Book Report

Ian Bogost is concerned with a critical approach to video games in his aptly titled book How to Talk About Video Games. In forming an answer to his titular question, he draws inspiration from other genres of established criticism like literary or film criticism. However he suggests that, because video games are inseparable from their platform or medium, approaching with a lens that focuses just on narrative content is insufficient. In the introduction he writes, “how to talk about videogames? Like a critic, not a reviewer, for one, but also: like a toaster critic, not just a film critic. To do game criticism is to take this common born subject as toaster and as savior, as milk and as wine, as idiocy and as culture.” Addressing the duality and natural tension in games and gaming platforms is a recurring theme in Bogost’s writing. It is important that Bogost here establishes an apologetic tone, as if he knows that he is going to be asking more of games than they were perhaps intended to give. He writes that this book is full of “attempts to take games so seriously as to risk the descent into self-parody. Such that we can appreciate them for what they are rather than what we wish them to be.”

What follows is a collection of essays wherein Bogost explores possible topics of video game criticism and study. It feels like Bogost is not forging a new genre of criticism as much as he is surveying the land to determine the richness of its soil. I examined two recurring themes across his essays that touch on issues in new media and culture that we have discussed in class. First, in all of his explorations Bogost considers the intersection between the medium and the message extensively. Second, Bogost regularly considers aesthetics and how they materialize in the experience of a game.

Bogost often considers the way that a medium that a game is distributed on affects the nature of that game’s content. For example, a study of the feminist subtext in Ms. Pac-Man is incomplete without an examination of coin operated gaming cabinets and enhancement kits. As Bogost puts it, “infrastructural details can help us understand what it means for a game to be what it is.” Because of the limitations and overhead of running a coin op cabinet, enhancement kits worked to improve the existing software of a cabinet by using the existing hardware. Ms. Pac-Man was an enhancement kit of Pac-Man that, due in part to its technological characteristics, became the “apotheosis of the feminist videogame, structurally, mechanically, fictionally, and temporally.” This is a demonstration of platform studies at work.

Bogost shows that aesthetics is often at the forefront of video game experiences. In his consideration of thatgamecompany and their trio of contracted games he concludes that, perhaps counterintuitively, “Its games are about the feeling of being somewhere, not about the feeling of solving something.” In another chapter Bogost describes the all-encompassing aesthetic experience of Proteus, an exploration game that blurs the line between game and art. Both of these are examples of games that Bogost highlights that incorporate an aesthetic experience.

            Bogost’s conclusion paints a bleaker picture for the future of video games and game criticism than the rest of his book would suggest. The heart of the problem with the video game industry, according to Bogost, is that “encountering games still requires pledging fealty to gamedom.” According to Bogost “games have maintained a separation from other forms of human culture and creativity” and “we have actively cultured and supported this separation in order to come into our own.” The beautiful characteristics about video games, that they are so unique, customized and interactive, are the very characteristics that curate a more exclusive fan base and stunt its growth into wider popularity. Video games as an industry are not doing as well as gamers might think it is. Bogost claims that, “like it or not, games are still a niche tricked by the echo chamber of internal success into thinking that they are approaching the mainstream.” Bogost assembles here a fascinating academic exercise that is rich with insights for the subset of gamers that would find it interesting. Although he is passionate about the importance of a critical approach to video games, he is realistic about the scope of game criticism, because “game criticism is subsistence criticism. There’s not enough land to till in games alone. Nor in literature alone, nor in toasters alone.”