The Medium of the Video Game. By Mark J. P. Wolf, ed. Foreword by Ralph H. Baer. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. xx + 203 p., ISBN 0-292-79150-X)

This book will, in some respects, be looked back on as a pivotal moment in the history of video game studies. Mark J. P. Wolf has presented an argument that not only understands the video game as a separate medium but looks at the medium itself, on its own terms and not as an economic or sociological phenomenon. That said, this book suffers from some serious flaws, most of which seem to be attributable to Wolf in his additional role as editor. Of the eleven articles in the book (nine chapters, an Introduction, and a Foreword) six are by Wolf. Of the remaining, the Foreword by Ralph Baer, inventor of the Odyssey, the first home video gaming console, nicely contextualises the book by establishing that the video game phenomenon, in potency if not in form or act, stretches back to the early sixties when the first game, Spacewar!, was created at MIT in 1962 by (who else?) bored graduate students with access to a computer. Video games coincide with the coupling of a computer to a video display, a seemingly self-evident observation which is nevertheless critical to a discussion of medium. Chapter Two, “Super Mario Nation” is a reprint of an article from American Heritage by Steven L. Kent on the history of the video game which, although informative, is five years out of date. It does not account for the most recent generation of home gaming consoles B PlayStation 2, X-Box, GameCube B or advances in home computing. Considering that one of Kent’s main arguments is the speed at which video games evolve, the inclusion of his article here is ironic. Chapter Seven, Rochelle Slovin’s “Hot Circuits,” looks at the 1989 Video Game Exhibition of the same name at the American Museum of the Moving Image, of which Slovin is founding director, with the hindsight of a further decade of advancement in video games as a cultural phenomenon. There may be much here for the museologist: the original exhibition was comprised of a “canon” of console units, with the units arranged like an arcade, albeit with greater spacing, and tokens given at the entrance so they could be played. However, when the exhibit traveled and was brought into smaller rooms, the units, now crammed together more tightly, were treated less as objects in a museum and more as games in an arcade: decals were peeled away, chewing gum was left on them, and so forth. For the exhibition, the museum commissioned an essay from the poet and critic Charles Bernstein, “Play it Again, Pac-Man,” which as Chapter Eight is now in print for the fourth time. It is truly dreadful, and an example of the worst form of criticism since it offers nothing constructive. It is apparent that Bernstein’s observations of video game playing and arcade life are all drawn from perceptions left untested, and his essay reads like a Newsweek article filtered through an introductory liberal Arts course on Marx, Freud, and MacLuhan. For the folklorist, it is Rebecca Tews’ “Archetypes on Acid” which may be the most useful as an entry into the video game world. Tews, a psychology doctoral candidate from Marquette — which makes her almost by default a Jungian — approaches the question of the popularity of video games by addressing their use of Jungian archetypes. If we transliterate, or transpose, this conclusion by instead noting the recurrent use of motifs in video games, we have the genesis of the genus “folklore and/in” applied to this medium. (For an excellent refutation of the reluctance to go beyond “folklore in” in the “folklore …