My eyes have not lingered on a screen or digital display in more than a week - I've been hiding out in the backwoods of B.C. and it has been bliss. Instead of cables and power adapters, the bags have been filled with novels and biographies, making it the perfect time for this space's annual survey of video-game books.
The first roundup was in 2004 and there has been a steady increase in gaming-related books across almost every publishing category since then. You can now find them in business, design and visual arts sections, and more and more Ph.D. theses on games are finding homes at university presses.
The bestsellers, by a wide margin, continue to be the game guides known as walkthroughs. They come out alongside most triple-A games and they are filled with illustrations and maps taking players through each level and secret passage. When a game becomes a hit, so do the guides - they can sell hundreds of thousands of copies in a matter of months - but you wouldn't pack one for a trip. Here are some that did make that cut, and feel free to send your suggested reading lists to the e-mail address above.
Fiction
Wander into the science-fiction aisle at a bookstore and on the final few shelves, past Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, you will now find mass-market paperbacks devoted to game franchises.
There are series for heavyweights such as Halo and Command & Conquer, but the one that caught my eye is for a game that will not appear for another few months: Drew Karpyshyn's Mass Effect: Revelation (Del Rey) is a prequel to Mass Effect, the game, which is currently being developed by Alberta's Bioware Corp. The game promises to be a sprawling role-playing experience, with branching storylines involving outer-space mysteries and thousands of lines of dialogue.
Karpyshyn, a staff writer for Bioware, uses Revelation to establish a full back-story for those events - humanity taking its first steps into a universe populated by sometimes nasty aliens - but he does so very awkwardly. The idea of a prequel for a complex game is a great one, but this is such a rough read that it started to dampen my enthusiasm for the interactive narrative it is supposed to set up - probably not the intention, so my advice is to wait for the game.
Back in the bookstore and further up that SF aisle, there are usually a colourful row of excellent novels by Iain M. Banks. The prolific Scottish author also regularly dips into literary fiction and his latest in that vein has a video-game angle: The Steep Approach to Garbadale (Little Brown) tells the story of the Wopuld family, which earned its fortune from a game called Empire. The family is gathering in the Scottish highlands to decide whether to sell out to Spraint Corp., a fictional console maker, and to deal with many skeletons in the closet.
Banks uses Empire, which started out as a board game before going digital, to mirror the decline of the splintering clan. Video games in this context are no longer part of the communal glue that holds families together, as their tabletop counterparts often were. It's interesting stuff, though the topical gaming content does fade away later in the book when those skeletons start falling on the rotting Wopulds.
Non-fiction
The past few years have produced piles of books on both sides of the games-are-good, games-are-bad debate. The best theory book I found this year, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press) by Ian Bogost, will give plenty of ammunition to both sides.
Bogost creates and writes about serious games, seemingly simple diversions that deliver educational, political and advertising content alongside entertainment. In Persuasive Games, he offers an academic but accessible introduction to their potential, and it is very meaty reading for anybody interested in where the interactive arts meet real-world topics.
Finally, a coffee-table book that is a guaranteed conversation starter for generations who spent part of their youth pumping quarters into arcade machines: Twin Galaxies' Official Video Game & Pinball Book of World Records; Arcade Volume, Second Edition. Walter Day, who wears a referee jersey to many video-game competitions, self-published this exhaustive, 758-page collection of arcade high scores: Frogger, Pac-Man, Galaga - every game, it seems, that was ever made. Day and co-editor Kelly Flavin include rules, anecdotes, profiles of top champions and places for fans to get those masters' autographs, a nice touch.
The book, which is available through twingalaxies.com, also happens to be the best companion to a documentary that is now making the art-house rounds: King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters features Day and a duo of arcade legends vying for the Donkey Kong high score. It's highly entertaining - if you're into watching things on screens.
