Games People Play: Three Books on What’s Behind the Fun
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Version 0 of 1. PLAY ANYTHINGThe Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of GamesBy Ian Bogost266 pp. Basic Books. $26.99. THE TETRIS EFFECTThe Game That Hypnotized the WorldBy Dan Ackerman264 pp. PublicAffairs. $25.99. DEATH BY VIDEO GAMEDanger, Pleasure, and Obsession on the Virtual FrontlineBy Simon Parkin254 pp. Melville House. $25.95. Hopscotch. Fantasy sports leagues. Settlers of Catan. Dungeons & Dragons. Beer pong. We are a nation at play. We love games. But there’s nothing frivolous about it. In these digital days, to think about play means moving beyond Parcheesi boards and the phalanxes of Las Vegas blackjack tables. We must stare into the almost $100-billion-a-year video game abyss, an industry soon poised to overshadow all other forms of entertainment and diversion — motion pictures, television, books and Donald Trump combined. Three books examine the appeal and purpose of games, video and otherwise, probing the reasons some of these playthings have become so engaging, addictive and even good for you. In “Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games,” Ian Bogost takes the widest angle view, promising to “upset the deep and intuitive beliefs you hold about seemingly simple concepts like play and its supposed result, fun.” Bogost, who also wrote “How to Talk About Videogames,” is a philosopher, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and video game designer. Proposing an aesthetic of play, he draws on myriad examples, from golf to the task of watering his lawn to his daughter’s self-directed rules of “step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” The direct but oftentimes repetitive, idea-driven prose of “Play Anything” might remind you of the applied-philosophy tactics of an Alain de Botton, even as Bogost makes no grand claim that games can make you a better person. Indeed, Bogost tries to disabuse us of what he perceives as the false gods of fun, ranging from the “spoonful of sugar” advice of Mary Poppins (“I dare you to try to follow this advice”) to the decluttering mantra of Marie Kondo and the entire field of “happiness science.” But games do combat “the fear of ordinary life,” the feeling of “our minds flip-flopping between heartfelt commitment and sorrowful disdain,” Bogost writes. “Games aren’t appealing because they are fun, but because they are limited. Because they erect boundaries. Because we must accept their structures in order to play them.” Fun is therefore “the feeling of finding something new in a familiar situation.” Hence, Pokémon Go, which, like soccer and other video games, is another “deliberate, if absurd, pursuit,” as Bogost might call the smartphone game known for sending millions on quests to capture creatures named Venusaur and Muk virtually lurking in city parks and on your front lawns. A clear steppingstone on the road to Pokémon Go was Tetris. This legendary Russian video game, Bogost writes, involves the quick arrangement of “four orthogonally connected squares.” Programmed in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, a young researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences, the game was the first-ever software to arrive from behind the Iron Curtain to this country. That history is the single focus of “The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized the World.” The first-time author Dan Ackerman, a journalist and CNET editor, puts together, brick by painstaking brick, the tale of that journey, one that upends the standard Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg technology-creation myth. This version unfolds in the 1980s and ’90s, during a Soviet age in which the term “distribution” meant delivering floppy disks by hand. When Ackerman evokes this clunkier era ruled by DOS, IBM PCs and Soviet bureaucrats clueless about property rights, the story shines. But when this rich setting is abandoned, the narrative falters (unless you’re excited by endless minutiae about licensing negotiations). Oddly, despite interviewing many of the major players who shaped the destiny of Tetris, Ackerman includes almost none of their direct quotes or reflections. Further, Ackerman’s main story is broken up by “Bonus Level” chapters that distractingly detail, for example, clinical uses of Tetris to study PTSD. Factoid-filled boxes also litter the layout; personally, I would have preferred screenshots of the game itself. These deficits aside, at least he makes clear what was groundbreaking about Pajitnov’s creation: “the idea of using a video game to play with space and structure, with no distracting narrative elements or cartoonish mascots” such as Pac-Man. “Before Tetris and its trance-inducing waterfall of geometric puzzle pieces, video games were brain-dulling distractions for preteens.” The question of why video games are so engrossing — O.K., even addictive — forms the DNA of “Death by Video Game: Danger, Pleasure, and Obsession on the Virtual Frontline.” Simon Parkin’s investigation was inspired by the shocking deaths of fanatical gamers in Taiwan and other countries, and seems to pick up where Tom Bissell’s 2010 deep dive into the genre’s allure, “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter,” left off. Parkin, a gaming and gaming-culture journalist, has more interesting ideas than Ackerman, and more of a literary eye for scenic and investigative detail than Bogost. Making the case that video games “are somehow different” from films or novels, Parkin writes that playing one “leaves us reeling and bewildered, hungry and ghosted in the fug of chronoslip,” his term for how digital games can create out-of-body experiences that are also out of time. “Death by Video Game” divides its argument into chapters — among them, “Success,” “Belonging,” “Mystery,” “Healing” — that sound like attributes you’d want your avatar to possess on its path through a massively multiplayer online game. Each chapter profiles gamers or game designers immersed in their particular compulsion: Grand Theft Auto, Dance Dance Revolution, Eve Online and No Man’s Sky; classics like Elite, Missile Command and Donkey Kong; indie games like Papers, Please (which asks players to assume the role of an immigration officer) or That Dragon, Cancer (which simulates the heartbreak of having a child with terminal cancer). If “Death by Video Game” begins to feel episodic and disjointed, it is: Nearly the entire book is a pastiche of profiles that originally appeared in publications like The New Yorker Online and Eurogamer. Parkin is not so much making an argument about video games as curiously plumbing the genre’s appeal. “Video games give a person the opportunity to survive and thrive within a system,” he offers, but they also “create unfamiliar places with unfamiliar vistas” where “people can belong. Many characters are blank sheets, ready for us to project our own stories and ideas onto.” More violent games might “allow us to explore our own darkness.” Tetris, he says, “replicates the sense of being overwhelmed as life’s problems and demands pile up more quickly than you are able to clear them away.” A game provides agency, whereas life can be unbeatable. For a man consumed with grief, a fantasy game like Skyrim provides refuge, a world of “easily digestible tasks,” Parkin writes, that allows him “to be anchored.” The “whys” behind our gaming obsession can seem as infinite as the digital playground of Minecraft. If the chockablock structures each of these authors concocts can, at times, feel as rote or automatic as grinding through the levels of a World of Warcraft quest, so be it. Each in its own way, these books demonstrate the importance of thoughtful, serious criticism on gaming and play. Humans are now firmly connected to this new medium that, unlike film or literature, has had only a few decades to find its voice. Meanwhile, as Bogost reminds us: “We don’t even know what fun is.” “We consume a book, but a game consumes us,” Parkin says. Best we understand these beasts — whether Pokémon’s Snorlax, Hypno or Wigglytuff or many others — because they stand poised now to devour us. |