The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game
Culture, Edited by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson.
With it's bright orange cover, The State of Play immediately announces that overly subtle academiceze will not be in play--though insight and intelligence is widely displayed. This little book contains 13 diverse essays that, as the
title suggests, explores video game culture from the inside.
Forget Fox Channel clichés
about video games causing violence. This issue isn’t ignored; it’s handled in a
sophisticated enough way that, as Cara Ellison and Brendan Keogh write in “The
Joy of Virtual Violence,” “It's the rest of the world that needs to catch up”
(155).
Essays range from straight on commentaries on gender discrimination—a
more critical issue than violence for most gamers—representation of race and
ethnicity, to esoteric explorations of identity, as in Ola Wikander’s “The God
in the Machine”:
“There is an interesting relationship that can be imagined
between this type of Gnostic mythology and the role of the video game player in
relation to the character he or she plays. Just like the fallen human soul
described by Gnostic religions, the video game player steps into a false world
that only exists for as long as one believes in it” (246).
