Configurations

Aaron A. Toscano's newest book, Video Games and American Culture, is an excellent, wide-ranging text discussing two important aspects of game studies. The first concept Toscano explores is the narrative and ludological¹ systems present in immersive digital text (or, by their popular moniker, video games). This type of criticism is both well-known and informative, appearing in works from various authors like Jesper Juul, Ian Bogost, and Henry Jenkins, amongst numerous others. The second concept, for which Toscano deserves immense credit, and which tends to aim his text toward a different target than that of his aforementioned contemporaries, is his tendency to denote the cultural origin (and resultant impact) of themes, ideas, concepts, characters, and metaphors that inhabit his chosen medium of video games.

Video Games and American Culture takes a survey-based approach, not necessarily digging extraordinarily deeply into any one particular topic, but rather serving to examine a large quantity of them in adequate detail. The examined topics include a dissection of the ongoing debate about violence in gaming (and its increasingly tenuous link to societal decay and/or crime, found in chapter 2); games as political scapegoat (and the tendency of politicians to gravitate to and employ the same spectacles video games employ as marketing tools instead as weapons of cultural criticism, the subject of chapter 3); and, as in the title of Toscano's chapter 6, "Games and the Neoliberal Hero," classic systems of heroism and protagonist character development described through the lens of monster theory and literary inversion. Toscano should be credited for giving each of these various topics adequate space within the text while maintaining his evidently broader goal of examining (as the book's title indicates) video games and American culture.

It can be readily envisioned that, in pedagogy, this text would function superbly as an introductory text for a games studies course, offering a strong yet succinct rebuttal [End Page 190] of the common refrain that typically positions itself against such course offerings, essentially some version of "Video games don't matter," "Video games are unserious," or "Video games are not worth scholarly resources." Toscano's tendency to relate both game mechanics and motifs to real-world events, offering incisive political commentary alongside that of well-established scholars in the field, demonstrates—even to the lay reader, or the video game newcomer—that game texts do indeed matter as much as classical literature. At no point, it must be noted, does Toscano veer into territory that feels "defensive" of video games scholarship; rather, by approaching the topic in an organized, documented, well-sequenced manner, he generates powerful ethos to the existence of the argument's position itself.

I particularly enjoyed, and found particularly useful, his first chapter, titled "Approaches to Video Game Studies." This chapter acts as a strong framing device for the text itself, including, in about 12 pages, a dissection of other invaluable games scholarship from primary names like the aforementioned Juul and Bogost, as well as Simon Egenfeldt-Nielson, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares. In this author's opinion, this section should be required reading for anyone seeking to add a games scholarship course to their own institution, as the discussions herein range from procedural rhetoric (in light of the Iraq War from early in the millennium) to a discussion of the same concept within everything from Tomb Raider to The Sims to, as Bogost examines, Madame Bovary. Toscano takes care to situate each critique of his chosen literature within a broader context of cultural import, including feminist critique, classism, and racism. On page 31, for example, he notes, during a discussion of Jesper Juul's Half Real (2011): "Unfortunately, Juul's work does not even hint at negative cultural values such as racism, classism, sexism, etc. Focusing on rules and procedures are an important component, but they do not address the ways culture influences these 'fictional worlds' or the characters in them" (31). Toscano repeatedly notes these...