Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

This evening on behalf of Harvard bookstore I'm very pleased to welcome Tom Bissell for a discussion of his new book Extra Lives Why Video Games Matter. Well the easy stereotype that your average video game player is an antisocial teenage boy. The truth is that millions of people men women young old and middle aged alike play video games nearly every day. Video games not only out earn major Hollywood films they're often the motivation behind major movie releases like Prince of Persia or Resident Evil. Yet despite prevalence and earning power videogames are essentially to be considered to be low brow entertainment. Tom Bissell in his latest book it strikes out to uncover why and also argue for videogames consideration as an acceptable art form paste a magazine calls the book A truly indispensable work of literary nonfiction and Publisher's Weekly hails it as a scintillating meditation on the promise and discontents of video games. My favorite review however comes from the L.A. Times with this provocative assessment. Quote this journalistic memoir is not only about the meaning of videogames it's about the heat and hesitation of love.

Tom Bissell is a journalist critic and writer. He's the author of Chasing the sea god lives in St. Petersburg and the father of all things he has written for many many publications including McSweeney's best interview Granta Harper's magazine New Republic and the Virginia Quarterly Review where he is a contributing editor. His work has also been widely anthologized and you often find his reviews in The New York Times Book Review when he's not teaching at Portland State University I understand Mr. Bissell is often playing video games and you'll find Mr. vessel's gamer tags on the back flap of your book. Ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for your patience for joining us please join me in welcoming Tom Bissell. Thank you everyone. I should say that my friend slots are rapidly filling up so if you do want to request my online friendship please hurry. So I've done I think is my third reading here at Harvard bookstore and I have to say this is my largest crowd by a factor of three.

I suspect this has something to do with the subject matter. I'm going to read part of the third chapter and then I would just we can open it up and talk about the talk about games. I'm going to focus a bit. The third chapter this book is called The Unbearable Lightness of games. I've been publishing long enough now to look back on much and to look back on much of what I've written and feel the sudden pressing need to throw myself off the nearest bridge. Every person lucky enough to turn a creative pursuit into a career has these moments and at least I sometimes tell myself I do not often look back on my writing with shame. I am ashamed of one thing however and that is an essay I contributed to a nonfiction anthology of young writing. I was encouraged to write about anything I pleased so long as it addressed what being a young writer today felt like. I wrote about video games and whether they were a distraction from the calling of literature. Even as I was writing it I was aware that the essay did

not accurately reflect my feelings. Recently I wondered if the essay was maybe somewhat better than I remembered. I then re read it and spent much of the following afternoon driving around idly looking for bridges. As for video games I wrote and I warned you this is a terrible essay. Very few people over the age of 40 would recognise him as even a lower form of art. I am always wavering as to where I would locate video games along. It's fairly forgiving sliding scale. Video games are obviously a manifestly a form of popular art and every form of popular art and every form of art popular or otherwise has its ghettos from the crack houses along Michael Bay Avenue to the tubercular prostitutes coughing at the corner of steel and Paterson as in Daniel and James. The video game is the youngest and increasingly most dominant a popular art form of our time to study the origins of any popular new medium is to become an archaeologist of skeptical opprobrium. It seems to me that anyone passionate about video games has better things to do than walk chin first into suckerpunch arguments about whether they qualify

as art. Those who do not believe videogames are or ever will be Art deserve nothing more goading or indulgent than a smile. I think that's what I was trying to say. But I was then and am now routinely torn about whether video games are a worthy way to spend my time and often ask myself why I like them as much as I do especially when very often I hate them. Sometimes I think I hate them because of how poorly they bring me back to childhood when I could only imagine what I would do if I were single handedly fighting off an alien army or driving down the street in a very fast car with the police. Police try to shoot at my tires are told that I was the ancestral inheritor of some primeval sword and my destiny was to rid the realm of evil. These are very intriguing scenarios if you are 12 years old. They are far less intriguing if you are 35 and have a career friends relationship or children. The problem however at least for me is that they are no less fun. I like fighting aliens and I like driving fast cars. Tell me the secret sort is just over the mountain and I will light off into goblin haunted territory to claim it.

For me video games often restore an unearned vaguely loathsome form of innocence and is innocence derived of not knowing anything. For this in all sorts of other complicated historical reasons starting with the fact that they began as toys marketed directly to children video games crash any cocktail party rationale you attempt to formulate as to why exactly you love them more than any other form of entertainment. Video games tend to divide rooms into us and them. We are in effect admitting that we like to spend our time shooting monsters and they are not unreasonably failing to find the value in that. I wrote in my essay that art is again I quote I'm sorry obligated to address questions allergic to mere entertainment. In my humble estimation no video game has yet crossed the Rubicon from entertainment to true art.. Here I was trying to say that what distinguishes one work of art from another is primarily intelligence which is as multivalent as art itself artistic or creative intelligence can express itself formally stylistically emotionally thematically morally or any number of ways.

Works of art we call masterpieces typically run the table on the many forms artistic intelligence can take. They are comprehensively intelligent. This kind of intelligence is huge is usually apparent in great works of art created by individuals. Unity of artistic effect is something human beings have learned to respond to and for obvious reasons. Human beings have been for obvious reasons this is best achieved by individual artists. Many games which are to be sure. Corporate entertainments created by dozens of people with a strong expectation of making a lot of money have more formal and stylistic intelligence they know than they know what to do with and not even trace amounts of thematic emotional or moral intelligence. One could argue that these games succeed as works of art in some ways and either fail or do not attempt to succeed in others. True art makes the attempt to succeed in every way available to it. At least I think so. My ambivalence goes deeper though a few years ago I was asked by a magazine for my year end roundup of interesting a static experiences among which I included 2K Boston's peerless first person shooter bio shock which I wrote. I would hesitate to call it legitimate work of art even

though it's engrossing an intelligent story line made at the first game to absorb me without also vaguely embarrassing me for being so absorbed in seeing that half hearted encomium imprint with my name attached to it about a game I adored. Obsessed over and thought about for weeks drove home the plunger of a fresh fresh syringe of shame. Was I apologizing to some imaginary cultural arbiter for finding value in a form of creative expression whose considerable deficits I recognise but which I nevertheless believe is important. Or is this evidence of an authentic scruple. On one hand I love bio shock which is frequently saluted as one of the first games to tackle what might be considered intellectual subject matter namely a game world exploration of the social consequences inherent within Iran's Objectivism. On the other hand what passes for intellectual subject matter in a video game is still far from intellectually compelling at least for me and I know I was not imagining the feeling of slipping hourglass loss I experienced when I played by a shock 10 hours a day for three days straight. If I really wanted to explore the implications and consequences of Objectivism there were better more

sophisticated places to look. Even a few of them would be as much fun though getting shot in the knee would be more fun than reading Atlas Shrugged. When I think about games here is where I bottom out. Is it OK that they are mostly fun and my Philistine are simply a coward. Are games the problem or am I. I came to this one some barest formerly furtive love of games honestly because the majority of the games I've enjoyed most as an adult tell stories. I was always comparing those stories with the novels and films I admire. Naturally I found and find most video game stories wanting but this may be a flagrant category error. For one thing no one is sure what purpose story actually serves in video games games of any kind of narrative structure usually employ two kinds of storytelling. One is the frame narrative of the game itself set in the fictional present and traditionally doled out in what are called Cut scenes or cinematics which in most cases take control away from the gamer who is then forced to watch the scene unfold. The other which some game designers and theoreticians refer to as the narrative is unscripted and gamer determined the fun

portion of the play game and usually amounts to some frenetic preconception of getting from point A to Point B. The differences between the framed narrative and narrative are what makes story in-game so unmanageable. One is fixed. The other is fluid and yet they are intended however notionally to work together. Their historical inability to do so may be best described as congressional. Several games have lately been experimenting with allowing decisions made during the narrative to alter the frame narrative. Most notably in Fallout 3 in line has Fable 2 but this is mainly expressed in how are you perceived and how you are perceived by other characters. Once again comes along that figures a way around the technical challenges of allowing a large number of narrative decisions to have frame narrative altering consequences none of which challenges I understand but whose existence several game designers sighing we confirmed for me an altogether new form of storytelling might be born. Stories that with your help create themselves. There is of course another word for stories that with your help create themselves. That word is life.

So would this even be a good thing. I'm not so sure when I'm being entertained I'm also being manipulated. I'm allowing myself to be manipulated. I am in other words surrendering when I watch television. One of our less exalted forms of popular entertainment. I'm surrendering to the inevitability of commercials and bite sized narrative blocks. When I watch a film the most imperial form of popular entertainment particularly when experienced in a proper and proper movie theater I'm surrendering most humiliatingly for the film begins at a time I cannot control. There's nothing to sell me that I've not already purchased and goes on whether or not I happen to be in my seat when I read a novel I am not only surrendering I'm allowing my mind to be occupied by a colonizer of uncertain intent. Entertainment takes it as a given that I cannot affect it other than in British exterior ways turning it off leaving the theatre pausing the disc stuffing in a bookmark underlining a phrase. But for those television programs films and novels febrile with self-consciousness entertainment pretends it is unaware of me and I allow it to. Playing games is not quite like

this. The surrender is always partial. You get control and are controlled. Games are patently aware of you and have a physical dimension unlike any other form of popular entertainment. On top of that many require a marathon runner stamina. Certain cons. games can take as many as 40 hours to complete and unlike books you cannot bring them along for enjoyment during mass transit dead time. Rarely has wide ranging familiarity with the medium so transparently privileged the on and under employed when as a writer I can very much vouch for that. Even though you may be granted lunar influence over the game's narrative tides the fact that there is any narrative at all reminds you that a presiding intelligence exists within the game along with you and it is this sensation that invites the otherwise unworkable comparisons between games and other forms of narrative art. Yes as difficult as it sometimes is to believe games have authors. However diminutive an R or a he or she or frequently they might exude. What often strikes me whenever I'm playing a game is how glad I am of that hovering off the aerial presence. Although I enjoy the freedom of games

I also appreciate the remindful crack of the narrative whip to seek entertainment is to seek that whip and the mixture of the two is what makes games such a seductive appealingly dyadic form of entertainment. A video game whose outcome was narrative is wholly determined by my actions as in say World of Warcraft which is less a video game than a digital board game and which game I very much dislike. I'm sorry if there's any wild fans here would elevate me into a position of accidental authorship. I do not covet and render the game itself a chilly collation of behavior trees and algorithms. I want to be told a story albeit one I happen to be part of and can affect even if in small ways. If I wanted to tell a story I would not be playing video games. A noisy group of videogame critics and theoreticians laments the rise of story and games critics excuse me games in one version of this view are best exemplified as total play when the player is an immaterial demi urge and the only narrative is what is anecdotally generated during play Tetris would be the best example of the sort of game. My suspicion is that this lament comes less from

frustration with story qua story than it does from the narrative butterfingers on outstanding display in the vast majority of contemporary video games. I share that frustration. I also love being the agent of chaos in the video game world. What I want from games control a certain seamless is the means by which I am being controlled may be impossible and I am back to where I began to reload the story purpose in video games is complicated then less complicated is how many gamers view story. For many gamers and by all evidence game designers story is largely a matter of accumulation. The more explanation there is the thought appears to go the more story has been generated. This would be a profound misunderstanding of story for any form of narrative art but it is hobbled the otherwise high creative achievement of any number of games frequently and work with any degree of genre loyalty. This would include the vast majority of video games. The more explicit the story becomes the more silly it will suddenly seem. Let us call this the mythic Lorian error.

The best science fiction is usually densely realistic in quotidian detail but evocatively vague about the bigger questions. Tolkien is all but ruin for me whenever I make the mistake of perusing the Anglo-Saxon Talmud isms of his various appendices among the Eldar the elf of the day Iran did not develop true cursive forms. Kill me please now since for writing the elves adopted the Finn Nori in letters. As for horror films the moment I learned Freddy Krueger was the bastard son of a thousand maniacs was also the final moment I could envision him without spontaneously bursting into laughter. The impulse to explain is the Achilles heel of all genre work and the most sophisticated artists when they're within every genre know better than to expose their worlds to the sharp knife of intellection. A good example of a game that does not make that mistake is Valve's cooperative first person shooter left for dead which offers yet another vision of zombie apocalypse. Unlike the Resident Evil series which goes to great narrative pains to explain what is happening and why culminating one of the most ridiculous moments in videogame history when the hero of Resident Evil

4 discovers an enemy doc document helpfully titled our plan. I left for dead abandons every rational pretext and drops you and three other characters into the middle of undead anarchy. Almost nothing is explained. The little characterization there is comes in tantalizing drips and all that is expected is survival which is possible only by constantly working together with your fellow gamers covering them while they reload helping them up when they are knocked down and saving them when they are trapped in the eye of a zombie hurricane left for dead is one of the most well designed an explosively entertaining games ever made. Well its purpose is incontinent terror its point is that teamwork is by definition a matter of compulsion not choice. Left for Dead designer Michael Booth had the maturity to grasp the power that narrative minimalism would provide his game the speedy and acrobatic zombies of left for dead have no planned more refined than kicking you to death as a scenario it is as ridiculous as any forged by the Vulcans a video game conceit. And yet from

start to finish left for dead is as free falling the unfamiliar and viscerally convincing as the worst dream you have ever had. Capturing what left for dead feels like is not easy but set left for dead to its highest difficulty level recruit three of its best players you can find. Push your way through one of the game's four scenarios and make no mistake what will go down will be so emotionally grueling it will feel as though you a spent an hour playing something like full contact psychic football. The end of the game however it turns out will feel epic to no one who did not take part in it but those who did will feel as though they have marched together through a gauntlet of the Damned. The game's refusal to explore the who what why or how of its zombie citizenry is emblematic of the unusually austere approach to narrative in many Valve games which the company may not have invented but has certainly come close to perfecting. The four controllable characters and left for dead are all common videogame types. The girl the black guy the biker the elderly Vietnam that they are not however blank canvases. I play as in order of preference. The girl the black guy and the biker. I absolutely

refuse to play the Vietnam vet for some reason I can't stand the guy tactics that failed in the jungles and swamps of the Mekong Delta have no place against an army of the undead. The object of the game is to fight your fight your way through scenarios that are themselves divided into five stages all of which but for the scenarios finale's concluded the player slamming shut a safe houses thick red metal door. The problem of course is that the between these safe houses are devastated locales a high rise hospital a train yard an airport a traffic tunnel among others filled with literally thousands of zombies looking to attack you and even sometimes one another. You want a weird video game experience creep around a corner in the sewers adjacent to the hospital say and you might find to your fascinated horror a couple of unaware zombies casually beating each other up. It's weird I don't know. The zombies attack singly or in groups or in what the game calls the horde standing in the middle of a darkened city street while a horde of zombies pours up and out of a subway station and clamors

over and around parked cars to get to you is about as unnerving as video games get. And these are just the rank and file zombies. The far more perilous special infected as were left for dead begins to glitter. Thinking about the special effects it is dried my mouth out with tears. The special infected come in 5 nightmare flavors. The hunter a hooded zombie who pounces upon and then tears into his prey rendering the Pouncey helpless until a friend comes along to shoot or push the hunter off the smoker. A coughing shambolic elastically tongue zombie who operates much like a sniper extending his tongue to pluck survivors from the pack. The Boomer an obese and separating slob zombie who is as fragile and explosive as a Pinto but whose vomit and bile attracts the dreaded horde and whose vomit on top of that is blinding. So that during a well coordinated attack you cannot see the hunter tearing to pieces your screaming friend right in front of you the tank as advertised to steroids the

distended zombie as tough as an armored car but who mercifully appears only a few times a game. And finally the witch a crying lost soul zombie who seems the very picture of helplessness until she is startled by a flashlight or a loud noise upon which she uses her razor manicure to instantly kill the survivor who startled her and whom you must try to sneak past and who is generally upsetting and inspired a video game nemesis is any. What is so brilliant about these special infected is the way they tap into distinct types of emotional unease for the hunter in a shock and for the smoker helplessness for the boomer It is panic and for the tank flight for the which is a strange combination of alarm and paranoia and blame. These emotions aroused as they are alongside other living gamers are part of what makes a game with no traditional narrative speak of so dynamically fertile an experience to look back on. Left for Dead creates within a structure that is formally story less but highly controlled. A game that feels to those playing it is harrowing Lee and expertly designed as a first rate horror film. Credit here is due to the so-called AI director that valve designed specifically for left for dead.

It is most basically a piece of in-game computation that monitors the gamers judges their performance and complicates things as it deems advisable. If things are going really swimmingly for the survivors why not inflict upon them a tank if their survivors are hurting Why not drop in an extra health pack. The AI director which would not work in a game with an inflexible narrative structure also ensures that the survivors are never attacked in the same place by the same number of enemies. The revolutionary quality of this cannot be overstated. Gamers often learn how to master a game by memorization but left for dead is impossible to master in this way. All one can do is hone strategies which especially on the highest difficulty level have a toothpick house fertility. You do not get a delivered narrative and left for dead when you do get is a series of found narratives. How do these found narratives work and what gives them the resonance. Well as it happens I have a left for dead story and it occurred while playing the games versus mode in which two human teams won Survivor one zombie have at each other playing against a human controlled special infected takes the robotically inflicted havoc of the AI director and

turns it into something far more wonderfully and personally vicious and Versus Mode the object is to reach the safehouse with his many living survivors as possible. The more survivors that make it the more points your team receives. One night at the end of the first stage of the dead air campaign I and three fellow survivors two of whom were friends one of whom had just jumped in had come to realize that we were up against a vial he gifted an absolutely devastating team of left for dead tacticians the Hannibal Napoleon Crazy Horse and Patton of zombies. They attacked with uncertain coordination insurgent coordination and to maximum damage. And it was only our own skill that had managed to hold them off as long as we had by the time the first stage safehouse came into view we four extraordinarily good left for dead veterans were limping hobbled and completely freaked out. Then another coordinated attack led by the boomer puking on this blinding us and summoning the horde while we staggered around the smoker took hold of one friend one hunter pounced on another the other remaining survivor and I decided to break for the safe house door before getting there my remaining friend was pounced on by yet another hunter. Although I freed him I was still mostly

blind and my friend despite having been released was under assault by at least a dozen rapacious normal zombies. Deciding that one of us making it was better than none of us making it. I stepped inside the safe house door and closed it outside the friend I had left behind managed to fight his way out of the horde and killed the smoker and Hunter ripping apart the other survivors who are now incapacitated incapable of getting up without help and quickly bleeding out. Which is to say dying. Unfortunately the heroic friend was himself incapacitated while doing this. Well my three down friends could shoot their sidearms they could not rise. They needed me for that and a minute or so they would be dead and from the shelter of the safe house I watched their health bars drain steadily away. Meanwhile the opposing team had begun to respond. A lone survivor against even two special infected opponents would stand no chance as all would take to end the round to be a hunter or a smoker incapacitating me. So I stayed put. But if one of us than one of us my down friends fail to see it that way.

Over my headphones they vigorously questioned my courage my manhood the ability of my lone female survivor to repopulate the human world on her own and my understanding of deontological ethics. On the other side of the safe house door I could hear the boomer belching farting and waiting for me to come out. You did one of my friends called out. He had just finished bleeding out a skull appearing beside his on screen name. My remaining friends were now seconds away from the same fate. I looked within. I did not like what I saw. Steeled myself and fired several shotgun rounds through the door safely killing the boomer who it must be said behaved with uncharacteristic carelessness. When I open the door I saw Hunter a few feet away in a corner waiting to pounce. But I killed him before moving out of the safe room and into the street. The second Hunter was better prepared but with miraculous good luck I managed to blast him out of the air in mid pounce. I quickly helped up the first Survivor and together we made it out to the final remaining survivor who was down to his last droplets of virtual existence. Well I helped up the final survivor my friend covering me eliminated the

lurking smoker and with glad cries the three of us made it back to the safe house at great personal risk and out of real shame. I had rescued two of my three friends in the process. Out faced against all odds one of the best left for dead teens I had and have ever played against. I realized then vividly that left for dead offered a rare example in which a games theme cooperation was also what was encouraged within the actual flow of gameplay. People I save that night still talk about my heroic action. And yes it was it did feel heroic. Whenever we play together and after the round two of the teams opposing two of the opposing teams members requested my online friendship which with great satisfaction I declined. All the emotions I felt during those few moments fear dulled doubt resolve and finally courage were as intensely vivid as any I felt while reading a novel or watching a film or listening to a piece of music for what more could one ask what more could one want. I once raved about left for dead in a videogame in poorly and within earshot of the manager a man I had

previously heard angrily defend the position that lightsaber wounds are not necessarily cauterized. His evidence the Tonton Han Solo to some bows in The Empire Strikes Back does in fact bleed. Left for dead he asked me. You liked it. I admitted that I did. Very very much. And him. I liked it he said grudgingly. I just wish there was more story. A few pimply Mullingar speak by our exchange nodded in assent. The overly caloric narrative content of so many day of so many games had caused these gentlemen to feel undernourished by the different narrative experience offered by left for dead. They like the games they presumably loved had become aesthetically obese. I then realized I was contrasting my aesthetic sensitivity to satin to that of some teenagers about a game that concerns itself with shooting as many zombies as possible. It is moments like this that can make it so dispiriting Lee difficult to care about video games. Thank you.

Yeah I think we will because I think the people who are kind of reflexively conversant with the aesthetics of games are not going to be quite as horrified by you know what an outsider would look at as happening on the screen I think my God that's just carnage and mayhem what could that possibly mean. And you know not all games are violent a lot of the games are read about in the book are so I should just say that right up top but I did an interview on New Hampshire Public Radio today and I sort of stumbled upon something I kind of liked which is you know if you take like a rock song you know if you looked if you like had the tablature of it and went on here and you had the lyrics of it here and you look at these things separately it probably wouldn't seem like a whole heck of a lot is going on but something about combining these two things and then you the listener hearing it or seeing it performed. Something happens within the performance and of in the very act of reifying this thing that gives it this. Almost like sub linguistic sensation that you get from it and a lot of like violent games that you would look at them or even games period. Let's not forget the violence part

games period you look at them and someone watching someone play could possibly think what on earth could be going on there that is of any value but there is something similar to the combination of these disparate elements and gameplay that creates something that can actually be really elegant and artful and be and can just sort of lasso your emotions in some really strange way and it's hard to talk about and one of the reasons I write about narrative games so much in my big concern is with narrative games in this book partially because I'm a fiction writer so I have like a traditional narrative kind of understanding for how I ground myself in these experiences but also because I just found those games were so much easier to write about because the gameplay aspect is I don't know if I've ever read a really good like long form description of what that thing that they do is actually is I don't know if anyone here has any insight into that but you know I thought I would start I would write this book and try to provide one and that mission failed. But I do think that there is an aspect to games that people who grew up

playing them and really appreciate them and thinking about them can. Will very much be able 10 years from now to be able to identify with in this meeting things that are that are not abstract and that actually have real static meaning. Every medium develop at every medium that anyone gives a damn about develops a tradition. This is actually a real thing. This is not a trivial objection to the video game form. I mean one you basically have to learn a foreign language to play games with any amount of success. Like trying to people just sort of understand like where valuable information is and interface systems I mean you give someone a joystick it's something you never held and it's like you're giving them a detonator you know I mean the. And you know I think gamers are kidding themselves that this isn't like a very real obstacle that people who might be inclined to think highly of what this form can do. And there's also the difficulty question because you know a lot of people who design games grew up as quote hardcore gamers which is a term that I loathe. But there's like a culture of difficulty. And so I don't really know what the answer to

this question is I mean I guess it's in literature be akin to Modernism you know I'm game difficulty is like what games modernist movement is and there's going to be people who want to bring games like well you know we as a games are a perfect example of like trying to expand games to more people. And I think what's probably going to happen is there will be. Like the the Ulysses of games is going to be the games that are really hard and only They're going to really devote it will get through it and then they'll be like poppier games for and that does mean any worse mind you not not necessarily worse or less sophisticated games or popular games that people can sort of just play and dip into to their own satisfaction but yeah I think about that all the time it's a real issue and I don't know how that gets addressed actually the question is about whether games are sort of striving toward a holodeck in intensity a sense around intensity or if the controller is a like a crucial part of the game experience. All I know is that with the rise of this controller this kind of game stuff I'm fit. It's a strange images but I feel like game folk and preaching upon

me and I don't take my controller away and I kind of feel like this stuff is not.