Print Screen: "This Gaming Life"

A three-city tour full of questions
7/31/2008 6:22 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 3

"This Gaming Life" opens with author Jim Rossignol getting fired. Not that he seemed to mind, much. Like many game journalists, Rossignol left a boring but better-paying job for the glories of press tours, LAN parties and driver updates. But the title and opening are a little misleading, since the gaming life Rossignol is talking about isn't his own, but this generation's. His book is a short but engaging meditation on what games mean to us, to our culture and to our times.

Well, it's not as boring as all that. "This Gaming Life" is a travelogue of Rossignol's experiences in London, Seoul and Reykjavik with each city spurring him to new observations about games and gamers. In an email conversation, Rossignol emphasized how central the travel writing is to the book.

"More than anything it came down to making the book easy to read. I could have delivered 80,000 words of impenetrable ruminations on the meaning of games, but for now I want to remain lighthearted and readable. My first book about videogames is one that my mother can read, and I'm proud of that. The three cities: London, Seoul and Reykjavik, are ones that don't get a great deal of press in gaming literature. All eyes have been on the United States or Tokyo. I wanted to change that."

Just like in Tim Guest's "Second Lives," a book Rossignol cites as an influence, this book comes most alive when the author travels to Seoul, a city that many gamers like to imagine as a glimpse into the future of gaming. It's social, it's mainstream, and professional real-time strategy players are treated almost like real athletes. Rossignol is less bullish about the future of professional, communal gaming in the West, because he traces the Korean gaming style to peculiarities in the evolution of its infrastructure; high-speed Internet connections spread more widely and quickly than high-powered computers, so the baang café culture made sense.

Because Rossignol is a more experienced gamer than Guest was when he wrote his book, "This Gaming Life" has much less of an emphasis on how strange different places are and a greater interest in the place of games in people's lives. And it's clearly not intended to be much more than a book where the author works out some of his own issues from the perspective with which he is most familiar. Take for example, his waffling on the general purpose of games. He starts with the simple premise that games are really about relieving boredom, and not much more. But the more he sees, the more open he becomes to the idea that games have transformative cultural power. It's a tension he never fully resolves in the book and still hasn't in his own mind.

"I think how it gets resolved is integral to what the future of games will be," says Rossignol. "I could try to get all philosophical about it, but I think the most pragmatic thing to say is that we've not come up with our best descriptions of games and gaming yet."

This tension is, in fact, central to the book's success. This Gaming Life is as much a trip through Rossignol's thought processes as it is through three cities. As a self-described advocate for the PC as a gaming platform ("Or, perhaps more accurately, I'm an advocate of the Internet as a gaming platform."), you won't see Rossignol do an in-depth analysis of the console wars or Sony's failed business strategy. And his PC focus means that this is the platform where he finds that gaming has the greatest potential.