GET LIT (ALL WEEK LONG): Win a copy of Tom Bissell's Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

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GET LIT (ALL WEEK LONG): Win a copy of Tom Bissell's Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

POSTED: Tuesday, June 22, 2010, 2:00 PM

Welcome to Book Quarterly Trivia Week! From now till June 23, we'll be inundating you with opportunities to win free copies of books from our Summer BQ. For the first time in BQTW's history, we've got copies of every single book we've reviewed, previewed and shouted out (even in Icepack!). So keep an eye out at 9 a.m., noon and 3 p.m. every day for plenty of chances to win.

Pantheon, 240 pp., $22.95, June 8

Not gonna lie: I judge books by their cover sometimes. This one — Tom Bissell's Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter — is one of my favorite of the BQ bunch. (This photo over here does it no justice whatsoever — in 3-D this little blockhead has a bunch of shiny, blue, texturized friends to keep him company.) Cuteness aside, though, here's what Jakob Dorof had to say about Bissell's pop-culture analysis:

Tom Bissell, for his part, knows video games. Though he wisely wastes few words on the skeptics themselves, his own take is clear: Throughout Extra Lives, he refers to "the classics of the form," places the video game on the same shelf as sculpture or poetry, and makes convincing arguments for it being "the most dominant popular art form of our time." You could find these sentiments on any web forum frequented by teenagers, but to hear it from a Guggenheim Fellow is a pleasure both to read and to ponder. Thankfully, Bissell is no fanboy, and he spends more time exploring his frustrations with video games than his fascination with them. To wit, his vivid descriptions of artful zombie dismemberment in Resident Evil can be enjoyed by anyone, but what will interest the gamer is the way he posits that Evil's narrative shortcomings set a troubling precedent.

To win a copy of Extra Lives, answer the following trivia question:

Who in 2005 said video games will never be an art form?

E-mail me at carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win, and be sure to put "Extra Lives" in the subject line. Check back later today: We're giving away copies of The Lonely Polygamist and The Shallows. [UPDATE, 11:35 a.m.]: CritMass reader Josh got this one right — Roger Ebert's the one who said video games would never be an art form.

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Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

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