Often cited for arguing in favor of the positive benefits of video games (and other elements of pop culture), Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter proposes that the growing complexity of narratives in pop culture—in conjunction with the increasing complexity of video games—has benefits that can transcend entertainment. The analyses of various works provide an interesting perspective. On the downside, the book’s thesis is difficult to prove, and the book is also cited and argued against in works emphasizing the negative influence of video games. For example, in Gamer Nation: The Rise of Modern Gaming and the Compulsion to Play Again Eric Geissinger breaks down the arguments of Johnson’s book and examines less positive aspects of games. Geissinger’s book is significantly more recent than Johnson’s so Geissinger has more modern examples to pull from than earlier authors could have predicted—for example, apps and games designed purely to be addictive, rather than to be fun or beneficial, to encourage users to begin sinking money into ostensibly free entertainment.
Dave Grossman and Kristine Paulsen offer a much harsher perspective on games in Assassination Generation: Video Games, Aggression, and the Psychology of Killing. The authors draw conclusions from existing data that purport a correlation between the growth of video games and violence. Whether viewed as a valuable perspective or as an example of a “moral panic” response to new media, Assassination Nation reveals the many concerns surrounding modern sensibilities to perceptions of video game violence and its cultural and societal influence.
But for the most part recent criticism has found balance between the positive and negative impact of video games, using qualitative and quantitative research to examine trends and perspectives. For example, The Video Game Debate 2: Revisiting the Physical, Social, and Psychological Effects of Video Games, edited by Rachel Kowert and Thorsten Quandt—the follow-up to The Video Game Debate: Unravelling the Physical, Social, and Psychological Effects of Digital Games, also edited by Kowert and Quandt—explores issues of video game violence, mobile gaming, and other matters in a more objective way, and also examines models of games as therapy and community building tools.
Some works do not provide their own research but instead propose models, templates, or frameworks for future writing and criticism. Among the up-to-date resources is Clara Fernández-Vara’s Introduction to Game Analysis, now in its second edition, which provides a flexible model for writing about games, a model that allows for mixtures of subjective and objective gameplay experience and analysis. Fernández-Vara’s book is a valuable starting point for those embarking on their own writing, criticism, and analysis projects.
