Reddit reviews Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

It's originally from this book.

http://www.amazon.com/Extra-Lives-Video-Games-Matter/dp/0307474313/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420850831&sr=8-1&keywords=extra+lives

It's a collection of essays written by Tom Bissell that tries to explain what makes video games so captivating. I read a few years back an remembering enjoying it. The chapter on Resident Evil really captured what made that special. He also writes a chapter about how he did a bunch of coke and played GTAIV for 40 hours straight.

He writes about video games too. I highly recommend Extra Lives.

You might have a look at some of these:

https://www.amazon.com/Inside-Video-Game-Industry-Developers/dp/0415828287

https://www.amazon.com/Extra-Lives-Video-Games-Matter/dp/0307474313/

https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Triumphant-Turbulent/dp/0062651234/

https://www.amazon.com/Changing-Game-Transforming-Future-Business-ebook/dp/B001I8QVJC/

https://www.amazon.com/Gamers-Work-Stories-Behind-People/dp/1430233516/

https://www.amazon.com/Innovation-Marketing-Video-Game-Industry-ebook/dp/B01G2BOQGY/

https://www.amazon.com/Total-Engagement-Virtual-Changing-Businesses/dp/142214657X/

Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell is going to be required reading. As others have posted here, YouTube is where most of the games crit and dissection is happening.

Extra Lives by Tom Bissell is pretty good. I'd recommend checking it out.

I produce a talk show about gaming culture from a retrospective, analytical focus that covers different subcultures, collections, and play history each episode. (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpnBpHVI5tHdXvlSVlVqO6ggUWCrU4ICQ). There's a lot of reminiscing about game culture before today's current state and I made it to fill the missing hole you're asking for. I definitely want to see more content that treats gaming culture with a broader respect instead of hyper-topical news stories and marketing that will be completely irrelevant within weeks. All my interviews are meant to be evergreen. If you're interested, check out the Heather or Rocco episode.

Outside my own work, the only great Games Literature I've read is Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307474313?keywords=Extra%20Lives&qid=1449403420&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1

Games, like movies, have examples of both great and terrible stories. It should be made clear that i'm not talking about any sort of arcade style multiplayer games here. You probably have no investment in your multiplayer COD character. You don't collapse emotionally when he is obliterated by a grenade from across the map. If you want to judge games based on their stories, then you need to recognize which games are actually narratives, and which games are simply entertaining echo chambers. A game is an interactive algorithm which a user derives entertainment from. A narrative tells a cohesive and engaging story.

I think one thing that makes games stand out is their ability to establish agency with the gamer. Agency is basically what makes you give a shit about what's happening. It means the person experiencing the game has actual emotional investment in the characters. It is the degree to which the gamer associates themselves with the character they are manipulating. Agency takes time and effort to establish. Movies can do a good job of making characters likable and establishing attachments with the audience, but the audience has no real investment beyond that. They haven't done anything besides just watching.

In a game, however, the character is a reflection of the gamer. When a player is properly engaged, there is mentally no difference between himself and his character. When the player's character dies in a game, the player says "I died." not "My character died." This indicates a kind of agency not seen in movies. Some of the best games are good because they are great at maintaining agency. They avoid things that break agency, like allowing the main character to die, or having him do something completely unbelievable. Breaking agency not only degrades the story being conveyed, but also makes players less invested and less likely to want to continue playing. When do you usually stop playing an intense single player game? Odds are it's right after you die in the game. This is because the agency is broken. But some games can at least partially mitigate this effect. In Bioshock Infinite, when Booker's health is depleted, he doesn't just die and pop up again at an earlier time. He goes unconscious as Elizabeth presumably drags him off to a safe place and revives him. Additionally, time is not interrupted. Enemies who were slain moments before are still dead. The creators have not only maintained agency, but they have strengthened the player's emotional attachment to Elizabeth as a character.

The difficulty in telling a narrative within the context of an interactive game lies in the free will of the agent, the player. This is where narratives in games fail. The trademark of games is that they allow the player to write some portions of the narrative themselves. Unfortunately, players are, for the most part, pretty shitty writers, so they need some help. When a game relinquishes control of the narrative to the player, it has to make sure the narrative is not ruined. But this sometimes means compromising agency. Going back to Bioshock Infinite, if the player meets Elizabeth and decides he just wants to kill her, then the narrative would be pretty much derailed. There might be a compelling narrative that involves Booker killing Elizabeth right when he sees her, but it's certainly not one that the creators want to tell or are prepared to tell. The game instead opts to break agency to preserve the narrative. Elizabeth doesn't bat an eye when you unload a shotgun in her direction.

So while games are not inherently better or worse at telling a story than film, they do possess tools which are not available in film, and have potential to be much, much better. But games as a storytelling device are new and immature, as were movies in their infancy. At first people were entertained simply by moving pictures, only later did people discover their potential to tell a story. Videogames are currently in the same boat. People have been so engrossed with what videogames are that they are only just discovering what videogames can do, which is convey a story that engages the player far more effectively than a movie ever could. A "bad" videogame is simply a case of wasted potential.


Edit: A great read on the subject is called Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter.

Not 100% on topic, but I absolutely loved the book Extra Lives. It talks about gamers as well as game devs, and the writing has a very unique and honest style.

The article in that link's also by Tom Bissell, whose book, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, is an excellent (if sometimes pretentious) book that definitely talks about games the way truegaming thinks about them. At the very least, it'll help us defend our hobby from the General Population.

(It also includes the CliffyB piece as a chapter somewhere in there.)

> I don't have to read critical reviews since I played the game myself.

Clearly you do. You want to know why people like it? Read positive reviews. That makes logical sense. And simply playing something isn't always enough to form your entire opinion on it, sometimes other people can illuminate aspects of the game or ways of viewing it that you previously hadn't.

That's why I told you to do some reading.

> Dark Souls isn't really a survival game, so I don't know why you put it in the same category as the other games.

If you paid attention to my post you'd notice that Far Cry 2 is more than just survival, it's about the unforgiving difficulty level and obtuse instructions, which is where it's comparable to Dark Souls.

> Anyway, difficult games where the objective is to survive have been around a long time. Silent Hill is a survival game.

So have roguelikes. That doesn't mean that roguelikes didn't become trendy over the past few years. Because they did, regardless of how long the genre has been around.