Extra Lives

I just finished reading Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell. Part memoir (mostly memoir), part analysis (definitely a reader response type of analysis), the book goes to great lengths of establishing why video games matter to Tom Bissell. This is not a bad thing, but it isn't quite what I had hoped for when I got my early Father's Day present. Still, what is most remarkable, for me, is that it wasn't what I am trying to write, at least not entirely. I have divided my book up into four categories: Tutorial, Exploration, Experience, and Exit. (I am toying with changing Tutorial to "Exegesis", but that might be too complex a word, despite the delicious alliteration; also, with its overt religious connotation and strained synonymic paring with the ideas of tutorial, I will probably just leave it as is.) Anyway, the Experience category is one that I am writing about my own personal experiences with the game in question, whether it be or Resident Evil or Prince of Persia or whatever. Reading Extra Lives was very much like seeing what it's like to be on the other side of the conversation for the Experience chapters of my own book. Fortunately, I liked it. Even though I hadn't played most of the games he was discussing, I felt comfortable with my knowledge, enough so that I could appreciate his experience and the way that it worked for him.

Despite how well it was written (I had to look up a number of words that he used, which was an unfamiliar experience, to be honest), I felt that the last chapter was too heavy a confession of Bissell's cocaine addiction and not enough substance. Then again, I have always been bothered by drug users--more the idea than any particular person--and I struggle to stow away judgments about patent stupidity when I hear someone being, well, so patently stupid.

Along with a skimming over of my notes from Baudrillard (a major resource for the book), I've really been feeling the itch to write more on this blog and flesh out more of the essays. Two problems: 1) Baudrillard feels prescient in so many ways apropos of gaming that I fear the book will have nearly endless quotes from him; 2) Thinking a lot about video games makes me want to go play video games. I have a possible solution for each problem, though I worry about actually taking advantage of them: 1) Write just one essay that really explores the Baudrillard connections, and be happy with that; 2) My son is recovering from heart surgery, so my monopoly on the only gaming console in the house has been preempted. Neither solution really makes me want to smile (especially number two, though it has nothing to do with the sharing of the PS3, which I'm happy to do for him), but I will probably end up using these answers anyway.

I know this is somewhat bombastic, but I just wanted to repost something that I wrote earlier, because, when I reread it, my jaw hit the floor:

Thus the hyperreal of the video games reterritorializes what has been subsumed in the hyperreal of modernity, a standing against oversaturation of symbolism by limiting significance into the confines of the game. Little wonder, then, that morality within the game is limited, too.

If this statement is right, then Peter Molyneux's statement to Tom Bissell is totally correct: "We're going to change the world and entertain in a way that nothing else ever has before" (201). Here's why: the symbols and signs that we typically interpret and summarily take for granted have drowned out meaning. Think of traffic: blinking lights, different colored lights, off ramps, on ramps, lanes, changing speeds, pedals, wheels, radio noise, speaking on the phone, and the list trolls on. There is this 'oversaturation of symbolism' rippling throughout the world. One of the things that video games limit--out of technological necessity--is how many signs and symbols are put onto the screen. Sometimes it's spartan, like Tetris, with a relatively small handful of icons to manipulate and respond to.

Sometimes it's egregious, like World of Warcraft, with a major portion of the screen's real estate littered with tiles, titles, bars, numbers, chat, and graphs.

But it still doesn't hold as many codes as does real life:

So the main gist of the quote is that part of the allure of the gaming world is, for all its complexity and difficulty, and facades of depth, it is still vastly more simple than the typical world in which we navigate--the game reclaims that simpler life, the one after which so many hopelessly pine.