Lucky Wander Boy by D.B. Weiss, Plume Books, 276 pages, $19.50

Digital Play: The Interaction Of Technology, Culture And Marketing by Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, McGill-Queen's University Press, 368 pages, $29.95

True or false? Two months ago, Sony acquiesced to political pressure and deleted scenes of the Quebec Liberation Front (a group of separatist terrorists) waging war on Toronto, from the upcoming release Syphon Filter 4, a video game for the PlayStation 2.

Fact or fiction? In April of 2000, the trade minister of Japan limited the export of the PlayStation 2, citing the console's sophisticated graphics hardware which, in the wrong hands, could be converted into a missile-guidance system.

Both incidents are true.

Anyone who believes that Grand Theft Auto and Tomb Raider are the irrelevant domain of malodorous screenagers with choppy social skills and repetitive strain injuries probably thinks arcade games still cost 25 cents. But ever since we caught Pac-Man fever in 1980, the quarters have been piling up.

In 1999, the interactive game industry earned $8.9 billion (U.S.) compared to Hollywood's $7.3 billion in box office receipts. As Digital Play notes: "By 2001 the cumulative amount generated by the Pokémon franchise for Nintendo and its partners over some five years was estimated at about 14 billion dollars." Further, 44 per cent of gamers are between the ages of 24 and 44, according to a survey cited in Digital Play.

Surprised? A normal reaction. Video game companies have done an excellent job obscuring their ledgers, preferring instead to immerse us in their respective virtual realities. Despite sizeable economic and cultural contributions for more than 20 years ‹ game cartridges have even been converted into (mostly) bad films ‹ the great video game book, the pixilated equivalent of Michael Chabon's novel of comics lore, The Adventures Of Cavalier And Clay, remains unwritten.

D.B. Weiss does his best, often succeeding in Lucky Wander Boy, the first novel about nostalgia for the Golden Age of video games (1978 to 1984). Adam Pennyman, the 28-year-old manchild narrator of Lucky Wander Boy, allows a sudden, newfound obsession with the arcade games of his youth to erode his relationship with his young, beautiful, Polish girlfriend Anya and endanger his job security.

Instead of ministering to Anya and being a diligent dot.com employee, Pennyman concentrates on his Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments, filled with entries on the historical and philosophical implications of Q-Bert and Frogger.

Why? As Pennyman explains: "It was important that someone begin to peel back the layers of meaning beneath their colourful surfaces, because they were a crucial strata in the bedrock on which a generation was built. Hollywood movies are considered important enough that, in many circles, interminable discussions and serious commentaries on them are acceptable."

The video game nostalgia D.B. Weiss evokes is real and fierce. Numerous Web sites, zines and multiple coffee table books have delved into the topic in recent years.

But Weiss assumes his readership shares his zeal for interminable discussions about microprocessor lore. His hyper-intelligence is an acquired taste, and the stink of M.A. scholarship wafts throughout the novel: "It is difficult to ignore the similarities between Donkey Kong (the creature) and the demiurge of the Gnostic heresies." (A similar semiotic analysis of video games was attempted by Richard Poole in his non-fiction book Trigger Happy, with somewhat better results.)

But Weiss' cleverness can also be an asset. He tweaks the structure of the traditional novel, describing his job as a video game copywriter to brilliant comic effect, details an encounter with his boss in screenplay format and offers multiple, choose-your-own endings. Along the way, Weiss invents an ancient Chinese philosopher named Dafie Ji (author of Leng Tch'e) and eventually confronts Araki Itachi, the programmer who created Pennyman's digital madeleine, a bizarre arcade game called Lucky Wander Boy.

Weiss inhabits his topic, but is unsure how to make key moments vibrate with the reader. A pivotal scene occurs within sight of a parking lot in the Alamogordo desert, underneath which are buried thousands of Atari 2600 cartridges and consoles. This, as it happens, is true (in 1983 surplus Atari inventory was dumped due to a horrific crash in the video game market) but such trivia functions best in a non-fiction setting, where unusual facts resonate without further embellishments. For Pennyman, the moment is ripe with portent, like a conspiracy buff's trek to the grassy knoll. For the casual video gamer, the attempt to spin garbage into gold fails.

* * *

Digital Play also mentions the Atari landfill, the most bizarre, but by no means the only, casualties of the battle between competing systems. Digital Play showcases the chaotic side of capitalism, public failures that demonstrate how, despite multi-billion-dollar fortunes, the video game industry is a high-risk industry. Since hardware is basically a loss leader, it is estimated that Microsoft must sell eight or nine games per Xbox to break even.

The chronology of Nintendo et al. has been attempted before, but Digital Play provides the sharpest overview to date, claiming to be the "first critical political economic analysis of the video game industry." Digital Play burrows into the maquiladora zones where cartridges and consoles are produced, questions the consumer lust of The Sims, details the recent trend toward product placement in video games, discusses the contradictions of "dot.communism" (software piracy) and debates "militarized masculinity" and the "atavistic bloodlust" that results in "abstract orgies of geometric disintegration" (a.k.a. video game violence).

If the author of Lucky Wander Boy is proud about his M.A., then Digital Play is pure Ph.D. Skip the first section of the book (70-odd pages) or you'll be subjected to an excruciating melange of jargon, media theory minutia and unnecessarily large words. Amazingly, Digital Play is not the only academic treatise on the subject. A collection of egghead essays called The Video Game Theory Reader was published last year, and this professorial attention serves either to legitimize the topic or represents its death knell, depending on your inclination.

Dozens of less scholarly books already exist, including Masters Of Doom, Joystick Nation, What Videogames Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy and many other interesting but flawed tomes destined to soon inhabit the Atari 2600 dump in Alamogordo. If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then describing mouse potatoes fragging each other into bits might well be beyond metaphorical imagination.

However, Digital Play proves a more accessible treatment of the topic is badly needed. It concludes: "Just as one needs to look behind the screen to understand the digital coding that produces the play of video game consoles and computers, so too we need to look behind the scenes to understand the social processes ‹ marketing, technological, cultural ‹ that constitute the game subject."

One of the more fascinating suggestions in Digital Play is that video games represent the "ideal commodity" of hypercapitalism, a widget that "embodies the most powerful economic, technological, social and cultural forces at work in a regime."

A second key insight is that the economic imperatives powering the industry are causing "tension between the calculated, organized and oligopolistic marketing of game culture and the experience of freedom, adventure, and transgression its imaginary worlds promise."

Moving from Adam Smith to Adam Pennyman, there is a reference to Karl Marx in Lucky Wander Boy, in the first Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments entry: "We are reminded of Marx's `need of a constantly expanding market' that `chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe,'" argues Pennyman, "casting the Pac-Man in the role of corporate antihero in a utopian fantasy where the agents protesting his unfettered domination of the maze-world actually defeat him in the end."