Zusatztext 77469380 Informationen zum Autor Tom Bissell Klappentext In Extra Lives ! acclaimed writer and life-long video game enthusiast Tom Bissell takes the reader on an insightful and entertaining tour of the art and meaning of video games. In just a few decades! video games have grown increasingly complex and sophisticated! and the companies that produce them are now among the most profitable in the entertainment industry. Yet few outside this world have thought deeply about how these games work! why they are so appealing! and what they are capable of artistically. Blending memoir! criticism! and first-rate reportage! Extra Lives is a milestone work about what might be the dominant popular art form of our time. Leseprobe from Chapter 9 Once upon a time, I wrote in the morning, jogged in the late afternoon, and spent most of my evenings reading. Once upon a time, I wrote off as unproductive those days in which I had managed to put down only a thousand words. Once upon a time, I played video games almost exclusively with friends. Once upon a time, I did occasionally binge on games, but these binges rarely had less than fortnight between them. Once upon a time, I was, more or less, content. Once upon a time refers to relatively recent years (2001-2006) during which I wrote several books and published more than fifty pieces of magazine journalism and criticisma total output of, give or take, 4,500 manuscript pages. I rarely felt very disciplined during this half decade, though I realize this admission invites accusations of disingenuousness or, failing that, a savage and justified beating. Obviously, I was disciplined. These days, however, I am lucky if I finish reading one book every fortnight. These days, I have read from start to finish exactly two works of fictionexcepting those I was not also reviewingin the last year. These days, I play video games in the morning, play video games in the afternoon, and spend my evenings playing video games. These days, I still manage to write, but the times I am able to do so for more than three sustained hours have the temporal periodicity of comets with near-Earth trajectories. For a while I hoped that my inability to concentrate on writing and reading was the result of a charred and overworked thalamus. I knew the pace I was on was not sustainable and figured my discipline was treating itself to a Rumspringa . I waited patiently for it to stroll back onto the farm, apologetic but invigorated. When this did not happen, I wondered if my intensified attraction to games, and my desensitized attraction to literature, was a reasonable response to how formally compelling games had quite suddenly become. Three years into my predicament, my discipline remains AWOL. Games, meanwhile, are even more formally compelling. It has not helped that during the last three years I have, for what seemed like compelling reasons at the time, frequently upended my life, moving from New York City to Rome to Las Vegas to Tallinn, Estonia, and back, finally, to the United States. With every move, I resolved to leave behind my video game consoles, counting on new surroundings, unfamiliar people, and different cultures to enable a rediscovery of the joy I once took in my work. Shortly after arriving in Rome, Las Vegas, and Tallinn, however, the lines of gameless resolve I had chalked across my mind were wiped clean. In Rome this took two months; in Vegas, two weeks; in Tallinn, two days. Thus I enjoy the spendthrift distinction of having purchased four Xbox 360 consoles in three years, having abandoned the first to the care of a friend in Brooklyn, left another floating around Europe with parties unknown, and stranded another with a pal in Tallinn (to the irritation of his girlfriend). The last Xbox 360 I bought has plenty of companions: a Gamecube, a PlayStation ...

“Winning. . . . The most fun you’ll ever have reading about videogames.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Bissell has written the finest account yet of what it feels like to be a video game player at ‘this glorious, frustrating time,’ a rare moment when humanity encounters, as he writes, ‘a form of storytelling that is, in many ways, completely unprecedented.’”
—New York Times Book Review

“Even if Extra Lives wasn’t the only book to deal with the future of videogames in a serious manner, it would probably still be the best one.”
—Newsweek

“This journalistic memoir is not only about the meaning of video games; it’s about the heat and hesitation of love.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Bissell is a Renaissance Man for our out-of-joint time. . . . His descriptions of simulated gore and mayhem manage to be clinical, gripping, and hilarious all at once. He transmits to the reader the primitive, visceral excitements that make video games so enticing, even addictive, to their legions of devotees.”
—The New Republic
 
“What should videogame criticism look like? Bissell’s book offers plenty of tantalizing possibilities. . . . A deeply personal work, as entertaining as the video games it profiles. . . . It’s also the first book about videogames that non-gamers can actually enjoy.”
—Entertainment Weekly
 
“A master prose stylist, the erudite Bissell is frequently insightful.”
—The Boston Globe
 
“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.”
—The Washington Post
 
“Bissell, a whip-smart writer, is engrossed by the new artistic and narratological possibilities that video gaming opens up to us, and his prose is never dry or academic—rather, it’s sweetly personal, and always engaging, even as it pushes its readers to reconsider gaming’s lowbrow status.”
—Time Out New York
 
“A fascinating book. . . . Extra Lives is like taking a private tour at a very exclusive museum, filled with lost masterpieces you never knew existed. You may not find yourself becoming a collector, but you won’t soon forget the experience.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Fantastic . . . I wish, someday, to play a game that will stay with me as long as this book about games.”
—Farhad Manjoo, Slate
 
“Extra Lives is the first truly indispensable work of literary nonfiction about society’s most lucrative entertainment medium. Bissell’s commentary is marvelously astute and his enthusiasm for videogames beams through every inch of text.”
—Paste
 
“An important, relentlessly perceptive book. . . . Bissell proves that it’s possible to ruminate on the past, present, and future of video games in a way that is both intellectually rigorous and consistently entertaining.”
—San Francisco Bay Guardian
 
“Full of surprisingly penetrating analysis of the real-life skills video games actually test and develop. . . . Bissell moves analysis of video games to the next level. . . . [Extra Lives] should help usher in a widespread, much more serious consideration of how video games have taken up permanent residence in our increasingly screen-based world.”
—The Plain Dealer
 
“Bissell is a serious and seriously good writer. . . . The video game industry now pockets more of our money than do its counterparts in music and movies, but you’d never know it from glancing at a newspaper or magazine, where Nashville and Hollywood still get far more profiles, business items, and, of course, reviews. Extra Lives is, among other things, a wonderful example of how and why this imbalance might be fixed.”
—*The Christian Science …