All Your Base are Belong to Us is an interview driven account of the rise of videogames. Each chapter focuses on a small set of key figures or companies and tells their story in a manner that reminds me of long form pieces in the Washington Post's Business section. I don't think it breaks new ground when it comes to well known feature such as Nintendo's Miyamoto, but most of the industry does not hold such a celebrity status so I learned more even about companies and designers I'm quite familiar with. For those that aren't newcomers to games journalism, I'd recommend skimming the selected notes chapter in the back to determine which chapters are most likely to be of interest based on who is interviewed.
On the downside, the prose of the book was more likely to push me away than draw me in. It often has an overly-familiar style that can be tricky to pull off, particularly when the videogame invoked emotions and sentiments described in first persons passages didn't tend to match my experience with the games in question. Similarly, while I think Goldberg is probably dead on when he emphasizes the importance of salesmanship by indie game designers, I didn't come away from the book bustling with new ideas or with a notably different take on videogames. He also sometimes falls into the trap up game triumphalism, while he willing to critique the widely acknowledged failures of those he interviews, his description of the strong points of their successes tends to be unalloyed. Picking an example from near the end of the book, his write-up of Shadow Complex makes no mention of the controversy regarding Orson Scott Card. A long discussion was not necessary, but the subtitle of the book is "How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture," the boycott attempt driven by a reaction to Card's social conservative activism seems well within its purview.
So in short, I think this book is a best fit for those curious about the corporate and entrepreneurship side of things; that have a lot of interest but a little information about some of the games and companies profiled; or that enjoy Harold Goldberg's prose in his online game journalism. Those primarily interested in games criticism should probably look elsewhere, although I'm grateful to Goldberg for mentioning Ian Bogost's persuasive games which apparently argues that games have a procedural rhetoric that can be convincing in a different way than other forms oratory rhetoric. That's a concept I'm quite interested in and a book I'll have to add to my wish list.
Source: Borrowed from my mother-in-law. Thanks!
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