18 September 2010 | NewScientist | 47

A youthful racketSelling the Fountain of Youth: How the anti-aging industry made a disease out of getting old – and made billions by Arlene Weintraub, Basic Books, £14.99/$25.95

Reviewed by Catherine de Lange

DON’T get sick, don’t get old and don’t die. These three maxims, as stated by Robert Goldman, a founding father of the anti-ageing

industry, might sound a tad absurd, but they are nothing compared to many of the industry’s claims which Arlene Weintraub explores.

By medicalising the process of growing old, sellers of anti-ageing “medicine” have made fortunes based on unfounded claims, she argues. Time and again, vulnerable people are spun a yarn and relieved of their cash. Some of the stories are shocking: the case of the anti-ageing doctor who prescribed hormone supplements way above approved doses, for example.

While Weintraub has done her homework, her often dogmatic style leaves little room for intrigue. Still, her scepticism will be food for thought for anyone tempted by promises to turn back the clock.

Feel for the eelEels: An exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the world’s most mysterious fish by James Prosek, Harper, $25.99

Reviewed by Stephanie Pain

EELS: you either love ’em or hate ’em. Well, perhaps few people have such strong feelings about eels, but this book should change

that. Prosek’s account of 11 years spent in pursuit of “the world’s most mysterious fish” is both enthralling and appalling.

What started as an investigation into where eels spawn evolved into something part-travelogue, part-anthropological study, part campaign to save the eel. The eel’s story is remarkable, and so are Prosek’s tales of eel people. We meet Ray, who rebuilds a giant stone eel trap in the Catskill Mountains near New York, only to see his eels flushed away by flood waters. We hang out with Stella, a Maori student of New Zealand’s eels, who lures decades-old giants out of the river with dog food. Then there are the eel people of the Pacific island of Pohnpei, who claim an eel as their ancestor. If you ever visit, don’t ask to eat eel.

Rock of agesThe Planet in a Pebble: A journey into Earth’s deep history by Jan Zalasiewicz, Oxford University Press, £16.99

Reviewed by Jon Turney

A PEBBLE picked up on the shore originated from the cliffs above. As it is a Welsh shore, then the cliff rock was itself once under the sea,

formed from sediments worn from a long-vanished continent, buried deep and baked into new rock. Before that, its atoms were part of the crust of a young Earth, a much larger pebble, with its own origin story.

All this and more is teased out from this pebble in Jan Zalasiewicz’s impressively skilful narrative. Common elements and atomic rarities, microfossils and ticking radio-isotopes all make an appearance. It builds to a satisfying picture of how our planet’s history is etched into every fragment of the pebble. Zalasiewicz has a clear style, with some nice lyrical touches. His story is a celebration of the astonishing ways geologists have found of sampling stone’s secrets. Geology has a gifted new popular science writer.

Yes, it can happen in video games, though I don’t think it happens often. But then, how often do books or movies reach the level of art? Not that often, if we’re honest.

JESSE SCHELL:Assistant professor of entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and CEO of Schell Games

Marcel Duchamp once said, “I have come to the conclusion that while not all artists are chess players, all chess players are artists.” Gaming and play bear an interesting relationship to art. Like art, play is experimental, creative, flexible and immersive. It is done for its own sake. And like art, games can challenge and transform us. So can video games be art? They certainly incorporate many artistic elements: painting, architecture, music, sculpture, acting, writing, animation and dance.

The games that feel more like art tend to have qualities in common. They do not pander to the player; they are mysterious; they feel more serious than most games; they have a complete, holistic feeling. Such games are rarities, but they exist, and as the form evolves, just as cinema did, more and more of them will appear.

IAN BOGOST: Game designer, critic, founding partner of Persuasive Games and author of Newsgames (MIT Press, 2010)

The 20th century saw the following celebrated as art: a urinal placed on a stand, a painting of a coloured square,

poetry made of words taken randomly from a hat, an audience cutting the clothes off an artist, industrial paint thrown onto canvas, reproductions of commercial advertisements, a telegram asserting that it was a portrait of its recipient, a barricade of oil barrels on a Paris street and live television images of a Buddha statue.

Lest we conclude that these are outlandish examples, consider the artists who produced them: Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, Tristan Tzara, Yoko Ono, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and Nam June Paik, respectively. All are celebrated, their status as artists never questioned.

Art has done many things in human history, but in the last century it has primarily tried to provoke us, to force us to see things differently. So maybe we should ask, “How are video games changing our ideas about art?” If the purpose of art is indeed to force us to see something we thought we understood in a new light, perhaps the most fundamental move video games have made in the artistic tradition is in the very eliciting of the question, “Can video games be art?”

JOHN SHARP:Art historian and professor of interactive design and game development at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, Georgia

Look beyond the cultural values assigned to video games and art, and you’ll see many similarities between them: both are leisure pursuits, neither are obviously utilitarian, and both are hubs of deeply engaged subcultures. But there are differences: games require direct engagement and what you might call co-authorship between the designer and the player.

All this poses the question of why we are concerned with giving video games the status of art. Are we simply trying to legitimise them? Does being called “art” change the qualities of video games? Only if we can answer these questions can we move the conversation forward.TA

Le-O

f-TA

LeS.

COM

/vA

NIT

AS

For more books and arts coverage and to add your comments, visit www.NewScientist.com/blogs/culturelab

100918_Op_CultureLab.indd 47 13/9/10 13:29:38