When I read a new non-fiction book, I hope that it will tell me something I didn't know already (not an unusual occurrence). Even better, I hope it will open for a whole new world I hadn't been aware, or barely aware, existed - but which matters.
I hadn't expected the book Video Game of the Year (Abrams Image, 2023), written by Jordan Minor, to do more than the first. But it did: I came away with a whole new perspective on a big part of our American culture in the last half-century.
It may be less strikingly new to you, if you're a video gamer and especially a gamer of longstanding. I'm not, because of no great desire to spend the time and effort needed to become accomplished at the games (or even learn much about them), not because of any animus toward them. My personal involvement with video games started with Pong and ended with either Space Invaders or Pac-Man (all three are profiled in this book), and after that the games, and the environment around them, became too much effort to attract much of my interest.
That doesn't mean they didn't attract lots of other people, of course; over the years I've known quite a few people who play them, to one degree or another. Some of the most popular games have sold immense numbers of copies, into the hundreds of millions, and some of them (Pokemon go is an example) have burst into the general cultural fabric. (Some years ago we often spotted PG players at a residential intersection near our house, deeply engrossed.) But what effect do they games have? Where did they come from? How have their evolved, and where might they be going? I didn't have much of a handle on any of this.
Minor has neatly filled this gap, for me and probably a lot of other people, through the device of naming a game of the year for (almost) every year since Pong arrived in the late 70s. The selections seem carefully chosen to throw light on the development of video games, not least their variety. If like me you're aware of these games only on the periphery - spotting the occasional ad or box in a store or news story that relates to one of them, often in a negative way - there's a lot to miss.
The variety of the games, for example. I'm tended to associate video games in the last couple of decades with hard-core shoot-em-up (or blow-em-away) violence, but while that is a key part of the picture, there's also much more. Some are gentle and artistic. Some are educational; I'd almost forgotten about Sin City, and had never been aware of many of the spinoffs it generated.
And more generally: What are some of the factors that have made some games immensely popular, while others fall flat? Some useful lessons in consumer preference and economic activity emerge from this. Not to mention some useful dissection of what goes into designing a game, an absorbing subject I'd never much considered.
Then there's the sources of the games. I hadn't realized how dominant, for so many years, developers from Japan were in the field; the corporate field seems to have spread more widely in recent years. I hadn't had much appreciation for the differences in, say, Nintendo and other providers, or how Playstation and XBox fit into the mix. The underlying corporate histories are worth knowing too, given how large some of those organizations have become.
Minor is enough of a good enthusiast to refrain from whitewashing the downsides, which gives me some confidence in his overall perspective. A tip of the hat to his easily-absorbed history, which opened a part of the modern world brand new to me. And maybe you too.