How to Talk about Videogames by Ian Bogost (review)

Given his scholarly expertise in media studies and interactive computing as well as his critical and commercial successes as a videogame designer for Persuasive Games LLC and as a contributing editor for The Atlantic, Ian Bogost is ideally suited to help readers in the arts, humanities, and social sciences find their bearings in this age of ne mediar, mobile apps, and smart technology. In this hyper-digitalized age, hastening at such a frenzied pace that, as Bogost acidly notes, "the test of time" for a product is measured in "mere years rather than generations" (161). Crucially, Bogost wants How to Talk about Videogames to reach other readers, too, because the "era of fields and disciplines has ended" (187); a book pretending otherwise may end up "Balkanizing games writing from other writing, severing it from the rivers and fields that would sustain it" (187).

Bogost's overarching argument is that videogame criticism is a problematic enterprise in two respects. First, it tries to account for both the "instrument[al] and aesthetic" attributes of software and hardware, in contrast to modern and contemporary forms of criticism—whether, say, about painting or literature or film or food—which tend to obscure the "functional," tool-or machine-like characteristics of these cultural artifacts in favor of their "expressive" dimension (xii). And second, videogame criticism is "preposterous" because "the sustained attention that criticism entails" is fundamentally "bonkers," regardless of its target (xii). In fact, suggests Bogost, it might even be better if people did not fixate on videogames in a way that isolates them from other cultural objects and practices:

Eventually, we might hope, books like this won't be necessary or even possible, because games will no longer make sense as a domain unto themselves, an elsewhere we go for stimulation or for worship. Instead, they will prevail by being a thing among others, ebbing and flowing into and out of our attention and commitments, taking their place as one of an infinity of dreams and inspirations, diversions and obsessions

(188).

In short, How to Talk about Videogames is meant to contribute to its own obsolescence.

Still, because we haven't yet reached this next stage of cultural consciousness, Bogost offers a book comprised of numerous "attempts to take games so seriously as to risk the descent into self-parody" (xiii). Writing with sly humor (sometimes self-directed) and contagious enthusiasm, Bogost seems to have played every game on every platform created since the 1970s, from early classics like PONG (1972) and Ms. Pac-Man (1982) to current titles like Candy Crush Saga and Madden NFL. Individual readers will, of course, have differing experiences and interests, but I doubt anyone with the slightest passing familiarity with videogames—including those of us raised on first-generation Atari consoles who also frequented video arcades at a time when they were lively public spaces—could remain indifferent to the varied topics raised. For my part, I'd like to highlight Chapter 6, which examines how ostensibly free-to-play applications are structured in ways potentially as addictive and expensive for gamers as slot machines are for gamblers; Chapter 12, which contends that videogames ought not to become too cinematic but should instead allow players "to do what Hollywood cinema can never offer: to linger on the mundane instead of cutting to the consequential" (102); and Chapter 16, which posits that sports videogames are not "copies or homages" of physical sports, but "computerized variants" of equal legitimacy that may even influence their non-virtual predecessors (141).

Overall, How to Talk about Videogames is an inviting, accessible book: excluding a few pages of brief endnotes, the whole book—from introduction to conclusion, with twenty chapters squeezed in between—runs under 200 pages. (It should be noted here that readers already familiar with Bogost's work may be disappointed to discover that versions or portions of nineteen of its main chapters have been published elsewhere.) Furthermore, the scholarly apparatus is hardly perceptible: the book lacks even a rudimentary index, and...