We interrupt our usual programming . . .

So normally what I write about here is all Pagan religious stuff, or at least religion-adjacent stuff like sex and politics.  You know, nice polite conversation.  (And yes, I'll have something to say about the recent cross-blog food fight on the Pagan/polytheist quasi-divide, but not tonight.)  Alas, given that I don't particularly want to link to one of my more personal blogs off of Twitter (for what should be presumably obvious reasons), I'm going to have to take a stab here into something far more outre and controversial: video game journalism.

Yeah.

So Bob Chipman, a movie critic under the name of MovieBob and a video game critic under the name of The Game OverThinker, recently authored a book and published it through Bang Printing by way of Fangamer.net: SMB3: Brick By Brick.  The intent is to perform the equivalent of a shot-by-shot analytic review of a movie for what he considers "The greatest game ever made."

I've been a fan of his for a little over a year, having stumbled across some of his videos for the Escapist around Yule '11 and then re-discovering him again through the Game OverThinker videos the following spring.  He was one of the guests at the SGC 2013 convention this last weekend, and one of the reasons I decided to skip out on the local SF/fantasy litcon the same weekend and go to a video game con halfway across the state instead.  (FWIW, I don't appear to have missed much, despite the lack of filking.)  The book debuted at SGC, so I picked up a copy at his autograph session on Friday.  It's not long - 205 pages, 4.5" x 7" - so it was a fairly fast read.

At this point, I want to reiterate that (1) I'm a fan, so this is likely not a completely objective review of the book, and (2) it's effectively self-published - Fangamer.net is not exactly a mainstream press.  So keep both of those in mind throughout the following.

I'm going to split this review into two parts behind the jump: Part The First will be on the actual content (spoiler: it's pretty good but not quite what I think the original idea was aiming for), and Part The Second will be on the book as a book, including layout and other publishing issues.


Part The First: The Content

The author's stated intention was to "play all the way through a classic game - every level, every enemy, every item, the whole experience - and analyze everything about it as I went: The mechanics, the layouts, the art-design of the sprites, the aesthetics of the backgrounds, the music, the known history of the production, cultural references and context, etc.," while also noting how the events of the game played into the events of his life at the time.  He doesn't quite achieve this lofty goal, but what he does manage along the way is interesting in its own right.

The first 62 pages are background on, first, the history of the Mario games (starting with Donkey Kong and running through the beginning of the Wii U era) and Mario himself as a character, and second, the author's personal history with video games in general and the Mario games in particular.  I am a sucker for this sort of historical and autobiographical stuff, so I found these sections quite enjoyable, despite (or perhaps becuse of) the conversational, almost confessional tone of the second one.  I am just old enough to be an Atari-wave Gen13er instead of a Nintendo-wave Gen13er; MovieBob is on the break between 13er and Millennial.  (I'm using Strauss and Howe's generation titles, in case anyone is surprised by my using Gen13er instead of GenXer here.)  Technically, though, my own childhood experience with video games was entirely on the Apple/IBM PC/Mac/Windows side; I had limited interaction with any of the consoles until my much younger brother ended up with an NES, and I never learned to deal with its controller.  (I still find a joystick far more intuitive than a pad-style controller.)  So, reading about such a different relationship to video games in general and this particular series of games in particular was fascinating for me; to be honest, I wish this section had been longer.

After that, it becomes a "Let's Play" with occasional historical or autobiographical notes.  Here's where I think some of the promise of the premise was lost; there are long stretches devoted to describing the gameplay without really analyzing it.  I found the places where MovieBob discusses the tone and feel of each of the game worlds to be interesting, but I kept wishing that that same sensibility had carried over into the discussion of the individual levels, which tend to drop back into simple description of what happened without the same focus on how and why.  Similarly, there are several places where interesting details are mentioned, and in a few cases even described in loving detail, but their effect - What does this do to the aesthetics of the game? How does it affect the themes? - is largely glossed over.  I suspect some of this is because the author assumes these effects are obvious, but he has the game in front of him.  The reader does not, and I (for one) have only a passing familiarity it - a little more active analytic detail would have been nice at these points.

The interplay between what was occurring in the game and what was happening in the author's life outside of it was intriguing; there was a strong bildungsroman/loss-of-innocence theme going on, a sort of wrapping-up of childhood memories (the author was going through two major life transitions at the time, one of which he knew would be occurring over the course of the playthrough, one of which was thrust upon him).  I personally found these parts extremely moving, partly because MovieBob wavers between not wanting to appear too emotionally exhibitionistic and wanting to be honest to the reader.  In many ways, I think the asides and framing explanations around the playthrough are some of the strongest parts of the book; certainly they seem to be where the author displays some of his most evocative writing.

Overall, for a first book-length published work, I think it's a solid foray.  It's certainly not perfect, but it largely accomplishes what it set out to do.  To some extent, I think the memoir aspect outshines the work of criticism, which is a bit odd for a critic's first book, but overall there is little to complain about.


Part the Second: The Format

I purchased the physical book, largely because I wanted it autographed; shallow, but I'm a fangirl, so there you go.  However, having read it, I am strongly tempted to recommend that anyone else wanting to read it (and who presumably does not care about having it signed) purchase it in digital form instead. There are a number of issues with the physical printing, most of which would be solved by the digital format.

The book is a perfect-bound paperback, 4.5" x 7" and 205 pages, as previously mentioned - a slim volume.  However, the interior margins on the pages are tiny: 0.25" on each side, 0.5" top and bottom, with the header and page number included in the top and bottom margins respectively.  The minuscule side margins mean that the text runs into the gutter - not just on a few pages, as a single printing error, but on almost every single page.  It's a fairly serious impediment to reading the text, in places.  That the font used is a fairly small one means that there are places where an entire letter is lost to the gutter unless the reader tugs the pages apart hard enough to crease the spine; I couldn't make myself do that, although I acknowledge that I may be more than usually squeamish about spine-cracking on perfect-bound books. At any rate, the lack of an adequate center side margin is problematic.

I think I understand why the margins and the typeface are both so small; paper and printing costs are not cheap, and making the book itself diminutive reduces its cost as a physical object.  (It also makes it easier to haul a few boxes to, say, a convention - the smaller it is, the more will fit in the checked bag at the airport.)  At the same time, though, making it physically harder to read reduces the potential audience, especially among a potential readership that are less text-oriented than previous generations.  Economic choice or not, an extra quarter-inch of margin on the left and right of each page would have greatly increased the readability and probably would have only added a few more pages to the book.  And of course, these issues will be rendered irrelevant by any digital format with resizable text and no gutters.

There is an editor listed for the book who is also credited for layout and artwork.  I am going to guess that this was not a copy editor, based on the typos and minor grammar glitches that pepper the text.  This is one of the most common issues with self-publishing and vanity publishing I've noticed.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that, from my perspective, the primary advantage of traditional publishing over other avenues in a world where, in Dr. Spengler's prescient words, "print is dead," is that traditional publishers will run one's work past a professional copy editor.  No matter how thorough a job of self-editing an author does, there will always be a few things that one misses; you knew what you meant when you wrote it, and so that's what you read back, even if that's not quite what you actually typed.  It's possible that this bothers me more than it would a reader used more to the world of blogs and Twitter, where self-editing is all the editing an author ever gets.  Still, the text would be stronger without the misplaced commas and occasional misspellings that the spellchecker doesn't catch.  I'm just barely willing to overlook the editing problems this time - again, the author's first published book, known issues with self-publishing, etc. - but someone who wasn't already a fan of either the topic or the author very likely would not.


Overall, I found the book an enjoyable experience, and found the second section rather enlightening in particular.  I'm not sure how much interest it would generate in someone who wasn't already interested in one or more of Mario, MovieBob, or video games in general as a youth-culture phenomenon, and the book's printing has some major issues, but for anyone interested in those topics and able to read the book in digital format, I'll give it a thumbs-up.