Broken Frontier

Tom Bissell doesn’t believe that the argument of video games as art means much. Instead, he asks this: can artists make video games?

It’s a much more mature and cerebral position, and one he takes through his book, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. It’s a phenomenal jewel of a book, and one that I devoured faster than I normally do prose. But it’s not some stuffy, expository dissertation on the meaning or importance of games. No, it’s rather a memoir of sorts, a collection of personal essays organized into chapters that represent Bissell’s journey toward a great understanding of games as a medium of storytelling.

Bissell is the perfect guy to do this. At 37-years-old, he’s written a handful of nonfiction books as well as a short-story collection, and is a regular contributor to a host of respectable publications, such as the New York Times Book Review and The New Republic.

Not only did Bissell help me understand video games in a more elevated light, but it also was the sole factor in my decision to buy a Playstation 3, something I resisted doing for years.

To say the least, I’ve changed my mind on some (but not all) of the points I made in an essay I wrote a year ago.

I encourage anyone interested in video games to check this book out.

And for more information, here is a talk Bissell gave to Google: