Product Description

This text offers a methodology for the interpretation of a major popular phenomenon. Arthur Asa Berger, a scholar of popular culture, explores the cultural significance of the expanding popularity and sophistication of video games. Broad-ranging in his approach, he considers the biological and psychoanalytic aspects of this phenomenon.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2576604 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 119 pages

Customer Reviews

Not for True Scholars of Video Games
As a scholar of video game research and a graduate student in Anthropology I was extremely curious and happy to get a copy of this book to include in my library. I was however extremely disappointed. This book presented numerous problems and oversights of video games in general. Although there are many areas covered, none of them are covered in any serious depth or scholarly attention. Too often, Berger makes personal comments (typically negative) without backing them up. When comparing books to video games and other narrative forms, he really splits hairs in trying to bring out differences. His compartmentalization on the subject is extremely artificial and disturbing. The typos and spelling errors are enough to keep a reader frustrated. Even if you are not a scholar of video games, I would not recommend this book. There are numerous other books out there that are better written and look at video games on a much more even level.

Nothing really new here...
As scholar of popular culture, I was understandably curious to see what Berger had to say. Unfortunately, I came away disapointed. This is a book that has a few good points, some problematic points as well as some parts that are pretty uninteresting; however, Berger has done his research. He cites several interesting sources, and for that fact alone it is worth checking out.

Berger goes into some great depth comparing video games to books and of course, as so often the case, he finds video games lacking. He discussed the things that books can do, such as identification, interiority, leaving things up to the imagination of the reader, and stops by saying that video games do none of these things as well. He neglects to discuss any of the things that video games do better than books, which is an odd omission considering that this book is about video games, not books...

While I disagree with many of his conclusions, Berger does do a good job of going over many of the general issues of studying video games. I feel that one might be better served by photocopying his bibliography and tracking down his sources, but as in introduction and overview it does a good job. The production of the book is a bit shoddy as I found numerous spelling errors and problems with the formatting which distracted from the message of the book. This is not a bad book, but it is not a great book. If you are already a video game scholar, I don't know that you will find anything interesting in this book. If you are interested in studying video games in an academic way, read Trigger Happy by Steven Poole instead.

Book Sorely Lacking
The back of this book says that it begins with the tracing of the evolution of video games. However, any book that includes a history of games and doesn't include the names Baer, Bushnell, and Atari, is sorely lacking. Also, it would have been nice had Berger read the two definitive books on video games; Leonard Herman's Phoenix: The Fall & Rise of Videogames and Steven Kent's Ultimate History of Video Games. Instead, his source was J.C. Herz's Joystick Nation, a book that has been poorly received by the video gaming community.