The Art of the Video Game Book Review

The Art of the Video Game is one of the worst video game art books I’ve ever seen. It has screenshots from 26 games from around 2006-2008, with some occasional development art. Each game is briefly discussed, and there are captions with the photos.

0:00 - Introduction
0:34 - Quality of the Physical Book
1:14 - Content
11:29 - Aesthetics
12:59 - Nostalgia
13:18 - Backstage
13:57 - Closing Remarks
15:17 - BONUS!


QUALITY OF PHYSICAL BOOK
-It’s short and wide. 11x9 inches.
-It has 160 pages, and about 148 of them have art.
-It comes with a dust jacket that is a million times worse than the hardcover.
-The pages are a bit thicker and sturdier than the average art book.
-Most images are okay but some look like they were blown up too big, and some are blurry.


CONTENT/INNARDS
Does it have what you want it to have?
-The author says he worked for the New York Times and that video game companies would send him promotional screenshots. He also says he printed up these images on his printer. The screenshots are from games made between 2006-2008. If any of that sounds interesting, maybe this book has what you’ll want to see, but for everyone else on Earth . . . no - it doesn’t have what you want it to have.

Variety of images and image types
-There’s a lot of screenshots from pre-release promotions.
-There are a few development images.
-There are a few times when the development art was compared to the final products.
-There are a few other random things like showing someone with motion-capture things on their face.

Organization
-The book is organized alphabetically by game..
-Each game has a blurb - often it’s from a website interview - then there’s pictures with captions. Some games take a different approach - it seems dependant on what images the author had available to him.

Is there writing or insight from the artists and developers themselves?
-Yes. In fact, some entire entries are remarks from developers. However, the tone of some of them is sort of sales-pitchy. It’s a bit of an odd tone for a book like this, and not really relevant to anyone looking at this review.
-Some of the developers talk about how they actually went about designing things, which is great, like how they “fixed” a claustrophobic alley in Killzone 2.

Quality of writing.
-At the start there’s a section on video game history and it’s alright. I liked that he had blurbs about the importance of visual designers at each point in time.
-Overall, I just really don’t like the writing. It’s just soooo over the top. It sounds like the writer literally right-clicked words and switched some out with the thesaurus tool, because some of the word choices are very unnatural. A lot of the writing is alright, but so much of it is forced and overbearing.


AESTHETICS
Artistic/pleasant layout
-It’s a wide book, which I think suits video game art books since a lot of the images produced are on wider paper, especially screenshots - which is mostly what this book has.
-While I wouldn’t give it bonus points for being aesthetically pleasing, I think it is at least consistent and easy to look through. However, some of the blurrier images are just not nice to look at.
-Most images are screenshots, many of which haven't aged well.
-The actual hardcover is fine, but the dust jacket design is bad. It’s just a conglomeration of unrelated images in boxes.
-I don’t know where else to put this in the review, but honestly I think the title of the book is dumb.


NOSTALGIA/AFFINITY EVOKED FOR THE GAME
-As for nostalgia, as I mentioned, I haven’t played most of the games in the book. I doubt the average reader has, either.


BACKSTAGE
-There are some parts of the book that offer insight into game development, like when it describes how the hunter from Half Life was developed or how certain aspects of turning an image into a 3D render was discussed. Generally, though, the development discussion was a bit shallow and generally from a technical perspective rather than an artistic one.


There are 17 book reviews in Season 1 of my series “Mike’s Video Game Art Book Reviews.” I hope you enjoy them!