Contents
Introduction. Nobody Asked for a Toaster Critic: Doing Videogame
Criticism
1. The Squalid Grace of Flappy Bird
2. A Portrait of the Artist as a Game Studio: Flow, Flower,
Journey
3. A Way of Looking: Mirror's Edge
4. The Blue Shell is Everything that’s Wrong with America: Mario
Kart
5. Little Black Sambo, I’m Going to Eat You Up!: Scribblenauts
6. Can a Gobbler Have it All?: Ms. Pac-Man
7. Racketeer Sports: Farmville, Candy Crush Saga, and Free to
Play
8. The Haute Couture of Videogames: Hundreds
9. Can the Other Come Out and Play?: Between and Way
10. Free Speech is not a Marketing Plan: Bully and Medal of
Honor
11. Shaking the Holocaust Train: Manhunt, Train, and Gestural
Control
12. The Long Shot: Heavy Rain
13. Puzzling the Sublime: Orbital & Drop7
14. Work is the Best Place to Goof Off: Flight Simulator, Euro
Truck Simulator, and the New Simulation
15. A Trio of Artisanal Reviews: Proteus
16. What is a Sports Videogame?: FIFA, Madden, and More
17. The Agony of Mastery: Swing Copters
18. The Abyss Between the Human and the Alpine: Mountain
19. Word Games Last Forever: Words with Friends
20. Perpetual Adolescence: Gone Home
Conclusion. Anything But Games: Not Doing Game Criticism
Notes
Ian Bogost is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author of many books, including How to Do Things with Videogames and Alien Phenomenology: Or, What It's Like to Be a Thing(both Minnesota), as well as Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism and Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. He is the award-winning game designer of A Slow Year, Cow Clicker, and more.
"This is Ian Bogost at his best. Keen intelligence, acid wit, and a
restless desire to look beyond the surface and tease out games’
less obvious, more important meanings."—Frank Lantz, director, NYU
Game Center"No one else is as wide-ranging, funny, or inspiringly
immune to cant or groupthink as Ian Bogost. How to Talk about
Videogames is his most accessible and entertaining book yet."—Tom
Bissell, author of Extra Lives and Apostle*"Ian Bogost can take
apart a game’s design and tell you exactly what makes it work and
what it means to us personally and to our game-playing society. How
to Talk about Videogames has deep insights into a range of current
topics we are dealing with or experiencing today. There’s a lot
here to learn."—John Romero, veteran game creator
"If you want an engaging, enjoyable tour of the video game
commentary in 2015 conducted by a smart and entertaining writer,
you’d be hard-pressed to do much better than How to Talk about
Videogames by Ian Bogost. "—Boston Globe"Whether Bogost is
examining old favorites like Ms. Pac-Man or scrutinizing a
flash-in-the-pan app like Flappy Bird, his outlook is thoughtful,
inquisitive, and amused."—Game On"Bogost embraces the
preposterousness and paradox of games as both consumer products and
art, and in running with that tension he offers a compelling method
of understanding and writing about them."—Gamechurch.com"[How to
Talk about Videogames] has already proven indispensable to those of
us interested in how video games have become such a vital artistic
medium."—Electronic Literature"Ian Bogost’s How to Talk About
Videogames isn’t just a book about games—it’s a book about
criticism, and where it fits in our wider culture. Bogost is the
rare academic writer whose work is as clear and exciting as the
best of the mainstream, and whose critical exercises backfire by
becoming enormous commercial/popular successes."—Boing Boing
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