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katiehicks's review
2.0
2.5 stars
A book about such a new and rapidly evolving medium was always bound to age very quickly, so my critisim of this book isn't necessarily that there are so many games today which disprove the central thesis that all games are based in some way or another on ancient mythological storytelling. Although I found this argument really interesting, and I found it broken down into compelling points, I kept thinking about newer games which I wish he would have had the chance to comment on. But again, it isn't the fault of the book or the author that this medium has changed so quickly.
My issues with the "aging" of this book have to do with the somewhat sexist language. Not only are the pronouns "he/him" almost universily applied to "generic gamer", but the only time female gamers are brought up at all is when Kelman says little girls might like the cute (and pink) Kirby games. I was willing to overlook this as just being the product of outdated philosophies in academic writing, but when I got to the section on "fetisished female protagonists" I just couldn't. At first, I was so excited about this section, and I was hopeful that title of the section implied that the discussion would center the probelmatic nature of a lot of early female character designs. Instead, the whole section is only a few pages, and questions (but never answers) why male gamers would be so drawn to these characters, and not only want to look at them, but to be them. This whole section and not a single mention of female gamers. Not even a passing sentence implying their existence. No clue that they might have different opinions of these character designs. At that point, it was pretty clear that the sexist writing was not just the result of the times, but in the author not considering women at all. I was not expecting a feminist discourse, but to not include female gamers at all seemed like an oversight which could quickly invalidate a lot of his arguments. It was the same with queer gamers, and gamers of color. Although there is the briefest mention that most video game protagonists are white men with dark hair, this was never really unpacked.
My other big complaint about this book was, randomly enough, its physical construction. The full page illustrastions were really cool, but they broke up the text in weird ways that made it difficult to read sometimes. Plus, there were parts where a page would end mid-sentence, and the rest of the sentence was no where to be found. More than once, it was obvious either a page was missing (though the page numbers were all acounted for, so it wasn't just a page torn out in my copy), or a section had been deleted. Thankfully, this almost always happened at the very end of a chapter, so I never missed out on the argument, but it was really sloppy and distracting.
A book about such a new and rapidly evolving medium was always bound to age very quickly, so my critisim of this book isn't necessarily that there are so many games today which disprove the central thesis that all games are based in some way or another on ancient mythological storytelling. Although I found this argument really interesting, and I found it broken down into compelling points, I kept thinking about newer games which I wish he would have had the chance to comment on. But again, it isn't the fault of the book or the author that this medium has changed so quickly.
My issues with the "aging" of this book have to do with the somewhat sexist language. Not only are the pronouns "he/him" almost universily applied to "generic gamer", but the only time female gamers are brought up at all is when Kelman says little girls might like the cute (and pink) Kirby games. I was willing to overlook this as just being the product of outdated philosophies in academic writing, but when I got to the section on "fetisished female protagonists" I just couldn't. At first, I was so excited about this section, and I was hopeful that title of the section implied that the discussion would center the probelmatic nature of a lot of early female character designs. Instead, the whole section is only a few pages, and questions (but never answers) why male gamers would be so drawn to these characters, and not only want to look at them, but to be them. This whole section and not a single mention of female gamers. Not even a passing sentence implying their existence. No clue that they might have different opinions of these character designs. At that point, it was pretty clear that the sexist writing was not just the result of the times, but in the author not considering women at all. I was not expecting a feminist discourse, but to not include female gamers at all seemed like an oversight which could quickly invalidate a lot of his arguments. It was the same with queer gamers, and gamers of color. Although there is the briefest mention that most video game protagonists are white men with dark hair, this was never really unpacked.
My other big complaint about this book was, randomly enough, its physical construction. The full page illustrastions were really cool, but they broke up the text in weird ways that made it difficult to read sometimes. Plus, there were parts where a page would end mid-sentence, and the rest of the sentence was no where to be found. More than once, it was obvious either a page was missing (though the page numbers were all acounted for, so it wasn't just a page torn out in my copy), or a section had been deleted. Thankfully, this almost always happened at the very end of a chapter, so I never missed out on the argument, but it was really sloppy and distracting.
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