Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Book Review: More than a game, the computer games as fictional form (03 Sep 2004) If you chose to work with computer games within academia in the nineties, you always had a dual purpose: to show what an interesting medium games are, and to prove that they are worthy of critical reading and scholarly attention. Looking for literature to cite and to quote was a struggle, and a thesis would be a patchwork, dealing as much with the possible usefulness of theory developed for other media as with the actual critical reading of the games. The book we were all looking for would contain a clear, precise and deceptively simple reading of a variety of games, something we could point to, disagree with or use to underline and expand our points, no matter what kind of computer-mediated games we were working with. The book we were looking for was More Than a Game, and Barry Atkins wrote it. More Than a Game is a small, manageable work, in which Atkins presents his reading of four very different games. Starting out with Lara Croft, he reads single-user games, adventure, first person shooters and strategy games. The games he focuses on are Tomb Raider, Half-Life, Close Combat and SimCity. They span the range from fantasy by way of history to simulated present, and cover some of the most prominent genres of commercial single-user computer and video games in the nineties. Atkins' reading of these games is tight. He has chosen to approach the games within the framework of literary theory, and he maintains his focus. Each game is seen clearly, and the presentation and interpretation of the games indicate that Barry Atkins has spent quite a bit of time at each type of game. The comparisons between interfaces are clear and cleverly observed, but perhaps the best observations in the book have to do with the reading of computer games as cultural artefacts, and the restrictions and options of the games read as significant expressions of the dominant paradigm. From the reading of SimCity: The bottom line that can never be forgotten in SimCity is budget control and fiscal probity. Indulge in too many utopian impulses, and, unless you access the cheats and keep replenishing your 'simoleons', you will go bankrupt, your city will fall into decline and you will fail. Rather than the single 'no' of Lara Croft, we will be subject to a long line of petitioners complaining about where we have gone wrong. In particular, truly radical departures from the American model of consumer capitalism are simply not allowed for - the car remains king, you must go through a period of heavy industrial production which inevitably pollutes before you can concentrate on service industries or high-tech, low-impact industries, the skyscrapers still offer the most desirable vision of appropriate land-use, and there is a core progressivism that, despite the environmentalist concerns built into the game, drives the game ever onwards towards 'bigger', 'better', 'newer'. (Atkins 2003:129). Article URL: http://tekka.net/06/?Game Read 60 more articles from Tekka sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Book Review: Transmetropolitan, Volume 10: "One More Time."     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy