How to Talk about Videogames

BOOK PREVIEW—We've provided a sample of the full-text here for review purposes.
Videogames! Aren’t they the medium of the twenty-first century? The new cinema? The apotheosis of art and entertainment, the realization of Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk? The final victory of interaction over passivity? No, probably not. Games are part art and part appliance, part tableau and part toaster. In How to Talk about Videogames, leading critic Ian Bogost explores this paradox more thoroughly than any other author to date.
Delving into popular, familiar games like Flappy Bird, Mirror’s Edge, Mario Kart, Scribblenauts, Ms. Pac-Man, FarmVille, Candy Crush Saga, Bully, Medal of Honor, Madden NFL, and more, Bogost posits that videogames are as much like appliances as they are like art and media. We don’t watch or read games like we do films and novels and paintings, nor do we perform them like we might dance or play football or Frisbee. Rather, we do something in between with games. Games are devices we operate, so game critique is both serious cultural currency and self-parody. It is about figuring out what it means that a game works the way it does and then treating the way it works as if it were reasonable, when we know it isn’t.
Noting that the term games criticism once struck him as preposterous, Bogost observes that the idea, taken too seriously, risks balkanizing games writing from the rest of culture, severing it from the “rivers and fields” that sustain it. As essential as it is, he calls for its pursuit to unfold in this spirit: “God save us from a future of games critics, gnawing on scraps like the zombies that fester in our objects of study.”
Background photo by Bartosz Wanot on Unsplash
Read a Sample
Metadata
- rightsEarlier versions of chapters 1, 2, 7, 17, and 18 were previously published at The Atlantic, theatlantic.com. Earlier versions of chapters 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, and 19 were previously published at Gamasutra, gamasutra.com; reprinted with permission. An earlier version of chapter 6 was published as “Rage against the Machines: The Real Danger of Videogames Isn’t Violence; It’s Swindling,” Baffler 24 (November 2013): 96–103; reprinted with permission. Portions of chapter 14 were previously published in Difficulty Switch column pieces in Edge Magazine. An earlier version of chapter 16 was published as “What Are Sports Videogames?” in Sports Videogames, edited by Mia Consalvo, Konstantin Mitgutsch, and Abe Stein (London: Routledge, 2014), 50–66. An earlier version of chapter 20 was published as “Perpetual Adolescence: The Fullbright Company’s Gone Home,” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 28, 2013; reprinted with permission.
Copyright 2015 by Ian Bogost
- publisherUniversity of Minnesota Press
- publisher placeMinneapolis, MN
- restrictionsAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
- rights holderIan Bogost
- series number47
- series title
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.