Review by New York Times Review
IN THE WALT DISNEY film, Mary Poppins proves herself an early proponent of gamification. "In every job that must be done there is an element of fun," she sings. "You find the fun and snap! The job's a game." With brevity that few contemporary gamification gurus can equal, Poppins encapsulates the movement's mantra. As the game designer Jane McGonigal argued in her 2011 pseudoscientific manifesto, "Reality Is Broken," the most mundane task can be made palatable, even alluring, if framed not as a chore, but as a contest. In "SuperBetter," McGonigal's follow-up, she pursues Poppins's train of thought in the îyric "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down." The principles of game design, McGonigal argues, can be used to turn not only leisure into productivity, but also sickness into health. By reframing recuperative tasks such as going for a walk, reconnecting with a friend or writing a short story as gamelike quests, healing can be systematized. Moreover, when you begin to tackle these life quests (McGonigal provides nearly 100 examples) you will, she writes, enter a "gameful" state, becoming more optimistic, creative, courageous and determined. By applying the psychological attributes that games unlock to real-world scenarios, we become like Mario as he guzzles a power-up and transforms into Super Mario. McGonigal's promises come thick and early, propped up by the results of two clinical studies. The 30-day program contained in the book will, she writes, "significantly" reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety and decrease suffering. It will increase optimism, make you "more satisfied" and even lead, incredibly, to a life "free of regret." McGonigal claims that every day for more than five years she has heard from someone telling her that the program changed his or her life. McGonigal developed her ideas after suffering a concussion that left her with lingering headaches and suicidal thoughts. To conquer her depression she turned to the metaphor of her profession. It was a timely choice. Video games have become a core ingredient in the entertainment diet of many Westerners. We are familiar with the paradigm of quests, and the idea of having our every effort rewarded. She also benefited from our obsession with personal data. This is the era of quantification. Every step we take can be recorded, the length of each night's sleep measured and the number of calories we ingest counted. In this way our survival acts have become a high-score challenge and, it follows, somehow winnable. Like many self-help books, "SuperBetter" operates exclusively in the hyperbolic register. The first four quests promise to be "life-changing." Alas, the missions turn out to be mundane. One asks you to stand up and take three steps forward or hold your fists aloft for five seconds, another to "snap your fingers exactly 50 times." McGonigal argues that these tasks improve your natural abilities, but this is an appropriation of the language and metaphor of games, without much of the substance. Failure isn't valuable in the SuperBetter program. You don't learn much when you neglect to ask a friend about her dreams (Love Connection Quest 5). There is no strategy to master when attempting to enjoy a favorite song (Ninja Quest 14). What's being sold here is not a game so much as a self-incentivized to-do list. Like all self-help books, "SuperBetter" takes familiar techniques of personal care - drink plenty of water, cultivate a robust support network, keep mentally stimulated - and repackages them. The prose, true to genre, swings between lullaby and war cry, seeking either to woo us with promises or to rev us up with declarative sentences about inner strength and power. Each paragraph is a needle bed of exclamation points, and the book's wilder claims appear flimsy, the arguments irksomely oversold. Nevertheless, McGonigal's logic is often based on truth. Suffering, or at least resistance, is one of the ways in which humans build resilience and strength. Games simulate reality's challenges. It follows, then, that through them we build muscles of fortitude, without having to endure earnest pain. But this is a blinkered view of the full function of games. Marilynn Strasser Olson, in her 1991 biography of the American illustrator and author Ellen Raskin, wrote, "Games as arbiters of rules and objectives are a metaphor for a vision of life that can be ordered, understood and won." Games are designed to systematize life (in particular the hero's journey), to render, for example, the effects of experience in crude numbers. Monopoly helps us to understand capitalism; chess, warfare; Minecraft, the rhythms of creation, destruction and survival. But if awarding points can provide incentives for people to do things that benefit them (something teachers have been doing for centuries), to claim that the kaleidoscopic business of existence can be mastered and won by framing it as a competitive challenge is as much recipe for misery as it is for joy. Just ask any jaded ex-Wall Street trader. "The State of Play," a collection of essays by a variety of academics, bloggers and independent game designers, also chooses for its theme how our "digital and real lives collide." Its editors, Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson, are interested in the way in which writing about the video game medium has grown from product criticism to social and political commentary. This broadening of scope is due not only to maturation, they argue. It is also the result of the democratization of game-making, which has allowed independent creators to release games on personal and seemingly noncommercial topics, in that way stimulating critical conversation. The collection varies wildly in style and purpose, lurching from narrative journal (like Leigh Alexander's vivid recounting of playing arcane games as a child) to scholastic essay (like Ola Wikander's examination of the role of theology in Japanese fantasy games). A piece by Ian Shanahan from 2004 recounts a provocative moment in an online game that influenced many young writers on games to explore digital identity politics in virtual spaces. In "Game Over," William Knoblauch argues that games have always been political, citing Missile Command, the 1980 arcade game in which players had to defend the California coastline from Soviet nuclear attack. (The game's creator, Dave Theurer, said he had atomic nightmares for years after its release.) Ian Bogost uses the flash-in-the-pan mobile phone success story, Flappy Bird, as a way to understand what makes games alluring - even if the appeal is precisely their lack of meaning. Many of the essays must be understood in their broader context, a time when video games have become one of the primary battlefields for cultural clashes over gender politics, now a mainstream concern. Anita Sarkeesian, the feminist critic who has endured a sustained torrent of abuse for challenging sexism and misogyny in video games, writes here about her experiences. So too does Zoe Quinn, the independent game maker who created a text game about depression that made her a target of harassment, including by those who claim video games have no place exploring such themes. "The State of Play" is a scattershot collection but one that is useful in providing a sampling of progressive writing about a medium that remains nebulous and shifting. The title, however, is misleading; the video game is an ever-broadening church, and only some of its rooms are represented and discussed here. A newcomer will not leave with a rounded understanding of "the state of play." But as a manifesto, it works better than McGonigal's book. The collection argues, simply if often implicitly, that contrary to many gamers' fears, criticism is neither an act of betrayal nor the first step toward censorship. Rather, it is an activity that can lead to fundamental improvement. SIMON PARKIN has written for The New Statesman and The Guardian, among other publications. His first book, "Death by Video Game," was just published in England.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 18, 2015]
Review by Library Journal Review
Editors Goldberg and Larsson (coauthors, Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game That Changed Everything) gather a series of daring personal essays on the current state of video game culture and the industry it came from. The essayists are both game lovers and game creators. They're deeply involved in the video game industry and they care greatly about video games as art, representing the most significant voices in the controversies currently rocking the fault lines of the video game landscape. Standout essays by Anna Anthropy and Zoe Quinn demonstrate how creating games can be cathartic while highlighting the extreme prejudices and online harassment that marginalized creators face from their peers. Their essays and others paint an alarming but timely picture in the aftermath of the Gamergate controversy, which concerns sexism in video game culture. Additional pieces unpack issues such as violence, faith, class, and more as they relate to games. All of the contributors balance darkness with uplifting accounts of how games have improved their lives. VERDICT A ground-breaking anthology that all video game players should read and ponder.-Paul Stenis, -Pepperdine Univ. Lib., Malibu, CA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
What video games mean and why they matter.Swedish technology writers Goldberg and Larsson (Minecraft: The Game that Changed Everything, 2011, etc.) gather a selection of "New Games Journalism" pieces, representing a recent development in writing about video games that focuses not on the technological or entertainment aspects of the medium but on the cultural, social, and political contexts in which the games exist. A focal point for this new approach has been the distressing "Gamergate" scandal, which found women who questioned sexist elements of gamesor who created their own alternatives or merely presumed to make their voices heard at allon the receiving ends of a massive torrent of online threats of sexual assault and murder from frustrated male gamers. Gamergate has inspired much insightful consideration (including Dan Golding's essay, "The End of Gamers," included here), but this book also includes thoughtful considerations of race, gender, sexuality, mental illness, and violence in gaming. Evan Narcisse writes of his frustration with the lack of acceptable representations of black people in games, while Hussein Ibrahim examines his ambivalence as an Arabic man killing scores of Arabic enemies in military shooter games. Developers like Merritt Kopas, Zoe Quinn, and Anna Anthropy recount their struggles to create games that meaningfully confront topics such as depression and sexuality, while other writers examine pervasive tropes and their larger meaningse.g., the popularity of apocalyptic settings and the masochistic anti-pleasures of maddening time-wasters like "Flappy Bird." The essays are uniformly well-written, full of personal passion and journalistic rigor, and they fully convince readers of the relevance and urgency of this new form of criticism. A consistently engaging and insightful reckoning with the serious implications of the ascendant entertainment medium of the 21st century. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
