Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In Extra Lives , acclaimed writer and life-long video game enthusiast Tom Bissell takes the reader on an insightful and entertaining tour of the art and meaning of video games.
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In just a few decades, video games have grown increasingly complex and sophisticated, and the companies that produce them are now among the most profitable in the entertainment industry. Yet few outside this world have thought deeply about how these games work, why they are so appealing, and what they are capable of artistically. Blending memoir, criticism, and first-rate reportage, Extra Lives is a milestone work about what might be the dominant popular art form of our time.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Author's Note (p. xi)
• 1 Fallout (p. 3)
• 2 Headshots (p. 17)
• 3 The Unbearable Lightness of Games (p. 33)
• 4 The Grammar of Fun (p. 49)
• 5 Littlebigproblems (p. 67)
• 6 Braided (p. 91)
• 7 Mass Effects (p. 105)
• 8 Far Cries (p. 129)
• 9 Grand Thefts (p. 159)
• Appendix: An Interview with Sir Peter Molyneux (p. 185)
• Appendix II (p. 203)
• Acknowledgments (p. 227)
• Index (p. 229)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

from Chapter 9   Once upon a time, I wrote in the morning, jogged in the late afternoon, and spent most of my evenings reading. Once upon a time, I wrote off as unproductive those days in which I had managed to put down "only" a thousand words. Once upon a time, I played video games almost exclusively with friends. Once upon a time, I did occasionally binge on games, but these binges rarely had less than fortnight between them. Once upon a time, I was, more or less, content.   "Once upon a time" refers to relatively recent years (2001-2006) during which I wrote several books and published more than fifty pieces of magazine journalism and criticism--a total output of, give or take, 4,500 manuscript pages. I rarely felt very disciplined during this half decade, though I realize this admission invites accusations of disingenuousness or, failing that, a savage and justified beating. Obviously, I was disciplined. These days, however, I am lucky if I finish reading one book every fortnight. These days, I have read from start to finish exactly two works of fiction--excepting those I was not also reviewing--in the last year. These days, I play video games in the morning, play video games in the afternoon, and spend my evenings playing video games. These days, I still manage to write, but the times I am able to do so for more than three sustained hours have the temporal periodicity of comets with near-Earth trajectories.   For a while I hoped that my inability to concentrate on writing and reading was the result of a charred and overworked thalamus. I knew the pace I was on was not sustainable and figured my discipline was treating itself to a Rumspringa . I waited patiently for it to stroll back onto the farm, apologetic but invigorated. When this did not happen, I wondered if my intensified attraction to games, and my desensitized attraction to literature, was a reasonable response to how formally compelling games had quite suddenly become. Three years into my predicament, my discipline remains AWOL. Games, meanwhile, are even more formally compelling.   It has not helped that during the last three years I have, for what seemed like compelling reasons at the time, frequently upended my life, moving from New York City to Rome to Las Vegas to Tallinn, Estonia, and back, finally, to the United States. With every move, I resolved to leave behind my video game consoles, counting on new surroundings, unfamiliar people, and different cultures to enable a rediscovery of the joy I once took in my work. Shortly after arriving in Rome, Las Vegas, and Tallinn, however, the lines of gameless resolve I had chalked across my mind were wiped clean. In Rome this took two months; in Vegas, two weeks; in Tallinn, two days. Thus I enjoy the spendthrift distinction of having purchased four Xbox 360 consoles in three years, having abandoned the first to the care of a friend in Brooklyn, left another floating around Europe with parties unknown, and stranded another with a pal in Tallinn (to the irritation of his girlfriend). The last Xbox 360 I bought has plenty of companions: a Gamecube, a PlayStation 2, and a PlayStation 3.   Writing and reading allow one consciousness to find and take shelter in another. When the mind of the reader and writer perfectly and inimitably connect, objects, events, and emotions become doubly vivid--realer, somehow, than real things. I have spent most of my life seeking out these connections and attempting to create my own. Today, however, the pleasures of literary connection seem leftover and familiar. Today, the most consistently pleasurable pursuit in my life is playing video games. Unfortunately, the least useful and financially solvent pursuit in my life is also playing video games. For instance, I woke up this morning at 8 A.M. fully intending to write this chapter. Instead, I played Left 4 Dead until 5 P.M. The rest of the day went up in a blaze of intermittent catnaps. It is now 10 P.M. and I have only started to work. I know how I will spend the late, frayed moments before I go to sleep tonight, because they are how I spent last night, and the night before that: walking the perimeter of my empty bed and carpet-bombing the equally empty bedroom with promises that tomorrow will not be squandered. I will fall asleep in a futureless, strangely peaceful panic, not really knowing what I will do the next morning and having no firm memory of who, or what, I once was.   The first video game I can recall having to force myself to stop playing was Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto: Vice City , which was released in 2002 (though I did not play it until the following year). I managed to miss Vice City 's storied predecessor, Grand Theft Auto III , so I had only oblique notions of what I was getting into. A friend had lobbied me to buy Vice City , so I knew its basic premise: you are a cold-blooded jailbird looking to ascend the bloody social ladder of the fictional Vice City's criminal under- and overworld. (I also knew that Vice City 's violent subject matter was said to have inspired crime sprees by a few of the game's least stable fans. Other such sprees would horribly follow. Seven years later, Rockstar has spent more time in court than a playground-abutting pesticide manufactory.) I might have taken better note of the fact that my friend, when speaking of Vice City , admitted he had not slept more than four hours a night since purchasing it and had the ocular spasms and fuse-blown motor reflexes to prove it. Just what, I wanted to know, was so specifically compelling about Vice City ? "Just get it and play it," he answered. "You can do anything you want in the game. Anything."   Before I played Vice City , the open-world games with which I was familiar had predictable restrictions. Ninety percent of most open gameworlds' characters and objects were interactively off limits and most game maps simply stopped. When, like a digital Columbus, you attempted to journey beyond the edge of these flat earths, onscreen text popped up: YOU CAN'T GO THAT WAY! There were a few exceptions to this, such as the (still) impressively open-ended gameworld of Nintendo's Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time , which was released in 1998. As great as Ocarina was, however, it appealed to the most hairlessly innocent parts of my imagination. Ingenious, fun, and beautiful, Ocarina provided all I then expected from video games. (Its mini-game of rounding up a brood of fugitive chickens remains my all time favorite.) Yet the biggest game of its time was still, for me, somehow too small. As a navigated experience, the currents that bore you along were suspiciously obliging. Whatever I did, and wherever I moved, I never felt as though I had escaped the game. When the game stopped, so did the world.   The world of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was also a fantasy--a filthy, brutal, hilarious, contemporary fantasy. My friend's promise that you could do anything you wanted in Vice City proved to be an exaggeration, but not by very much. You control a young man named Tommy, who has been recently released from prison. He arrives in Vice City--an ocean-side metropolis obviously modeled on the Miami of 1986 or so--only to be double-crossed during a coke deal. A few minutes into the game, you watch a cut scene in which Tommy and his lawyer (an anti-Semitic parody of an anti-Semitic parody) decide that revenge must be taken and the coke recovered. Once the cut scene ends, you step outside your lawyer's office. A car is waiting for you. You climb in and begin your drive to the mission destination (a clothing store) clearly marked on your map. The first thing you notice is that your car's radio can be tuned to a number of different radio stations. What is playing on these stations is not a loop of caffeinatedly upbeat MIDI video-game songs or some bombastic score written for the game but Michael Jackson, Hall and Oates, Cutting Crew, and Luther Vandross. While you are wondering at this, you hop a curb, run over some pedestrians, and slam into a parked car, all of which a nearby police officer sees. He promptly gives chase. And for the first time you are off, speeding through Vice City's various neighborhoods. You are still getting accustomed to the driving controls and come into frequent contact with jaywalkers, oncoming traffic, street lights, fire hydrants. Soon your pummeled car (you shed your driver's-side door two blocks ago) is smoking. The police, meanwhile, are still in pursuit. You dump the dying car and start to run. How do you get another car? As it happens, a sleek little sporty number called the Stinger is idling beneath a stoplight right in front of you. This game is called Grand Theft Auto , is it not? You approach the car, hit the assigned button, and watch Tommy rip the owner from the vehicle, throw him to the street, and drive off. Wait--look there! A motorcycle . Can you drive motorcycles too? After another brutal vehicular jacking, you fly off an angled ramp in cinematic slow-motion while ELO's "Four Little Diamonds" strains the limits of your television's half-dollar-sized speakers. You have now lost the cops and swing around to head back to your mission, the purpose of which you have forgotten. It gradually dawns on you that this mission is waiting for you to reach it . You do not have to go if you do not want to. Feeling liberated, you drive around Vice City as day gives way to night. When you finally hop off the bike, the citizens of Vice City mumble and yell insults. You approach a man in a construction worker's outfit. He stops, looks at you, and waits. The game does not give you any way to interact with this man other than through physical violence, so you take a swing. The fight ends with you stomping the last remaining vitality from the hapless construction worker's blood-squirting body. When you finally decide to return to the mission point, the rhythm of the game is established. Exploration, mission, cut scene, driving, mayhem, success, exploration, mission, cut scene, driving, mayhem, success. Never has a game felt so open. Never has a game felt so generationally relevant. Never has a game felt so awesomely gratuitous. Never has a game felt so narcotic. When you stopped playing Vice City , its leash-snapped world somehow seemed to go on without you.   Vice City 's sequel, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas , was several magnitudes larger--so large, in fact, I never finished the game. San Andreas gave gamers not one city to explore but three, all of them set in the hip-hop demimonde of California in the early 1990s (though one of the cities is a Vegas clone). It also added dozens of diversions, the most needless of which was the ability of your controlled character, a young man named C.J., to get fat from eating health-restoring pizza and burgers--fat that could be burned off only by hauling C.J.'s porky ass down to the gym to ride a stationary bike and lift weights. This resulted in a lot of soul-scouring questions as to why A) it even mattered to me that C.J. was fat and why B) C.J. was getting more physical exercise than I was. Because I could not answer either question satisfactorily, I stopped playing.   Grand Theft Auto IV was announced in early 2007, two years after the launch of the Xbox 360 and one year after the launch of the PlayStation 3, the "next-generation" platforms that have since pushed gaming into the cultural mainstream. When the first next-gen titles began to appear, it was clear that the previous Grand Theft Auto titles--much like Hideo Kojima's similarly brilliant and similarly frustrated Metal Gear Solid titles--were games of next-gen vision and ambition without next-gen hardware to support them. The early word was that GTA IV would scale back the excesses of San Andreas and provide a rounder, more succinctly inhabited game experience. I was living in Las Vegas when GTA IV (after a heartbreaking six-month delay) was finally released.   In Vegas I had made a friend who shared my sacramental devotion to marijuana, my dilated obsession with gaming, and my ballistic impatience to play GTA IV . When I was walking home from my neighborhood game store with my reserved copy of GTA IV in hand, I called my friend to tell him. He let me know that, to celebrate the occasion, he was bringing over some "extra sweetener." My friend's taste in recreational drug abuse vastly exceeded my own, and this extra sweetener turned out to be an alarming quantity of cocaine, a substance with which I had one prior and unexpectedly amiable experience, though I had not seen a frangible white nugget of the stuff since.   While the GTA IV load screen appeared on my television screen, my friend chopped up a dozen lines, reminded me of basic snorting protocol, and handed me the straw. I hesitated before taking the tiny hollow scepter, but not for too long. Know this: I was not someone whose life had been marked by the meticulous collection of bad habits. I chewed tobacco, regularly drank about ten Diet Cokes a day, and liked marijuana. Beyond that, my greatest vice was probably reading poetry for pleasure. The coke sailed up my nasal passage, leaving behind the delicious smell of a hot leather car seat on the way back from the beach. My previous coke experience had made feeling good an emergency, but this was something else, softer, and almost relaxing . This coke, my friend told me, had not been "stepped on" with any amphetamine, and I pretended to know what that meant. I felt as intensely focused as a diamond-cutting laser; Grand Theft Auto IV was ready to go. My friend and I played it for the next thirty hours straight.   From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Grand Theft Auto IV is both a waste of time and "the most colossal creative achievement of the last 25 years" according to this scintillating meditation on the promise and discontents of video games. Journalist Bissell (Chasing the Sea ) should know; the ultraviolent car-chase-and-hookers game was his constant pastime during a months-long intercontinental cocaine binge. He's ashamed of his video habit, but also ashamed of being ashamed of the "dominant art form of our time"; by turning the eye of a literary critic on the gory, seemingly puerile genre of ultraviolent, open-ended "shooter" games, he finds unexpected riches. Bissell bemoans the "uncompromising stupidity" of their story lines, wafer-thin characters, and the moronic dialogue, but celebrates the button-pushing, mesmeric qualities and the subtle, profound depths these conceal-the catharses of teamwork and heroism in the zombie-fest Left for Dead, the squirmy moral dilemmas of Mass Effect, the "mood of wistful savagery" suffusing the rifles-and-chainsaws-bedecked denizens of Gears of War. Bissell excels both at intellectual commentary and evocative reportage on the experience of playing games, while serving up engrossing mise-en-scene narratives of the mayhem. If anyone can bridge the aesthetic chasm between readers and gamers, he can. (June 8) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Although this is not a scholarly book per se, its subject is certainly one of interest in the academy. A contributing editor for Harper's Magazine and an award-winning author, Bissell (who also teaches fiction writing at Portland State Univ.) offers a belletristic defense of video games as an art form. The book is worth reading for the prose alone, a crisp mashup of styles that invokes the best of both The New Yorker and Wired. Bissell interviews game designers, reports on industry shows, visits the BioWare and Ubisoft studios in Canada, and explores ontological questions about what makes video games unique through comparisons with cinema, literature, and other expressive media. In so doing, he reflects on such aspects of video games as dialogue, character believability, interactivity, game mechanics (i.e., rules and procedural operations), cinematographic effects, and platform genre. Bissell's many examples include a range of famous game series--"Fallout," "Grand Theft Auto," "Gears of War," "Mass Effect," "Resident Evil." The overall results are fun, challenging, a bit random, and thoroughly enjoyable in a smart way. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division and upper-division undergraduates; technical studies; professionals; general readers. N. A. Baker Earlham College

Booklist Review

Might as well get this out of the way: Bissell is addicted to video games. So much so that he pretty much missed the last presidential election because he was playing a new and highly anticipated game. Here he explores not just his own affection for video games but also the games themselves. What separates good games from bad? Where do video games fit on the sliding scale of art? A video game, Bissell tells us, is a form a self-surrender, but a different form than, say, a movie. We have no influence over what happens in a movie, but we do in a video game. In playing a video game, we are, in a sense, the authors of the stories we're acting out. Bissell explores the key elements of video games: dialogue, character design, voice performance, visual appearance. Do the best games approach something akin to virtual (or perhaps alternate) reality? Not just for gamers, the book should also appeal to readers who have some serious questions about the nature and impact of video games and their increasing popularity.--Pitt, David Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

Harper's contributor Bissell (Fiction Writing/Portland State Univ.; The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam, 2007, etc.) considers the importance of video games. Parts of this uneven investigation into the aesthetics of the gaming experience are as thrilling and fresh as the best writing on any subjectparticularly his confessional chapter on Grand Theft Auto IVbut most of the chapters fall short of that high standard. The questions Bissell raises and seeks to answer via interviews with leading game designers like Sir Peter Molyneux, Jonathan Blow and Cliff Bleszinski are not without general interestwhat role does story play in a game's aesthetic experience? how do games (and the gamers who play them) create meaning? how can something that never plays out the same way twice even have meaning?but too much of the book is surprisingly amateur, as awkwardly expressed as a bright but underachieving fan-boy's private journals. Often affecting the fussy grandiloquence of a doddering classics professor, Bissell promises substance but mostly delivers only empty style. Perhaps this is the author's way of reifying for the reader the central paradox of his thesis: that his favorite video games (Resident Evil, Left 4 Dead, Far Cry 2) come so close to providing him with his ideal aesthetic experience, sometimes even more than works of literature or filmyet in the end, most of them are "just" toy worlds populated by elves, zombies, soldiers and little green men. More a collection of profiles and game reviews than a focused thesis, this little book never answers the question implicit in its subtitlebest appreciated by serious game junkies. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.