Last week, as part of an ongoing effort to educate me even just a bit about games, Alex lent me Tom Bissell's Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. I've not played many 'proper' video games and most of my relationships with them have been at one remove. By which I mean I've spent a lot more time lazily watching other people play various versions of GTA or Medal of Honor, etc, and offering the occasional unhelpful heckle than I have holding the controller and trying not to crash a bus or blow myself up by accident. I found reading this book to be like an only slightly more distanced version of the same experience. Bissell presents himself as the sort of man who's always got a long-suffering but indulgent girlfriend in the background, rolling her eyes affectionately as he carves up yet another zombie, and this lends his descriptions of the experience of play a kind of abashed self-consciousness. It's as sweetly appealing as he no doubt realised it would be.

For me, Extra Lives provided a kind of structured synthesis of a lot of things I knew or suspected I knew intellectually about games and gaming culture. I found this reassuring; it was quite a cosy read in that sense. Bissell's analysis has a confidence that comes from marrying academic and theoretical insights with an entirely emotional engagement with the pure, instinctual experience of playing games. Indeed, Extra Lives verges on the confessional at times; it's explicitly born of obsession, and not surprisingly this is where his most interesting conflicts of expression lie. Bissell writes about Gears of War and Far Cry 2 in the same way that Antonia Quirke writes about Gerard Depardieu and Christopher Walken. Superlatives pile on superlatives; subjective experience is described in seductive, intricate, loving detail. It doesn't matter if he contradicts himself, if every single game he plays is the most stunning, the most affecting, the most devastating of all of them. It doesn't matter if a game is at the same time the most amazing and the most frustrating. Bissell's haunted by visuals; he describes the art in games in wistful, yearning terms, creating his own images of ethereal, harsh, pure beauty. Aesthetically, at least, most of the games he describes are infinitely, dreamily, heartbreakingly lovely to him. By now, of course, you can tell I find this a very appealing and catching way of writing, but whether or not it is also a problematic way depends on what you want from the book. If you're looking for a personal articulation of the reasons games should be considered culturally and artistically important, you'll find it expressed here in a welter of gorgeous pathos. If you want a comparative or qualitative analysis of what makes games good, it's likely to be less effective.

Anyway, the actual reason Alex lent me the book is that there's also a lot of discussion of the relative importance of narrative in game design. (At least, I think so; although I suppose a desire to inspire me to make a fool of myself trying to play Call of Duty or Mass Effect can't be ruled out completely.) Essentially, part of what Bissell's interested in is the intersection of 'play' and 'story' and the conflicts arising from the (perceived, for the moment at least) insurmountable incompatibility of the two. He considers, for example, Clint Hocking's famous discussion of 'ludonarrative dissonance', (first applied to BioShock but no doubt now in much more general use). He interrogates game developers about the depth of the importance they assign to writing. And he finds himself no more able than any of them to solve the problems games have with narrative and storytelling. This is where it becomes directly relevant to us as we work on Echo Bazaar.

Echo Bazaar isn't a video game; I don't feel particularly pressed to define it in terms of an IF or an RPG or whatever, and I think different people see it in different ways anyway. These discussions are interesting but not always especially helpful. But it is a game, anyway. It's not just a story. You play it, alongside and above the reading of it. It has things in common with video games which make questions about player agency and authorial voice relevant to it in the same or similar ways. There's a couple of pages in Extra Lives about moral decisions affecting NPCs that I wish I'd had to hand when writing about our Comtessa storyline, for example.

I found Extra Lives reassuring in another way, too; it's made me feel that we're quite possibly really on the right track with what we're trying to do with Echo Bazaar. Because we think about things that it turns out matter. This is a ludicrously trite point, probably, for everyone else on the team, but I'm glad to find that the things I personally have been worrying about are not the wrong things.