Christopher Hanson

GAME TIME

Understanding temporality in video games

230pp. Indiana University Press. Paperback. $38.

978 0 253 03286 7

Megan Condis

GAMING MASCULINITY

Trolls, fake geeks, and the gendered battle for online culture

160pp. University of Iowa Press. Paperback, $65.

978 1 60938 565 1

Eric Geissinger

GAMER NATION

The rise of modern gaming and the compulsion to play again

277pp. Prometheus Books. $25.

978 1 63388 379 6

VIDEOGAMES

Design/play/disrupt

Victoria and Albert Museum, London, until February 24

Marie Foulston and Kristian Volsing, editors

VIDEOGAMES

Design/play/disrupt

208pp. V&A. 25 [pounds sterling].

978 1 851 77940 6

"May be now video games will be taken seriously", say Marie Foulston and Kristian Volsing, the editors of Videogames: Design/play/disrupt, a collection of essays commissioned to accompany an exhibition at the V&A in London. Games have never won the cultural recognition other media have--no blockbusting film release has delivered credibility, no high-profile prize has provided legitimacy, and no public endorsement (not even from world leaders) has given videogames authority. It seems that the question is not when games will be taken seriously, but whether they ever will.

One problem is that the case for videogames' importance is often made in numbers the sales figure of a major game versus a Hollywood film's box office takings; the average age of players (some might be surprised that for men it is thirty-two; for women, thirty-six); the number of women who report playing games (45 per cent of American gamers are women, according to the Entertainment Software Association), and so on--as though these figures might bring validation. Not only do statistics fail to counter people's assumptions, they also don't communicate the richness of the medium. Nor do they describe how a good game comes to life in the hands of a player, how the experience of playing can be more immediate and immersive than any other form, how time itself can seem suspended.

To those who have never played, that last point may seem particularly far-fetched but, according to Christopher Hanson, the manipulation of tune is at the heart of the videogame. Game Time: Understanding temporality in video games opens a compelling window onto how designers play with time and how this can drive people to play. "When a person agrees to play a game", Hanson writes, "they effectively consent to subjecting themselves to the limitations of the game", and this includes--as with films and novels--giving oneself over to someone else's sense of time. For Hanson, game designers are primarily artists, and the culmination of their creation comes when the viewer/player achieves "flow", the psychologist Mikahil Csikszentmihalyi's term for maximum productivity and happiness: the optimum mental state experienced by highly successful people when creating their best work (whether a particularly beautiful goal kick or paragraph). The rest of us get a taste of this when we find ourselves in what is colloquially referred to as "the zone": a delicious sense of focus, impervious to all distraction, when truly immersed in a task. Flow is attained when your skill is challenged and you receive enough unambiguous feedback that--somehow--time seems to stand still....