Download Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter AudioBook Free
Tom Bissell is a prizewinning article writer who shared three broadly acclaimed books prior to the get older of thirty-four. He is also an obsessive gamer who has spent untold hours before his various gaming consoles, playing headings such as Much Cry 2, Remaining 4 Dead, BioShock, and Oblivion for, basically, days. If you're scanning this flap copy, the same thing often will be said of you, or of someone you understand.
Until just lately, Bissell was slightly reluctant to say that to his enthusiasm for games. With this, he is not by yourself. Millions of parents spend hours weekly playing video gaming, and the industry itself now reliably outearns Hollywood. However the wider culture appears to regard video gaming as, at best, well designed if mindless entertainment.
Extra Lives can be an impassioned defense of the assailed and misinterpreted art form. Bissell argues that people are in a golden age of games—but he also believes games could be even better. He offers a remarkable and often amusing critique of the ways video gaming dazzle and, just normally, frustrate. Along the way, we get firsthand portraits of among the better heads (Jonathan Blow, Clint Hocking, Cliff Bleszinski, Peter Molyneux) at the job in gaming design today, as well as a shattering and deeply moving final chapter that describes, in searing information, Bissell’s descent in to the world of Grand Fraud Auto IV, a casino game whose styles mirror his own significantly self-destructive compulsions.
Blending memoir, criticism, and first-rate reportage, Extra Lives is like no other reserve on the subject ever shared. Whether you love video gaming, loathe video gaming, or are merely curious about why they are becoming the prominent popular art form of our time, Extra Lives is required reading.
