Gaming Still Looks for Its Scribe: A Review of the Latest Batch

Electronic Gaming Business, July 16, 2003

In another sure sign that gaming has arrived as an economic force in American entertainment, book publishers are falling all over themselves this season to publish into the sector. While rumored to be only quasi-literate, and more fond of gnawing bindings than reading their pages, EGB's own surly critic is up to his horns in new titles from both mainstream and specialty tech publishers. So far as the scaley one can tell, however, gaming is still searching for its literary voice.

The lead title this season is David Kushner's very readable Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture (Random House $24.95). This Rolling Stone and Wired scribe only makes good on half of the title's promise, but does an excellent job of humanizing figures in the industry. The story of two disaffected, mildly delinquent youth, John Romero and John Carmack, finding ambition and purpose in game design is compelling stuff. Kushner and his book serve the industry well by getting into the heads of the "two Johns" as well as the supporting cast at id Software (Tom Wilson, Adrian Carmack, American McGee, etc.) and showing how games like Castle Wolfenstein and Doom emerge from a skein of personal desires, dysfunctions, office politics, ego, and some sheer problem-solving genius. In short, he uses biography to suggest how games are artistic expression.

Absent a critical eye for his subjects' obviously arrested personalities or for the culture, however, Masters of Doom doesn't bring us any closer to understanding why gaming grabbed Romero, Carmack and a generation's imagination so forcefully. Since Kushner never really gets at what drives Romero to game and Carmack to code so feverishly, we miss the chance to gain insight into the audiences that followed their tastes and designs.

Coming in late August, Brad King and John Borland's Dungeons & Dreamers: The Rise of Game Culture, From Geek to Chic (McGraw-Hill Osborne, $29.99) suffers a crummier title and drier writing but it seems smarter than Masters of Doom. This much broader overview of electronic gaming history deftly telescopes between key personalities that built the hobby (Gygax, Garriott, Romero and Carmack) and the culture of gamers that gathered around their works including Quake champ "Thresh" and even the foremost academic defender of the medium, Henry Jenkins.

Industry pros will learn more here about their market, and especially the social and community-building imperatives that gamers bring to their hobby. To their credit, Mssrs. King (a Wired News writer) and Borland (a CNET staff writer), recognize gamers as a heterogeneous crowd, diverse constituencies each of which brings to gaming different needs and wants. There is no pat demographic profile here. Alas, just as Kushner got too close to his heroes in Masters of Doom, these authors embrace sometimes too forcefully social rationales and skirt with the facile notion that games are simply occasions for building community. But Dungeons & Dreamers is the most comprehensive and thoughtful representation of the culture of gaming yet.

The Boss, who is rumored to have eaten his media theory professor after a particularly nonsensical lecture on "Chrissy as Cultural Subversive in "Three's Company," does not take too kindly to egghead treatment of his favorite pastime. Surprisingly, he is trundling through James Paul Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (Palgrave/Macmillan, $26.95) without tossing the tome into his dungeon pyre. This professor of reading at University of Wisconsin, Madison is a rare bird, an academic who truly loves gaming and is convinced that good games often succeed because they engage us in important patterns of learning. Using examples from his own play experience, Gee explores how games like Half-Life and Deus Ex, Pikimin and Arcanum rely on classic modes of learning about symbol systems, identity, probing, etc. His point is less that games are important learning tools, although they can be, but that games work on us because they engage and exercise in us some fundamental techniques for coping and learning about the world.

Although most code-junkies and designers probably should slog through Gee's challenging prose, they are probably most at home with the more direct rewards of Game Developer Magazine's Postmortems (CMP Books, $29.95), a compilation of generally informative case studies on the development of 26 titles. Editor Austin Grossman gathers together instances of startups, creating sequels, working on new gaming concepts, working on licenses, and designing for online. Because many of the articles are written by members of the team, some lack critical distance and sometimes sound like PR, but in many cases the designers are frank about important nuts and bolts, managing teams and project scheduling, handling online hacking, etc.

Game executives and professionals may think that Postmortems is their best bet since it is obviously targeted to the trade, but The Boss sez get your nose out of the code for a second and look harder at the ways others are writing about this industry because it matters. PR pros might take a page from Kushner in learning how to portray some of the romance of the business and how personal histories inform games. Likewise, game company executives and designers should see in King and Borland and Gee's books an invitation to think a little harder and deeper about how their games actually work on people both cognitively and socially.