I’ll tell you something that I truly believe: some day in the future, video games will indisputably be considered humanity’s greatest art form. To put down an argument here justifying that opinion would clog the pipes of this review – and as always, I do love to be brief about my book reviews. Should I feel inspired to start up my old sister blog, I may go into those thoughts, and I’ll happily pop a link here somewhere.
In my life a lot of the those wonderfully aesthetic experiences came to me via the consumption of books. It is why I am the reader that I am today. Less frequently, but still with the same intensity, I had aesthetic experiences via video games, and a video game that gave me a particularly lasting and memorable experience was 1995’s Chrono Trigger.
I don’t think I am the only one. Look i up on YouTube and you will find a lot of chatter about it, despite that it is a 30 year old video game.
Almost a decade ago, I saw Michael P. Williams’ book Chrono Trigger at a book sale going for 1euro. I jotted the title down and didn’t purchase it. This past year, I encountered the book again randomly and decided to pick it up.
What I think I was expecting from William’s book was a non-fiction account of the author’s own aesthetic experience from the game, and how it impacted his life going forward. I think a bit of that is there. But it isn’t enough, and nor is it very focused. Writing about an aesthetic experience is hard. I don’t really think any author I have read can capture it. Maybe aesthetic experiences are by their very nature un-capturable. What is left then of Williams’ book is some recounting of events of the video game, some personal ramblings of how he related events in the story to some events in his personal life, and a bit of a political screed about Chrono Trigger’s lack of diversity.
I don’t think this book is worth reading. I am not sure this review of this book was worth writing. The kindest thing I can say about this book is that I am 100% the type of person who considers such a book to be something worth writing and reading, and that writing such a book would be a challenge. Williams failed at, but so would many of us. Thanks for trying.
Failures in Polymathy 