’t work out was whether Bissell bought into their ideas or grudgingly felt forced to concede ground to them (particularly Blow and Hocking) – it felt rather like the latter.
Bissell also parades at length his hypnotic addiction to the Grand Theft Auto series to a slightly counter-productive degree – I’ve never been that addicted to a game and I’ve never felt the need to complement the experience with class-A drugs, but then that’s maybe why I don’t have a killer book about video games in me. This section felt to me like a lesson in how to make games that matter seem that much less impressive by being a dick, and it sits uneasily with the rest of the book (I’d read the section before actually so Bissell must have published it elsewhere and shoe-horned it into this book).
It’s one of those books that are chock-full of opinions, many of which I disagree with. He falls firmly on the side of the phrase ‘videogames‘ being two words and not one – fundamentally wrong! His interpretation of Far Cry 2 falls so short of my experience that I wonder if he played more than a couple of hours of the game – maybe that’s a measure of the game’s brilliance. I hated his description of Left 4 Dead, only because it was dismissive of the story elements in the game which I feel are absolutely revolutionary and quite daringly original. I don’t get his criticism of the disconnect between the story and gameplay in Modern Warfare (a game I don’t particularely care for as it happens) – his complaint is that there is only an illusion of agency in the single-player campaign, but this illusion exists in most or not all games (what is exploration in GTA but an illusion of agency, only a better one?). His criticism of Braid is that he had to look up the puzzles, but I didn’t and thought the game was a masterpiece – does that make it a bad or flawed game or an acquired taste? I suppose the problem might be that Bissell seems one of those guys who can often only look at a game from his own sphere of experience.
But, generally, it’s a fantastic book and a great read and gives voice to issues that I think matter. I don’t like the title – Extra Lives is a pun of course, but it also parades the ever-overplayed escapism angle that I don’t feel does gaming any favours.
Now for my big bone of contention. And it’s a dinosaur’s vertebrae of a bone. By openly narrowing down his selection of games to story-based ones, he basically cuts a huge proportion of what I understand as video gaming out of the discussion. Tetris is given a cursory mention as a game from the other school of thought, implied as those who think stories in games are a bad development. This is a mistake. Not least because it should change the subtitle of his book from “why video games matter” to “why story-based games that play with the relationship between story and game narrative matter”.
What comes across is that Bissell is one of those either/or type of guys. Either you like one thing (story-based games) or you like the other (the gamey games). My personal feeling is that there’s absolutely no real substantive difference between the two, and to build some sort of theoretical wall between them is hugely counter-productive. Rather like the wall between that which is considered art, and the other stuff. Or the argument that there is figurative painting, and then the other stuff. Or that there is Hollywood-style film-making, and then other stuff. All these arguments are essentially pointless – let’s not continue to perpetuate another.
And then Bissell (thankfully) spends the rest of the book undermining his own position anyway. He picks out many of the games with the loosest connection of storytelling and the strongest elements of ‘play’ (or ludo-narrative as you may like to call it). Classics of their kind certainly – Gears Of War, Resident Evil, Far Cry 2, Braid, Fallout 3, Oblivion, Left 4 Dead. He laments the lack of good dialogue and good voice-acting and good plots, but follows this with significant airtime for Blow (Braid) and Hocking (Far Cry 2) who explain why these traditional notions of story fail to explain what is truly significant in video gaming anyway.
Bissell’s personal ‘journey’, if that’s what it is, is all well and good, but it misses the opportunity to bridge the gap between his own gaming mores and the grand tradition of the medium. The revelatory lightness of touch in terms of story that he finds in Left 4 Dead existed in Space Invaders. The sort of narrative that exists wandering around an open-world does exist as blocks fall in Tetris – decisions are made and a narrative plays out. Dynamical meaning (the idea that it is what you actually do in a game that creates meaning, not the content around it) has existed since videogaming began and long before. These same arguments have played out in one form or another in pictorial art, books, films etc.
But this is also what I loved about the book. It made me think about what I actually think. Bissell may be wrong on some things, but he is not a bore (and it takes one to recognise another 
). And he is advancing the conversation in an interesting direction. And as I have subsequently learned he is a huge advocate of Mirror’s Edge, which automatically makes us part of the same spiritual brotherhood.
Great podcast interview with Bissell here. Book is called Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. Another good review of the book here…
Excellent review of an excellent book, though Bissell sufficiently covered his biased bases for me in his introduction, where he defended his book’s focus on recent games that tend toward violence. He likes tons of games in every genre, but chose “these” games for writing.
I felt, as you did, that the cocaine diary was “paraded” to poor effect, and wonder if it was used to spice up pitch sessions with publishers and interviewers. “It’s not JUST a book about videogames!”