BOOKS: ALL WIRED UP

Electronic games like Pac-Man, Tetris, Doom and Myst are the totems of a generation and have etched an indelible imprint on the American psyche. Or so J.C. Herz, the 25-year-old author of Joystick Nation (Little, Brown; 230 pages; $23.95), would have her readers believe. For as Herz sees it, video games aren't just kid stuff; they are "theme parks of the mind" that reflect the fears, fantasies and desires lurking in every human soul.

In her witty manifesto, Herz correlates each major genre of electronic game with an age-old impulse: shoot-'em-ups like Doom tap the primal instinct for survival, while puzzle games like Tetris satisfy the need for order, control and reason. The games' larger-than-life superheroes are interpreted as contemporary reincarnations of mythological figures like Zeus and Prometheus.

But in her zeal to convey the importance of the games, Herz occasionally loses her edge and blindly defends them against all criticism. Her responses to the bimboesque portrayal of women and the questionable values that the gorier games convey to children, for example, feel as shallow as an Aqua-Fresh smile (a Herzian saying). The games' shameless pandering to adolescent fantasies is explained with little more than a breezy "what teenage boys want, teenage boys get," while growing parental concern is briskly dismissed as "adults freaking out about their precious darlings being driven to new heights of deviancy by popular media."

Still, Joystick Nation offers more than enough wisdom, humor and insight to make it an engaging treatise on how video games have moved beyond the kiddie arcades and into the cultural fabric of modern society.

--By Anita Hamilton