How to Do Things with Videogames, by Ian Bogost (University of Minnesota Press, £14)
From the mind behind satirical Facebook game Cow Clicker comes a collection of essays on videogames that confirms Bogost as one of the most penetrating, erudite and original thinkers around on the topic. Two species of "meditation" coexist here slightly uneasily: the first examines videogames' formal aspects, beautifully interpreting the experience of (say) "transit" or "reverence" for architecture in games. He rigorously defends an animal-shooting game endorsed by the National Rifle Association, on the way to the normative conclusion that "we should simulate torture". (He has reasons, but his rhetoric certainly counts as the kind of "incendiary provocation" he disdains in his conclusion.)
The second kind of essay examines how games (small, often bad) are made as commercials or marketing tools. Bogost argues that you can tell how "relevant" a medium is by the variety of such uses to which it is put, but this grants too much to the market-oriented philistinism of cultural "relevance", which is the only sense in which music, for instance, could be thought the more "relevant" thanks to the existence of jingles or ringtones. But overall, this is a fascinating book, and often very funny. On 1980s Atari porn games: "Another was Burning Desire/Jungle Fever, in which a naked man/woman flying a helicopter must ejaculate/lactate out a fire that risks devouring a man/woman tied to a stake." Come on, we've all played that.
A Brief History of Encyclopedias, by Andrew Brown (Hesperus, £8.99)
Encylopedias, argues this author, are as much about deciding what things to leave out as in – in which case his own concise and elegant tour of the subject deserves itself to be called encyclopedic. Brown is witty ("It is easy to imagine a present-day Aristotle [...] editing the Guinness Book of Records") and his story – from compendia of heresies or marvels to nerve-wrackingly gigantic Chinese collections of all knowledge, Bacon, the Britannica and finally Wikipedia – is full of splendid digressions.
The winner of the prize for the most quasi-Borgesian taxonomies must be the early 16th-century French savant Textor, who provides "sections on men who smelt bad, various types of haircut, arguments drawn from the impossible, different kinds of excrement, descriptions of a long time and a list of various types of worms". It makes Wikipedia seem terribly dull by comparison.
Future Science, ed Max Brockman (Oxford, £9.99)
This collection of "cutting-edge" essays doesn't, as the title might imply, tell you what scientific discoveries will be made in the future. But if science-publishing impresario Brockman's idea was to gather some impressive youngish writer-researchers, he has found a good few: standout moments include pieces by Kevin P Hand on a robot mission to explore icy moons, William McEwan on advances in molecular biology and custom virus-making, Daniela Kaufer and Darlene Francis on the physiology of stress and Kirsten Bomblies on bioengineering immunity in plants.
Psychologist Daniel Haun elegantly concludes that our mode of orientation, using "left" and "right" relative to our own bodies, is a "weird" overriding of an "inherited preference" for using the environment (eg, compass points), as many non-Western peoples do. (Maybe that's why I get lost so easily in videogames.) The most arresting opening, meanwhile, is that of Asif A Ghazanfar's intriguing theory about human speech: "I think the brain is like an AM radio." Some mornings I know how he feels.
