NONFICTION
Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, by Tom Bissell, $22.95
The video game industry, writes Tom Bissell in “Extra Lives,” began “as an engineering culture, transformed into a business, and now, like a bright millionaire turning toward poetry, (has) confident but uncertain aspirations toward art.”
Bissell believes it’s time that this art form, however nascent, answered some big questions: How do video games create a narrative, and what’s the criterion for judging their value? Can the games offer profound aesthetic experiences? What compels a person (usually male) to spend hours engaged in shooting, bludgeoning, road-killing and pretty much making a bloody mess of things on-screen?
If your last contact with a video game was, say, “Pong,” then you’ll be staggered by how far the medium has advanced both technically and in terms of storytelling (“Grand Theft Auto IV” has a plot, and it’s richer than you might imagine).
But this book won’t get you to care enough to buy an Xbox. Passages explaining a particular game’s characters and levels get tiresome, and Bissell’s interesting ideas feel haphazardly arranged.
Still, for anyone who has spent a weekend thrilled by the prospect of beating a game, “Extra Lives” will cast the addiction in a new, cerebral light. Bissell’s reflections on how he has been affected by his play — especially when it was paired with his once endless craving for cocaine — add an unexpected poignancy.
But like a player encountering the “Game Over” screen, the reader puts down this book sighing for more.
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NONFICTION
101 Places Not to See Before You Die, by Catherine Price, $13.99,
Catherine Price, a blogger, traveler and freelance writer, realized a little bit ago that “the last thing I need to read is a book that pits my desire for adventure against the time pressure of mortality.”
Books such as “100 Places to See in Your Lifetime” and “101 Places to Have Sex Before You Die,” she concluded, stressed her out. Her solution was to write an antithesis, a compilation of experiences and situations readers never need relish: hence “101 Places Not to See Before You Die.”
Much-visited entries in her avoid list include Euro Disney, Times Square on New Year’s Eve, Ireland’s Blarney Stone, Stonehenge and the entire state of Nevada.
Many of the entries are weird and funny (“Any Place Whose Primary Claim to Fame Is a Large Fiberglass Thing”), but some aren’t, such as hell, an AA meeting when you’re drunk and the inside of a spotted hyena’s birth canal.
The book is seemingly well researched, so you can take her word for it when Price says you can skip a giant room filled with human crap (a sludge-recycling plant in Southern California); the Testicle Festival, where revelers chow down on Rocky Mountain oysters, which, Price clarifies, are not a “high-altitude mollusk”; and your boss’ bedroom.
