tjr's review
2.0
This books isn't about video games "mattering" at all. Instead, it is about the author's crazy cocaine addiction and the fact that he played Grand Theft Auto 4 twenty-four/seven while skiing the alps of self-deprecating misery. This all comes to the forefront at the end of the book, in the last chapter. Everything else, unfortunately, is filler, only there to help the author get to his point (most likely for himself more than for anyone else).
Pick this book up if you like games and want someone to make you feel guilty about it, perhaps even disgusting. No, Bissell won't chastise you for your love of games. Instead, he will gross you out by creating a mental association between you and him, via the common ground of liking video games. You'll want to have a mental shower after reading it, believe me. Perhaps even a mental douche.
Pick this book up if you like games and want someone to make you feel guilty about it, perhaps even disgusting. No, Bissell won't chastise you for your love of games. Instead, he will gross you out by creating a mental association between you and him, via the common ground of liking video games. You'll want to have a mental shower after reading it, believe me. Perhaps even a mental douche.
adastra14's review against another edition
Honestly, the author seems like a truly miserable person, and he demonstrates seemingly endless contempt for basically everything and everyone. His writing style is self-aggrandizing and sneering as he positions himself as the one-true arbiter of taste, presenting his (oft-unpopular) opinions as absolute truths. The book is less about the value of video games, but rather it discusses storytelling within games, which in his opinion is always doomed to fail (ex: “As well-written as it is, Mass Effect neither fails nor succeeds on literary terms, for no game could”) as he self-admittedly cannot find it in himself to accept video games as a potential art form. I was excited to try this book, given that I love to read non-fiction about the gaming industry and games themselves, but I barely got a quarter in before I found myself skipping multiple pages at a time to move past one diatribe or another. He also describes a specific awkward line reading in Resident Evil as “an autistic miscalculation” which is just, well, 🙄.
jobinsonlis's review
2.0
The sort of pretentious navel-gazing you would expect from somebody who feels the need to justify why video games are an important medium. If you want to learn about Bissell's coke-fueled experiences playing through GTA4 for the first time or read about which decisions he personally found difficult to make in the first Mass Effect, this book is for you. For me, I think I'd rather play the newest Yakuza game.
mrericmendez's review
3.0
Has good examples throughout the book of the importance of the video game culture using actual games as examples. It's a bit of a disconnect for those of us who refuse to use Xbox so that may be on me for not understanding the left4dead references. The principles laid out throughout the book have been placed seemingly haphazardly and without much conscious thought, it seems. With a bit more organized effort, a revised edition would probably contain more golden nuggets of information for readers. Overall, I'm grateful for the book in this field, which is a newer genre (one of the principles discussed in the book using the Flower game, which i absolutely adore). I'd say 3/5 stars for the current edition
richard76's review
3.0
“Extra Lives” starts off strong. The author has a talent for taking elements, facets or facts of the game industry and putting them together in ways I’ve just never thought about. For example, I usually think of meaningfulness in games in terms of intellectual engagement or artistic merit, but he also talks about the raw visceral experience games can create, the ways in which videogames can be emotionally or even physically affecting. He also talks about how most game designers come from programming or engineering backgrounds (which I didn’t know; I thought most of them came from more purely creative backgrounds), and how writers have traditionally been de-prioritized in the process (which I did know), and how that adds up to profound implications for the games that are made.
But then the narrative kind of goes off. His specific selection of games is puzzling. He seems to have chosen them due to reasons of personal appeal rather than industry significance, which I suppose is fair but limits the impact of his message. For instance, he exiles to the appendix a fascinating and insightful interview with Peter Molyneux, which really should have been in the main text.
The author says it’s because he couldn’t figure out how to weave it in, but that’s because his narrative spirals into semi-autobiographical elements that contribute little to his overarching themes; the text never really recovers. For example, he brings up his cocaine addiction. At first, I thought this was promising, an opportunity to explore the ways in which videogames are – and are not – addictive, and why gamers have such a reputation for being obsessive. But no.
I was also put off his writing style. Whom does he think he’s addressing? He consistently uses esoteric words I don’t understand. It’s hard for me to see the language in this book being accessible to a mainstream audience. While he occasionally employs a very nice turn of phrase, he tends to say things in a much more complicated and convoluted way than necessary. As a writer, I understand and appreciate how nuance can be conveyed with very careful use of wording and sentence construction, but his use frequently goes too far and simply ends up cloaking many of his points in a layer of confusion.
So ultimately, I find the book to be a mixed experience. I do feel enlightened about the video game industry; but I also feel frustrated by questions – implicit and explicit – that the author ultimately fails to address.
But then the narrative kind of goes off. His specific selection of games is puzzling. He seems to have chosen them due to reasons of personal appeal rather than industry significance, which I suppose is fair but limits the impact of his message. For instance, he exiles to the appendix a fascinating and insightful interview with Peter Molyneux, which really should have been in the main text.
The author says it’s because he couldn’t figure out how to weave it in, but that’s because his narrative spirals into semi-autobiographical elements that contribute little to his overarching themes; the text never really recovers. For example, he brings up his cocaine addiction. At first, I thought this was promising, an opportunity to explore the ways in which videogames are – and are not – addictive, and why gamers have such a reputation for being obsessive. But no.
I was also put off his writing style. Whom does he think he’s addressing? He consistently uses esoteric words I don’t understand. It’s hard for me to see the language in this book being accessible to a mainstream audience. While he occasionally employs a very nice turn of phrase, he tends to say things in a much more complicated and convoluted way than necessary. As a writer, I understand and appreciate how nuance can be conveyed with very careful use of wording and sentence construction, but his use frequently goes too far and simply ends up cloaking many of his points in a layer of confusion.
So ultimately, I find the book to be a mixed experience. I do feel enlightened about the video game industry; but I also feel frustrated by questions – implicit and explicit – that the author ultimately fails to address.
nickfourtimes's review against another edition
3.0
1) ''Godforsaken is often used to describe the world's woebegone landscapes. But to say that God has forsaken something, there must be some corresponding indication that God had ever shown any interest in it, and, in the case of Edmonton, Alberta, this was not immediately apparent.''
2) ''Soon my biweekly phone call to my cocaine dealer was a weekly phone call. Soon I was walking into the night, handing hundreds of dollars in cash to a Russian man whose name I did not even know, waiting in alleys for him to come back---which he always did, though I never fully expected him to---and retreating home, to my Xbox, to GTA IV, to the electrifying solitude of my mind at play in an anarchic digital world. Soon I began to wonder why the only thing I seemed to like to do while on cocain was play video games. And soon I realized what video games have in common with cocaine: Video games, you see, have no edge. You have to appreciate them. They do not come to you.''
3) ''So what have games given me? Experiences. Not surrogate experiences, but actual experiences, many of which are as important to me as any real memories. Once I wanted games to show me things I could not see in any other medium. Then I wanted games to tell me a story in a way no other medium can. Then I wanted games to redeem something absent in myself. Then I wanted a game experience that points not toward but at something. Playing GTA IV on coke for weeks and then months at a time, I learned that maybe all a game can do is point at the person who is playing it, and maybe this has to be enough.''
2) ''Soon my biweekly phone call to my cocaine dealer was a weekly phone call. Soon I was walking into the night, handing hundreds of dollars in cash to a Russian man whose name I did not even know, waiting in alleys for him to come back---which he always did, though I never fully expected him to---and retreating home, to my Xbox, to GTA IV, to the electrifying solitude of my mind at play in an anarchic digital world. Soon I began to wonder why the only thing I seemed to like to do while on cocain was play video games. And soon I realized what video games have in common with cocaine: Video games, you see, have no edge. You have to appreciate them. They do not come to you.''
3) ''So what have games given me? Experiences. Not surrogate experiences, but actual experiences, many of which are as important to me as any real memories. Once I wanted games to show me things I could not see in any other medium. Then I wanted games to tell me a story in a way no other medium can. Then I wanted games to redeem something absent in myself. Then I wanted a game experience that points not toward but at something. Playing GTA IV on coke for weeks and then months at a time, I learned that maybe all a game can do is point at the person who is playing it, and maybe this has to be enough.''
ubercoat's review
1.0
Though I don’t play as often as I used to, I consider myself a gamer. I like the idea of someone unpacking the idea of why video games matter, and I think that topic would make for a good book. Unfortunately, Extra Lives is not that book. The problem is not that I necessarily disagree with Bissell’s opinions on whether or not games matter – the problem is that the book really isn’t about that topic at all.
The title is more than a little misleading. While Bissell doesn’t spend much (if any) time discussing why video games matter, a significant amount of time is spent detailing the aspects of narrative-based games that Bissell finds problematic. More often than not, this hinges on the writing in the games – the subtext of which seems to be that the author believes games would be a whole lot better if the industry employed more people like him. Bissell gives the impression that he thinks rather highly of himself, and finds many opportunities to remind the reader of his accomplishments, in-game or otherwise.
The result of all of this, unfortunately, is that the book is an infuriating mess. Bissell is so self-satisfied, his writing so masturbatory, that I found myself actively disliking him not far into the book – and it only gets worse with each subsequent chapter. When he isn’t implying that the video game industry needs more Tom Bissells, he’s going on, for page after page, about how he plays specific games. Now, I like video games, believe you me – but reading about why he played his Mass Effect character the way he did, or his description of playing Resident Evil for the first time, is painfully boring.
As I alluded to earlier, I really wanted to like this book. It’s a shame that there’s so little there to like.
Suggested alternate title: Tom Bissell Presents The Tom Bissell Story (In Which Video Games are Played)
The title is more than a little misleading. While Bissell doesn’t spend much (if any) time discussing why video games matter, a significant amount of time is spent detailing the aspects of narrative-based games that Bissell finds problematic. More often than not, this hinges on the writing in the games – the subtext of which seems to be that the author believes games would be a whole lot better if the industry employed more people like him. Bissell gives the impression that he thinks rather highly of himself, and finds many opportunities to remind the reader of his accomplishments, in-game or otherwise.
The result of all of this, unfortunately, is that the book is an infuriating mess. Bissell is so self-satisfied, his writing so masturbatory, that I found myself actively disliking him not far into the book – and it only gets worse with each subsequent chapter. When he isn’t implying that the video game industry needs more Tom Bissells, he’s going on, for page after page, about how he plays specific games. Now, I like video games, believe you me – but reading about why he played his Mass Effect character the way he did, or his description of playing Resident Evil for the first time, is painfully boring.
As I alluded to earlier, I really wanted to like this book. It’s a shame that there’s so little there to like.
Suggested alternate title: Tom Bissell Presents The Tom Bissell Story (In Which Video Games are Played)
kikmigi23's review
3.0
This is a book by a gamer, for gamers, and I'd have to say that you probably need to at least be dating a console gamer to get the most out of it. Readers of Game Informer will probably be able to keep up nicely. The book itself is interesting but suffered from ramblietus. I felt like I was circling points in a LAX holding pattern at times.