Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo

by Eugene F. Provenzo Jr.

'Video Kids' raises significant questions about the role of video games and their impact on the lives and values of young people. It delivers a mandate to researchers who are investigating ways in which video games can be used in the classroom.

184 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1991

Reviews

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm going to do one of my semester projects on early console gaming, so I'm going to have a lot of books like this on my shelf in the next few months. As far as things go, Video Kids likely won't be too relevant to my project, but it is an interesting read. It's oddly fascinating to see someone so worried about 8-bit video game violence in the face of what came next, and slightly reassuring to see that some of his fears about gaming's inability to consider teamwork have been disproved. For the most part, though, this book is close analysis of several NES games and the way in which culture feeds into them, turning the games into a warped cultural contact point for the kids that play them. Some of the facts presented about the games from the grade schoolers that Provenzo interviews are incorrect, but as Provenzo's focus is on how these games are perceived by young players, this is not a fatal flaw. Plus, it's almost worth reading just for the ultra-serious summary of the movie The Wizard in the introduction.

Video Kids is not a fun book to read in and of itself, but as a historical artifact of early 90s gaming research and analysis, it's quite interesting.

[Claudiu Toma · Rating 2 out of 5]

Absolutely atrocious book. To name but a few of the problems:
1. The majority of the book is comprised of half page citations. This ruins the readability of the book and, more often than not, the citations have only a vague tangential connection to the topic at hand
2. The exact phrase "video games such as Nintendo" appears an ungodly amount of times
3. Choke full of wrong information (such as the mythical "Activision console" which is mentioned several times)
4. The author seems to lack the concept of "target audience" as the book contains an entire chapter criticizing how products specifically designed for young male audiences have an underrepresentation of main female characters
5. Most of the times the author cherry picks negative examples. Never once in this book was it mentioned that the main character in the massively popular game Metroid was female and only lightly brushes the idea of parenthood incompetence/lack of responsibility

The only reason I gave this book 2 stars instead of 1 is because it does indeed contain a couple of interesting bits of information. However, the bad far outweighs the good

[Chandler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good psychological assessment of the phenomenon that was Nintendo back in the mid to late 1980s. Debunks a lot of myths about the linkage between violent video games and aggression in youths. Much of the book is dated, but it provides good perspective of where the rating and censorship movement for video games came from.

[daphny drucilla delight david · Rating 4 out of 5]

im always happy to read books about videogames BEFORE the inside circle jerky established language of videogames existed (using HUMAN words instead of CRUNCHY GAMEPLAY, BLINN PHONG APPROXIMATION, GUI etc)

would have given it five stars but i hate pages and pages of fucking charts i wanted those pages to be filled with more discussion