Over his illustrious career, Jacob Geller has written and produced a sprawling collection of video essays. Deftly interweaving video game analysis with complex narratives about art, politics, and history, Geller’s work positions games as vital tools for understanding each other and ourselves. How a Game Lives re-examines ten of Geller’s most iconic essays accompanied by his brand-new commentary, afterwords on each piece by some of the industry’s best writers, and stunning original artwork by Kilian Eng and other exceptional artists.

With videos like “Who’s Afraid of Modern Art”, “Every Zelda is the Darkest Zelda”, and “The Legacy of the Haunted House”, Geller has taught audiences how to think about the art that’s affected them. How a Game Lives immortalises those works and more, and provides boundless insight into the construction, philosophy, and afterlife of each essay.

Marlene’s Review:

There’s power in stories, though. That’s all history is: the best tales. The ones that last. Might as well be mine. – Varric Tethras in Dragon Age: Inquisition

I’ve always loved this quote because it manages to combine how I feel about games, how I feel about their characters, what makes some games live in my imagination and even my heart for decades while and even after playing them – along with the reason I’m playing in the first place. It also kind of explains why I decided to dive into How a Game Lives AND, a whole lot about how I approach the world, whether real or imaginary.

Because I play games FOR the story, to be INSIDE the story, to experience the story as a character within it and not just a consumer of it. And some of those stories LAST, not just Dragon Age but also Mass Effect, Horizon Zero Dawn and Final Fantasy X. They feature stories that can still move me and characters that I still think about – often quite fondly. (I STILL miss the original Elder Scrolls game, Arena. The sequels have never quite lived up to the first. Your gaming mileage may vary.)

The stories in games, whether games I play myself or games that I watch Galen play (he loves a good platformer where I tend to throw the controller across the room and hit one of the cats) also inform my own writing about other stories in other formats. I review books, particularly science fiction and fantasy, and there’s plenty of cross pollination between them.

As there is with pretty much every other form of storytelling, which is what games and books and movies and any other form of media ARE. If, as one writer said, “Man is the only animal that blushes…or needs to,” then stories are how we deal with some of that blushing, whether we use it to excuse or explain or change the subject entirely. Stories are how we process the world, and the stories in games are part of that processing.

A part of me is tempted – HIGHLY – to just talk back to How a Game Lives. Not to argue, but to continue the conversation, because that’s part of the point, both for the original video essays and for the book I have in real, live, hand. (I seldom get print books for multiple reasons, but this is one of the rare cases where I requested an actual, physical, reading copy from the publisher and I’m glad I did. The format works MUCH BETTER in print, but if you have to read the ebook use a black background layout for readability. Still, get the real book if you can.)

A huge part of me wants to add more fuel to the various contextual fires. I’ve read two books recently that I would have had even more appreciation of if I’d seen Geller’s essay “Fear of Cold” first, as both Michael Nayak’s Symbiote AND Sarah Gailey’s Spread Me reference John Carpenter’s The Thing in very similar ways. Also The Blackfire Blade uses golems, but it uses them in the same way that Dragon Age Origins does, starting with an ancient artifact and an unwilling victim, and I kind of want to throw that on the discussion in “The Golem and the Jewish Superhero”, along with the more traditional, if decidedly female, golem in The Maiden and the Monster.

And I would love to do a really deep dive with someone about the issues raised in “Does Call of Duty Believe in Anything?” because the question at the heart of that essay is both profound and applicable to way more than just THAT series. It’s all about the structure of narratives that in effect reinforce the status quo while doing their damndest (and most likely ours) to pretend that the status quo is neutral when it never is. Which, in its turn, jumps straight off a cliff into discussions about how opening up gaming and other media to traditionally underrepresented viewpoints supposedly ‘ruins some people’s childhoods’ and goes against a canon that originally reinforced that status quo and whether or not viewpoints in the public sphere or in art in general should be restricted to the acceptable. That way lies tyranny and book banning and I could go on all day because these essays made me THINK and that’s always an excellent thing.

Before I get down off my soapbox here, I can’t leave without adding a quote from another long-running media property, because the more I think about it, the more apropos it is. It’s part of a dialog between the still somewhat idealistic Bashir and the ever mysterious and frequently duplicitous Garak in Star Trek Deep Space 9.

Bashir: Out of all the stories you told me, which ones that you told me were true and which ones weren’t? Garak: My doctor, they all were true. Bashir: Even the lies? Garak: Especially the lies.

So I’m not here to review How a Game Lives, because it isn’t a book that lends itself to that treatment. I’m here to talk about what the book made me think about. The trick for me, much as it seems like it can be for the author, is to wrestle those thoughts into a coherent mass less than the size of, oh, say, The Lord or the Rings or the movies it spawned.

I’ve been playing computer and video games for nearly 50 years. I built my first computer out of a Heathkit in 1979 and one of the first things I did was type game code onto cassette tapes from books, because 1979 predates just about everything including even floppy disk drives and color monitors. The first games I remember purchasing were the original Zork, followed by the other Infocom text adventure games because, well, that’s what there was. I also had an Atari but that came later.

In other words, I’ve always played games, and I still do. I play because it’s fun – even when it sometimes literally hurts. There are games I play, like Diablo, because there are just some nights when pixels need to die. But the games that live, the ones that stick with me, are the games with big stories and fascinating characters, and that’s true whether I’m the actual player or whether I’m watching Galen play. Some games, like most of the Assassin’s Creed series, Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon Zero Dawn and the Uncharted series, tell great stories and make fantastic television.

So the question of ‘How a Game Lives’ or ‘What makes a game live’ are questions that I’ve been wrestling with for a long time. From a personal standpoint, the games that stick with me are the ones that make me care for their worlds and their characters, which is why Final Fantasy X has stuck with me for more than 20 years, what made the Dragon Age series infinitely replayable – at least until the latest iteration, and why I can’t make myself replay the Mass Effect Trilogy in spite of how good it was.

When I was first offered a review copy of this book, part of what appealed to me as a reviewer was that it presented an opportunity for both Galen and I to get a say. My experience of playing computer and video games is longer, but his is broader, and in the context of this book, he’s played many if not most of the Zelda games which rightfully warranted a chapter of their own in How a Game Lives – because those games certainly do.

So here’s Galen’s essay in response to “Every Zelda is the Darkest Zelda”

Childhood memories can grow dim, but one of the NES-era Legend of Zelda games was quite likely the very first game I played on a home console during a trip visiting a family member. The most vivid part of that memory was how difficult it was to deal with the Tektites; I didn’t get very far before it was time to return home.

Ocarina of Time was the Zelda game that first truly sunk its claws into me; after that I played many but not all of the successor games. It combined a good story with interesting puzzle-dungeons and a successful illusion that there was always more to its world over the next hill. That sense of having a world to explore that felt lived reached a peak in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. To this day, a game that combines good writing, a world to explore that feels real, and environmental storytelling is like catnip to me. It doesn’t have to be a true open world—Final Fantasy X isn’t, for example—but as long as the world has verisimilitude and rewards poking around its corners, I’ll probably enjoy exploring it.

While double-checking some facts for this review, I was reminded that Ocarina of Time came out in 1998; i.e., the year I graduated college. That fact might inspire one of the common questions regarding a platform for telling stories that sometimes still stings: “Aren’t you a bit old to be playing that?” (Marlene’s comment: At this point in my life, when I get questions like that, I just laugh. I’ve got nothing else – or at least nothing else polite – left to say.)

In his essay “Every Zelda is the Darkest Zelda”, Geller provides an answer: video game stories—or at least the ones that are written well—can grow along with the player. The experience (and hopefully wisdom) one gains as one grows older can turn a cartoon tale that features thwacking energy balls back and forth with Ganon into an exploration of adult themes such as maturation and picking up the pieces from a disastrous war…that the heroes lost. It’s not for nothing that Archive of Our Own has 329 fanfics tagged “Link has PTSD”… for a game series that also features a lot of charm and humor. As Geller points out, however, the darkness of some of the themes is balanced by a fundamental sense of hope: not necessarily the adolescent hope that Good will beat Evil and All Will Live Happily Ever after, but the messy adult hope that amelioration from disaster is, while partial, also possible.

I really appreciated Geller giving me a fresh way of looking at one of my favorite game series. The essay (and the afterward to the essay by Matt Margini) by itself is worth the price of the book. I’m glad Marlene suggested that we do a joint review; I will be following Geller’s work henceforth.

Escape Rating, well, not this time. Neither of us precisely escaped while reading this book. Instead, separately and together, we engaged with this book in a very real way, leading instead to a rather personal Reality Rating of A. Anyone interested in a discussion of video games as art, as storytelling, as a reflection on the world that game players and game creators inhabit is going to be riveted even though their brain is likely to explode while reading – and or diving back into these essays original video format.

Meanwhile, I’ll be keeping my eye out for Geller’s just announced NEXT BOOK, which, based on the book I’ve just finished, may have THE most appropriate title EVER with You’re Not Overthinking It, no matter how much the author fears he – or for that matter his readers and viewers – might be.