Thinking about Video Games: Interviews with the Experts

by David S. Heineman

The growth in popularity and complexity of video games has spurred new interest in how games are developed and in the research and technology behind them. David Heineman brings together some of the most iconic, influential, and interesting voices from across the gaming industry and asks them to weigh in on the past, present, and future of video games. Among them are legendary game designers Nolan Bushnell (Pong) and Eugene Jarvis (Defender), who talk about their history of innovations from the earliest days of the video game industry through to the present; contemporary trailblazers Kellee Santiago (Journey) and Casey Hudson (Mass Effect), who discuss contemporary relationships between those who create games and those who play them; and scholars Ian Bogost (How to Do Things With Videogames) and Edward Castronova (Exodus to the Virtual World), who discuss how to research and write about games in ways that engage a range of audiences. These experts and others offer fascinating perspectives on video games, game studies, gaming culture, and the game industry more broadly.

Genres: Video Games, Nonfiction, Games, Business

272 pages, Paperback

First published July 22, 2015

Reviews

[Kalin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of interviews deserves extra credit for its goal to create "a kind of cross-community dialogue between those who play games, those who make games, and those who research them." Unfortunately, I didn't discover anything groundbreaking in the individual interviews, perhaps because I've already read too much in the field--or because people seldom come up with deeply brilliant insights when they talk. ;)

Yet I did appreciate the following bits:

~ The concept of flow in video games and education (from the interview with Nolan Bushnell):

The concept is quite simple. It’s what we call the “Goldilocks Point,” and that is you want a game to be hard enough to be difficult but easy enough that you can succeed, and that by staying right in the middle of those two constructs – not too hard, not too easy, but just right – you put yourself into a state of flow (...). You can do that with educational projects, and, when you do that, all of a sudden the learning becomes stickier. A student can be working on a project for a couple of hours and not blink, whereas most students tune out after fifteen minutes of lecture.

~ If I could find the following arcade games (from the interview with Eugene Jarvis), I'd give them a go:

Heineman: You’ve created games that have spoken to political or controversial subjects in some interesting and usually funny ways. N.A.R.C. addresses the war on drugs. The Cruis’n series offers all these little send-ups of the American and European landscape and culture. Target Terror lampoons the War on Terror. Smash TV is a parody of the violent entertainment that we have in the culture.

~ Chris Grant highlights the problem with numeric scores in game reviews:

There are a lot of other problems, though, like the focus on the numeric score in a review that a lot of our audience has. That is weird. It’s the focus on that number relative to other numbers that’s especially weird. “This game’s a seven. That game’s an eight. How dare you.” They’re trying to chart the world with a perfect system that is perfectly valid relative to everything, including itself. It’s absolute fucking insanity.

It boggles my mind when a company offers bonuses to its developers based on the Metacritic aggregated score.

~ Edward Castronova raises an interesting point about personal happiness:

I do talk about hedonism, but we have to be really careful when we talk about what’s in somebody’s self-interest. A large part of the problem we have today is that people have goals that don’t necessarily align with their self-interests. This whole discussion is about people selfishly pursuing their goals, but there could be a change where people become aware that their goals really aren’t making them happy. I’ll give you the classic examples of the business executive that gets a job offer in a different city and says, “That’s what I should do.” He goes there and he and his family are miserable, because it turns out happiness depends on having long-run relationships in a single place (all the research shows that).

~ Hehe, that's a good one:

Heineman: (...) This is a common complaint about academia: it is slow in responding to what happens in the game industry, and this is detrimental to its usefulness for that industry.
Castronova: One defense of academia is that it is our job to “get it right,” not to get it “right away.”

(But then Castronova basically defends the hands-on, "show me what you've done" approach.)

[Steve Heglin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superb collection of interviews with industry experts, and professionals from the various fields that video games and gaming culture reaches. I'll admit that this book took me a little while to get into, simply because the introduction and preface were so dry and lengthy. I suspect that this was done to legitimize the book to a more critically-minded, academic audience. My advice: skip the intro and head straight for the interviews; Heineman asks thought-provoking, challenging questions, and knows when to let his interviewees go on and lecture a bit. He actively shapes each conversation so that every interview ends up making a thoughtful statement on gaming culture, or at the very least, brings up games in a context that hasn't yet received a lot of attention.

I especially liked his talks with Nolan Bushnell (creator of Pong and Chuck E. Cheese, who has much to say about the evolution of games as a medium as well as the future of gamification and learning), Edward Castronova (an economist who brings up a lot of important insights as to the often overlooked aspect of virtual economies in games and the market share they represent), and Ian Bogost (a scholar and philosopher who offers a multi-faceted approach to how we ought to move forward in critically analyzing games as a medium, as well as how the future of game studies programs in academia will look).

The collection is curated very well, and by the end Heineman gives some helpful commentary to bring things full-circle. The book functions well as both a text for students in game studies, as well as a casual read for everyday gamers interested in something that digs a little deeper into games as a medium.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this book in a GoodReads giveaway. (Thanks) This book was a little different than what I expected it to be, but I liked it. I was expecting less specific topics regarding gaming. This book examines the history, economy and culture of gaming; most of which I have really not thought too much about. The author of this book interviewed many influential people from within the industry and from different fields within the industry. Not being in the gaming/technology field, there were a few times that I didn't completely understand what was being written about, but I also appreciated that it wasn't being dumbed down in the presentation of information. I would've liked to read more about the neuroscience regarding gaming, music composed for games and some of the more quirky things about gaming culture, but I enjoyed the book.

[The Adventures of a French Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is an interesting book on video games, I would say more for people working in that field. The different interviews give each a good insight in the industry, revealing what is working and what is not, and how it could be improved, how it could evolve, etc.