Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation

        I have a vague recollection of commercials when I was a kid that repeated the line “Sega does what Nintendon’t” and the frantic discordant shouts of “SEGA!”. Blake J. Harris’ Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation explores that moment in pop culture, approaching the story from the context of journalism and historical analysis. It’s a nice companion to Jason Schreier’s Blood, Sweat and Pixels or Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry. The books collectively explore the ups and downs, the rivalries and tribulations of a burgeoning industry, recreating the drama of the era.

Console Wars in particular explores the key figures in the rivalry between Nintendo and Sega, documenting all the underhanded plays (mainly by Sega) to tackle the industry giant. Nintendo presented a more wholesome and family-fun image to Sega’s more irreverent and wildly juvenile approach. The tactics are pretty entertaining, and if you’re interested in advertising and marketing I imagine that the two of them present a case study replete with do’s and don’ts.

What is most surprising about Console Wars is how precisely it recounts the conversations for key figures. In that respect, the book is novelistic. For instance, the book opens with an account of Tom Kalinske on vacation at the beach with his family when Hayao Nakayama, the president of Sega Enterprises, approached him and asked him to fly back to Japan with him. Harris reproduces the conversation Tom had with his daughter and future colleague in its full tenderness and drama.

In fact, the book follows that approach consistently. It feels like every business meeting, sales pitch, public outburst, resignation, promotion, marriage proposals, etc. is provided with a word-for-word reproduction—so much so that at times it feels outright unbelievable. How would anyone possibly remember the exact words they shared in the heat of a conflict? Perhaps it speaks to the thoroughness of Harris’ research and creativity in style. Some details, I imagine, are recorded in official records—recorded speeches at E3, for example—while others would only be verifiable through multiple corroborative interviews. If a bit implausible, Harris’ approach is nonetheless compelling as a narrative.

In terms of the details, the ground Harris treads isn’t exactly new. A number of people have given their accounts of the famed console wars—it’s kind of amazing that the whole book spans only about 6 years in real life; a whole career seems to be crammed into a short half-decade. The strength of the work is in its depth. Harris covers a lot of detail, including specific campaigns and movements. The book documents the highlights of different generations of consoles and the public response. From Super Mario to Donkey Kong Country to Sonic the Hedgehog to Night Trap to Mortal Kombat, the book runs the gamut of gaming landmarks. Harris documents the drama of developing a Sonic sequel and the internal conflicts between Sega of America and Sega of Japan, with the latter sandbagging the marketing gimmicks to the frustration of poor Tom Kalinske.

The book uses the console wars as a jumping off point to examine broader industry movements, including the legalities of violence in games and the push to create the ESRB rating system. It also documents the formation of Nintendo Power and the inaugural E3 conference. It’s compelling to see how the strife of the time period led to creation and flourishing of an industry, despite these rivals essentially trying to ruin the market share of one another.

Overall, the book isn’t anything groundbreaking. It doesn’t revolutionize the way I think about gaming, exactly, but the colourful cast of characters and the novelistic approach is very engaging as a story. It’s light, fun, and pretty informative. It hits the nostalgia buttons but also pulls back the curtain on how cutthroat and wild these fun colourful pastimes really were amongst adults while kids picked up the controller and demanded another try.

Happy reading and happy gaming, whichever side of the console war you fought for.

Strangers by David A. Robertson

I’ve been on the hunt for a new Indigenous novel that would work for a grade 9, which led me to Strangers by David A. Robertson. It has an engaging premise: a teenage boy returns home to his reserve after a decade of living in Winnipeg, summoned by his old friend via a series of urgent texts. The novel is framed as a murder mystery, but has a number of other layers, including a pandemic, a conspiracy, and supernatural beings like omniscient shapeshifting coyotes and ghost girls on fire.

I’m sorry to say that, ultimately, Strangers disappointed me. Expecting a murder mystery, I was waiting for a series of clues to unfold and then be pieced together in a way that recontextualized the story. Instead, the reveal of the killer fell flat because there was no previous connection to the character. There was no way I could have pieced together the string of deaths on my own, and by the end of the book the genre has shifted and the novel becomes a super hero origin story, setting us up for a trilogy (I think), which also left elements of the mystery unsolved. I wouldn’t teach this one, if for no other reason that the ending fails to satisfy. The motivations for the conspiracy remain unclear.

To back up a bit, Strangers focuses on Cole, a controversial childhood hero in his community Wounded Sky First Nation. At seven years old, his school erupted into flames. He rushed back into the building and, somehow, miraculously, he lifted a fallen wall off the ground, freeing two of his best friends. Tragically, the other children passed away. He was then swept away to Winnipeg, partially to protect him from the controversy: a fair number of people hate him because he didn’t save their loved ones, a fair number of people hate him for leaving and never reaching out. At the prompting of his old friend, he returns to Wounded Sky for a memorial, but there’s a catch. Not only does he seem to bring back a pandemic that kills people within twenty four hours, but it seems like every time Cole spends alone time with a friend, that friend ends up dead. Oh, there’s also a trickster coyote figure that is guiding Cole and forcing him to take action in secret, blackmailing him with a purgatorial ghost girl who died in the fire.

Part of my frustration with the novel is its implausibility. After one of Cole’s friends is shot and killed in his arms, the police let him roam free, which I can maybe forgive, but when Cole is the last person to see a second victim alive and is free, it seems totally implausible that police would not take him into custody. I can accept the magical realism element, but the police procedural elements give no good reason for Cole to be free. Also, towards the end of the book, Cole needs to donate his blood and a group of teenagers figures out how to do a transfusion, essentially—thank goodness a real doctor steps in, but it’s again pretty implausible.

Another issue I felt the book suffered from was a bloated cast of characters. The first fifty pages introduce a ton of characters—friends, family, community members. This would not be an issue if the conventions of a mystery novel were followed more closely. If we had a large cast of characters to suspect and deduce the true killer, it would add a fun dimension to the book. Instead, it feels like we just need more people to have conversations with—and those conversations are repetitive. At the risk of being an insensitive jerk, I was pretty irritated by Cole’s mopey attitude. He suffers from survivor’s guilt over the event at his elementary school and experiences doubt, guilt, shame, etc. I wanted him to just get over it. He did what he could to help—he saved two lives; he was seven years old, what does he or anyone expect him to do—save everyone? It’s reasonable to explore that survivor’s guilt for a bit, but we wallowed alongside him too much.

There are some moments when the characters have a nice connection, but there are some of the YA tropes that drive me crazy and feel nothing like the students in my room. The childhood friend that Cole is in love with is probably the best case for a sincere and authentic connection. Amongst the friends of the book, their personalities and dialogue just don’t quite register as being substantially different from one another (which is another factor in making the cast feel too bloated).

The book wasn’t all bad, but it did make me feel cold. By the end of the book, I was just waiting for it to come to a close. There were some fun action sequences, but they were really hindered by the crawl of the wallowing. Incidentally, there were the strange tonal shifts throughout the text. The subject matter is deeply serious but the omniscient coyote guide makes jokes throughout—and worse, outdated jokes that no teenager today will understand and that parents might find cute in their tongue-in-cheek way.

Anyway, it was worth trying out Strangers to keep the curriculum fresh and engaging, but sadly I don’t think this one is going to work out for my class.

Happy reading!

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro

  The punnily titled Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? is a historical critique of the author of plays like Hamlet, The Tempest, and Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare, one of if not the most influential writer in the English language has been subject to a number of conspiracy theories. For example, perhaps Chrisopher Marlowe wasn’t actually murdered and his death was all a cover-up that allowed him to be spirited away to write plays under the pseudonym Shakespeare. James Shapiro’s thesis: these conspiracies are bogus. Shakespeare existed and wrote the plays we attribute to him. I’m sure we’ve all heard some conspiracies that Shakespeare didn’t write his plays. I even remember that in our high school edition of Macbeth the marginalia suggested that Christopher Marlowe wrote Act 3, Scene 3, and that is why there is an extra murderer that had never been introduced previously. Bunk, Shapiro would say.

Shapiro dismantles a number of common “clues” for Shakespeare’s inauthenticity throughout the book. For example, there’s the common belief that Shakespeare was uneducated because there is no record of Shakespeare attending school. Shapiro suggests, though, that Elizabethan England was not keeping records of the sort, but in fact plenty of people were educated, even if the attendance register is lost to history. The same goes for the argument that Shakespeare couldn’t possibly be as worldly as he presents in his texts. How could he possibly know about life in Italy, for example, if he never even left England? Well, Shapiro argues, often playwrights worked for play houses and were hired to write. The play houses would have their own collections of books that their writers would read and draw from—not that books were inaccessible in Elizabethan England; Shapiro points to some stats of how many book dealers existed. 

Shapiro works through a number of specific theories for alternate identities for Shakespeare that emerged in the years following his death, dismantling each one. He points to records that we do have (like lawsuits that bear Shakespeare’s name), the errors in peoples’ assumptions about Elizabethan writerly culture, famous frauds, and so on. Shapiro documents a fraud where one man wrote a wealth of extra missives, poems, and plays bearing Shakespeare’s name trying to convince others of a different Shakespeare. Even famous authors like Henry James and Mark Twain were Shakespeare skeptics, referring to “the author of the Shakespeare plays” rather than Shakespeare himself. Another prominent theory was that Francis Bacon was the author of Shakespeare’s plays—but to what end? Why conceal his identity?

Perhaps most compelling is the undercurrent of Contested Will. Beyond an exploration of who Shakespeare really was, the book presents some reasons that people might buy into conspiracies. In some ways, it’s far more broadly applicable than we might anticipate from the outset. For example, Shakespeare is presented as a unique force; he’s essentially a divine being in the world of literature. Thus, at one point in history, we see the debate rise up to challenge Shakespeare, Shapiro suggests, alongside other forms of divinity worship. At another time, we see the pushes for and against individualism. Scholars examined the idea of Homer being multiple rather than a singular writer; by extension, people then examined the works of Shakespeare as collaborations between a number of unidentified people, again dismantling his singular importance. Alternatively, scholars could not accept that the plays are anything but the work of a singular genius, but that we have identified the wrong person and that we now need to pull someone out from obscurity. We can’t have a Shakespeare that is an upper class figure; we need a scrappy everyday hero. Essentially, Shapiro’s argument is that political, religious, and social issues are the driving force of conspiratorial thinking. I actually hoped Shapiro would put a finer point on it and bring everything into a distinct framework, but the intimation is enough as a starting place.

One of the main arguments against Shakespeare’s identity is that he is so hard to pin down and find documentation of in his time. Shapiro, though, argues against that line of thinking. He notes how the spelling variants make it more challenging to find definitive record of Shakespeare. There was Shak-spar, Shakespear, Shakspar, or other variants before language got standardized in its spelling, so we can’t find or maybe have destroyed records with variations in spelling. One argument against Shakespeare is that people in his time weren’t talking about him—but Shapiro points out that they were. There are references to him as an employee of theatre companies, for example. Sure, he did collaborate on some plays (and Shapiro names the actual collaborators, which is pretty cool), but that was part of the process. Stories were commissioned and workshopped and shifted for different venues. Essentially, Shakespeare was known to others and we do have record of the man and the actors that he worked with.

Shapiro goes into some analysis, for example, of how specific roles may be written for specific actors. There is textual evidence for the specific people who were cast in particular parts. Shapiro also corrects the record on at least some of the order of the plays, which a number of anti-Shakespeare conspiracists got completely wrong in tracking to track Shakespeare’s development as an author and to pair his plays with autobiographical moments of their preferred candidates. (Sidenote: is it appropriate to call these conspiracy theorists Shakespeare birthers? It’s the same phenomenon, sort of.)

One of the most compelling literary arguments Shapiro makes in the book is against biographical criticism. It was interesting to see how previous conspiracists read and misread the plays to match their theories of who Shakespeare was (Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, for example). They would match the characters with real world figures and ensure that each aligned. These biographical readings, Shapiro and other new critics would suggest, fail to do justice to the actual content or logic of the plays. There’s actually a compelling anecdote where Shapiro discusses Helen Keller’s literary career. She is of course known for her life story. What I did not know is that she wrote fiction, too, and Shapiro documents how Keller was frustrated by the fact that nobody was interested in her fiction because her life overshadowed her work. People longed for more autobiographical fiction. Shapiro shows the way in which our society became more invested in an individual talent and why that led to autobiographical criticism and, moreover, demanded a specific identity for Shakespeare.

The book was pretty illuminating. I think it could have been used a little bit more of a push to lock down the frameworks for conspiratorial thinking that Shapiro exposes through case studies. The case studies are effective for showing errors in thinking and gives Shapiro an opportunity to correct the record and challenge the gaps in our own knowledge about the era and about Shakespeare the man. I’m not an expert, but I am persuaded.

Happy reading!