Book review: Extra Lives: why video games matter

I just finished reading Extra Lives: why video games matter by Tom Bissell. It is a curious book: part gamer memoir, part behind-the-scenes interviews at various game studios and part ponderance on the medium of video games. Bissell’s love of video games is obvious and infectious and his reminisces about playing various games are entertaining. The fun of games is obviously primarily in the playing, but there is also satisfaction to be found in analyzing how they work and why they affect you the way they do. I am not sure that Bissell answers the question he references in the title though and the various chapters don’t form a whole that is greater than its parts. Anyone not already interested in games is unlikely to be converted by this book, but then again: these people would not be reading the book to begin with. Gamer enthusiasts who pick up Extra Lives will likely smile in recognition at well-worded observations, but are unlikely to learn anything new.

Being a writer, Bissell is mostly fascinated by the narrative possibilities and limitations of video games. You can tell a beautifully crafted, carefully paced story, but this will tend to severely limit the freedom the players have to create their own experience. The more you allow them to shape their own narrative, the more unforeseen variables come into play, meaning you have to loosen your grip on plotting and pacing. There is an ever-present tension between narrative control and player-induced chaos. The book doesn’t provide a solution to this conundrum, as there doesn’t seem to be one. Still, it is an interesting topic which resurfaces a few times and is discussed at length.

Conclusion: if you are a gamer who has a candle or flashlight at hand during a power outage, this is a very good book to keep you busy until you can fire up your pc or console again.

Book Review: Sex at Dawn

The Savage Love podcast pointed me to the book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. It takes a critical look at traditional assumptions about men and women and their actual behavior when it comes to sex and relationships. If monogamous marriage is the ideal, then why does it fail with such alarming frequency and make even a lot of the people who stick with it unhappy?

The book provides the following answer: men and women are not naturally monogamous and centuries of being in denial about this has culturally put our psyche and sex drives through the wringer. The authors quite convincingly posit that scientists throughout the centuries have been guilty of ‘Flinstonization’: projecting their opinions into the past and distorting things to make them fit the worldview of their own era, which generally was seen as far superior. For instance: primitive (‘savage’) cavemen were supposed to have lived short and violent lives. Likely not true: since groups of hunter-gatherers had large areas to forage, with a plentiful supply of food, there would have been no need for violence. The short life-span is a statistical distortion caused by adding child mortality into the total average, dragging the life expectancy of adults way down. A very similar thing happened with the calculation of how tall people used to be thousands of years ago: not as big of a difference as is now generally assumed. We did not come as ‘far’ as we may want to think.

The pop culture cliché of a caveman dragging a woman into his cave by her hair is baseless. The authors theorize (again, quite convincingly) that it is far more likely that men and women lived in a sort of commune, on equal footing if not in a matriarchy, in which both men and women had various sexual partners at any one time and raised children together. The fact that it wasn’t clear who the father was in any given case, meant the children belonged to the group as a whole and everyone felt responsible for them. There are some interesting indicators for this. Why, for instance, do men generally last a lot shorter in the sack than women, the man needing recuperation when the woman is just getting warmed up? And why are women a lot more vocal than men, as if to call attention (and maybe further partners) to the activity going on, even if in the wild this would have been at the risk of attracting predators as well? And at the risk of getting too graphic: why are the heads of penises designed to suction out the semen previous partners may have left behind and why does semen have elements in it that would neutralize that of another man while protecting the own team from one that might drop by shortly after? This kind of sperm competition is generally seen in polygamous species.

The coming of agriculture and personal possessions to be passed on ‘within the family’ changed a lot of things and not in a good way: to make sure the children doing the inheriting were not ‘bastards’, women suddenly needed to be controlled, their sexuality vilified or simply denied. Masturbation – a natural and even (by current research) healthy drive – was seen as Evil for centuries, through various forms of rationalization by some deeply twisted ‘scientists’. Reading the chapters about this, you can’t help but feel angry at the physical and mental torture people went through in the name of pious morality.

That’s not to say the authors end the book with a plea for us all to run into the woods and resume living in communes like those we lived in thousands of years ago. Culturally speaking, in any case, we are too far removed from those roots. But they point out that society has expectations that run contrary to our natural drives and that this has to be acknowledged if nothing else. Being honest about our drives and feelings can actually help marriages and save people a lot of heartache.

Example of a relationship going horribly wrong: a woman may fall in love and couple up with one type of guy while on the pill, go off the pill to get pregnant and then find her hormones uninterested in her partner but interested in an entirely different type of guy. Often by this time there will be a marriage and kids to deal with. Meanwhile, her partner may feel frustrated by his lack of sexual variety and lose sexual interest in his wife. Happiness does not ensue.

Sex at Dawn is a fascinating read and I have just scratched the surface in this review. (For instance, I didn’t get to mention that, while lesbians, gays and straight men have a generally pretty fixed sexuality past the formative age, (mostly-)straight women’s sexual response turns out to be highly unpredictable and all over the map. And don’t get me started on the Bonobo’s…) The book is written in a very accessible way and though the middle bit feels just a touch dry compared to the rest, there is humor and a large amount of interesting factoids to keep you reading. (Random quote: ‘Darwin says your mother’s a whore.’) Sex is not always the big deal it is made out to be and confusing love and sex can lead to dramatic complications for all involved. Open discussion is key. So: discuss. This book makes an excellent starting point for that.

Note: The paperback edition of Sex at Dawn will be published in June.

(Written for the ABC Blog.)

Book Review: Under the Dome

Dome Spells Doom for Dum-Dums

Stephen King’s latest, Under the Dome, is a massive literary achievement, at least in actual size. At over a thousand pages, this book can sprain wrists over a prolonged reading session and fracture skulls when wielded with evil intent. It’s not King’s longest work, at least if you count his multi-volume Dark Tower saga as a continuous story, but it’s a long-term commitment for the reader all the same. On the American cover, thriller writer Lee Child blurbs: ‘The Best Yet, From the Best Ever’. While calling King the ‘best ever’ is in the realm of outright silly hyperbole, the question remains: is this King’s crowning glory?

Well, not quite, but at least it comes within a Green Mile of being it. The concept is as follows: an invisible barrier – a ‘dome’, if you will – plonks down over one of those small, typically American towns King loves to write about. From there on, things swiftly proceed to hell in a hand basket. After the first death toll (a plane and multiple cars crash into it, people and animals get sliced in two), unwise behavior of people under pressure soon leads to more fatalities. Then the semi-permeable barrier starts to cloud up because of pollution, the temperature slowly begins to rise under it and the clock is clearly ticking for all those who are trapped.

The major catalyst for most things Bad are selectman/used car salesman ‘Big’ Jim Rennie and his son. The first stops at nothing to gain control over the town as soon as external authorities are cut off, the second is just plain psychotic. The most important players on the side of Good are former military man/cook Dale Barbara and Julia Shumway, owner of the local newspaper. They have to find a way to counter ‘Big’ Jim, while at the same time figuring out what is keeping the dome in place and how to make it go away. Complicating matters, especially in the second half of the book, is a meth lab which also ends up getting locked in.

As almost every review has pointed out – a little gleefully – Stephen King must have been annoyed when this exact concept (‘small American town caught under see-through dome’) played out in The Simpsons Movie for laughs. King has claimed that it doesn’t bother him though, as the execution of the idea was completely unlike his version. King definitely came up with it earlier: 25 years ago he already took a stab at the first chapter for the book – which he actually used this time around, mostly intact – but he gave up because he didn’t know how to make it work.

He does make it work this time around, though it’s not a complete success-story. First, the good. As always, King’s prose should come with racing stripes painted on the side. You are sped along, invested in the characters and interested to see what will happen next. There is always something exciting going on, so you don’t really ‘feel’ the length of the story, except in actual weight in your hands. There is the occasional duff, awkward line or simile but those are quickly passed by and forgotten. All of this is true of most of King’s books, whether he is going for straight-up horror or something more cerebral and literary. The basic set-up of Good versus Evil while under the assault of some overarching bad situation is also typical King. There isn’t a whole lot of moral grey area in the book: people are pretty much bad or good, with only a few stragglers lingering in the middle. Interestingly, there are a lot of Jesus-lovin’, Bible-thumpin’ hypocrites on the bad side.

As a deeper allegory for the True Nature of Humanity or for global warming, Under the Dome doesn’t quite hit the bull’s-eye. King cheats too much with the specifics of the town that is portrayed. When it comes to keeping the action going, he probably was wise in having someone truly, insidiously Evil under the dome to speed up the decline of civilization, but psychologically more interesting might have been a slower slide into decay of a more morally ambiguous crowd. He cheats on the environmental aspect by having a meth lab complicate things, instead of stewing people in a prolonged local simulation of global warming. More grey area and a longer time-frame could have made for a more profound – if slower – story.

A general criticism of King tends to be that the denouements of his books don’t live up to the skilful build-up. Unfortunately, the same goes for this one. Without getting into specifics or spoiling too much: for a large part of the book, things seem to be building up to a direct confrontation between Rennie, Barbie and their respective posse. Though there are some scuffles and casualties, the two main men never really face off. The ultimate explanation for the dome is also a bit vague and silly but ultimately irrelevant to the meat of the story: human behavior under extreme circumstances.

Is it the best of King? Probably not. I prefer him a bit more creepy and my personal favorite is still It, which scared the pants of me, admittedly when I was a lot younger. And he has written books with more depth to them. But it is definitely a very entertaining read and should not be passed up by anyone who fancies sinking his mind into a big chunk of blood-speckled suspense.