- he spoke of many things; fools and kings -

Video games and I have an interesting relationship.

I played my way through some of the ground-breakers in the '90s: afternoons spent equally on playground swings and in the basement playing GoldenEye with friends after school; immersing myself in the lush forests and forsaken temples of Hyrule; losing myself a little in Midgarian back streets and flying Gardens.

Somewhere along the line, my siblings and I fell into a chimaera-like approach to the games we played. As a gamer, the mechanics were never so important as the world I found myself a part of - I would, and still do, find exploring the game world (and playing spot-the-reference - blame my bibliophile leanings) often the best part. My sister has a keen eye for puzzles, but also for directions; without her, I suspect both my diving-suited avatar, and my brother's, would be lost somewhere still in the depths of Rapture.  Mechanics and gameplay itself, most often, fell to my brother. Looking back at our playing style, and the fact that he often had two backseat drivers, his patience was legendary. He also has the steady hands (and stomach) to finish most of the games we picked up, where I watched parts of BioShock and shooter franchises like Gears of War and Call of Duty half-hidden behind a couch cushion. I found the worlds fascinating, and had to know how the story ended, but had trouble maiming others when graphics were at N64 levels, and perhaps most tellingly, finished my Fable II play-through with a halo (much to my brother's amusement.)

Still, for our quirks, we were an oddly effective team, and some of our best talks in reality came out of moments we witnessed together in a pixellated world, whether in the question of what to do with the wandering Little Sisters of BioShock's undersea world or reeling in the aftermath of standoffs on a river's edge in Virmire.

It was this focus on video game's affect (how they work, how they don't, and why they matter) that drew my eye to Tom Bissell's Extra Lives.  Bissell weaves a compelling, humourous narrative that doesn't pull punches where he sees weaknesses - nowhere more memorably than where he celebrates Resident Evil's innovative camera work, gameplay mechanics, and thoroughly haunting scoring - and lambasts its preposterously stilted dialogue, which, he notes, "at its least weird, sounds as though it has been translated out of Japanese, into Swahili, back into Japanese, into the language of the Lunar Federation, back into Japanese, and finally into English."

It's a weakness that, Bissell notes, has persisted as games have otherwise become more sophisticated; he notes with ire that some of the dialogue for Fallout 3 "makes Stephanie Meyer sound like Ibsen."  And while his zingers are well-targeted, he also delves into various aspects of the gaming world to find out why games that were so beautiful could get away with being so very stupidly written.


In one chapter, he tours the northern climes of my first home; I'll forgive him for calling it godforsaken, as he was silly enough to visit in winter. He visits BioWare and talks about writing with Drew Karpyshyn, the head writer of Mass Effect, which has been critically and popularly held up as an example of flexible, effective writing paired with inspired voice acting.

Their interview - and the description of the BioWare office; still a place I half-dream of working in - was a cool window into the game development world, but a number that stayed with me was that BioWare
employs over twenty writers: a number that, in the gaming world, seems, by what Bissell describes in the rest of the book, as unfathomable as the number of summits that climber Alex Honnold free-soloed in one day (three) does to the climbing world. Too often, writing seems to be an element tacked on towards the end of production, which can often lead to stilted, redundant, or overly serious dialogue that has the effect of jarring the player out of the world in which they should feel immersed.


Another chapter finds Bissell attending the DICE (Design Innovate Communicate Entertain) conference in Las Vegas. The chapter is a fascinating look at the prevailing trends in video game design, the industry's changing demographic (but static focus on what makes a 'convincing character': rugged twenty-something white male protagonists don't look like they're going anywhere anytime soon) and discusses the peculiar relationship between video games and the film industry. The academic reporting from the conference contrasts with Bissell's personal reflections on Las Vegas as a city; one part travel writing, two parts dystopian recollections of his past residency.

Dystopia is a theme that follows through to the book's final chapter. Its examination of morality, authenticity, and addiction, woven through the retelling of months devoted and lost to playing Grand Theft Auto IV, are reminiscent of writer Taras Grescoe's misadventures in Thailand in The End Of Elsewhere, and equally heart-breaking. Despite the sense of loss, however, choice is the chapter's - and perhaps the book's - strongest theme. As someone who is well outside the target audience for the GTA games, all it took was an overheard aside about running over pedestrians and executing sex workers in-game for me to keep my distance from the franchise and side-eye anyone who seemed to revel in it. I'm not alone in this perspective; Bissell notes that in the seven years between the release of the Vice City and Liberty City versions of the franchise Rockstar has "spent more time in court than a playground-abutting pesticide manufacturer." Even so, another line stopped me cold (in response to the killing-of-sex-workers trope): "...it is not what GTA IV asks you to do that is so morally alarming. It is what it allows you to do."  The game presents you with an open world, he suggests; what you do with it, in the end, is up to you.

Choice, redux.  Rendered in better resolution and more graphic detail than in other games, with the added weight of innocent blood on the player's hands, but at the end of the day, the player was the one who chose to put it there. Given, I'm certain that you can't make it one hour through any of the GTA franchise with your character still remaining what our society would call an upstanding citizen, but then, even in videogames' (perhaps) more innocent past, that's nothing new. Renegades with a history of environmental terrorism (Final Fantasy 7's AVALANCHE team) or even a young boy in green blithely smashing hundreds of pieces of crockery in search of shiny currency would also, likely, be frowned upon.

In the end, Extra Lives celebrates, examines, and challenges gaming in equal measure, and was a fascinating read that braided interviews with industry leaders and pioneers with the author's personal experiences. It's a fast-paced read, and definitely recommended to anyone interested in the evolution, development, or structure of gaming, or storytelling as a broader (and constantly evolving) art.


♥ music of the moment: nature boy (david bowie)