Historical Mush

Okay, so yesterday I promised to weigh in on the hard polytheist/soft polytheist/archetypalist/humanist Pagan food fight going on across the Pagan blogosphere.  As with so many things, I'm rather late to the table on this one - most of the folks with an axe to grind have said their piece and left.  Several folks ended with comments along the lines of "Well, if everyone practiced their Paganism as much as they talked about it, then we wouldn't be having these arguments."

I'm pretty sure that's wrong.  The reason I think it's wrong is that the philosophers among the pre-Christian Classical Pagans of Greece and Rome had similar arguments, and it's hard to argue that they weren't practicing their Paganism.  More about that in a minute.

First, let me come clean about my position: I'm a hard polytheist, meaning that my experiences of the gods are as individual persons who have a meaningful existence of their own.  I'm also an adherent of process theology, meaning that I experience the gods as changing and developing over time.  I'm a polypanenthist, meaning that I experience the gods as present in the forces and matter of the physical universe but also having some dimension outside it.  And I'm also an archetypalist, meaning that I experience the cultural archetypes we, as humans, create and embed in our art and media as having a certain amount of power and influence of their own, despite not existing outside of the human mind.

More after the jump:

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.