Comput Game J (2015) 4:187–188 DOI 10.1007/s40869-015-0014-8 BOOK REVIEW
Rachel Kowert, Thorsten Quandt (eds): The Video Game Debate—Unravelling the Physical, Social and Psychological Effects of Digital Games Taylor & Francis (unpublished proof), ISBN 978-1-138-83160-5 (hbk), 978-1-138-83163-6 (pbk), 978-1-315-73649-5 (ebk) Michael Heron1 Published online: 30 November 2015 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
The Video Game Debate is an important and timely contribution to the selfreflective literature on video games. It consists of a series of immaculately referenced, in-depth articles covering a wide range of topics. These include video game communities; violence and moral panic; and the ability of games to offer opportunities for deep learning via extended participation. Each of the chapters represents, in the main, a well written review that is a substantive synthesis of the key literature on a topic. These offer deep and insightful commentaries on major trends in video game research. On that basis alone, I can recommend it as a core text for those looking to appreciate some the complexity of these rich and vibrant topics. The quality of the scholarship is uniformly high, and while the chapters suffer already from being somewhat out of date, that’s perhaps inevitable in a field that is as fast paced as this one. However, it is not a flawless book—perhaps its most significant weakness is that there is little in it to justify the title. While the topics discussed are genuinely contentious, the treatments offered tend to skew the reader towards the ‘right’ conclusion from the evidence. These are not objective, unbiased discussions regardless of what the authors may have intended. That’s unsurprising given the nature of the topic, but one wonders whether an alternate format for the book might have lived up to its potential. There are elements in each of the chapters that emphasise or contradict others but I would have liked to have seen that model adopted more forcefully and formally. It seems a missed opportunity—if each of the key topics had been put forward in a pair of adversarial essays, perhaps each
& Michael Heron
[email protected] 1
School of Computing Science and Digital Media, Robert Gordon University, Garthdee House, Garthdee Road, Aberdeen AB10 7QB, UK
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stemming from a shared literature review, then a greater proportion of these topics could have been meaningfully explored. As it stands, I find rather little in this to warrant the phrase ‘debate’, as even the disagreements that rage within several of the topics are largely smoothed over by the time we reach the conclusion. A notable subversion of this is in the chapter on video game violence, which should be required reading of anyone looking to make any hyperbolic, simplistic pronouncement on the relationship between violence in video games and the wider societal context in which video games exist. There are several important themes running through the chapters—primarily that of the difficulty of analysis when working across disciplines. It is hard to draw robust conclusions when not only the methodologies but the data gathering procedures may be wildly incompatible. This in turn leads to the key weakness in many of the chapters, and ironically the likely source of the ‘debate’ within the book. Much of the evidence as presented is couched in corollary, pointing out small sample numbers, the ‘preliminary’ nature of conclusions, and the difficulty of extrapolating from the laboratory to the real world. This is addressed and acknowledged by the book itself, but it is a shallow kind of debate that can find its only real expression in conditional language and shrouded prevarication. Another key theme of the book, and an important observation, is that we should be wary of work that comes from a fixed perspective—that we should be careful our own biases don’t flavour our conclusions with expectation or assumption. Ironically, I think the book would have benefitted a great deal if it had been less willing to take its own advice on this. The treatments are competent but the book could have offered more genuine enlightenment if it had been more willing to focus on areas of dispute rather than synthesis of material. Regardless of these reservations, I recommend the book highly as a series of introductory essays on contentious claims within gaming. It is of use to experienced scholars looking for an easy reference point, but also to those looking to probe deeper through the exploration of the richly referenced material.
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