There’s a great scene in the class Steve Martin movie “The Jerk” where his character leaps with joy shouting, “The new phonebooks are here, the new phonebooks are here!”

I feel a little like that since receiving my advance copy of James Newman and Iain Simons’ "Difficult Questions About Videogames"

The book offers 969 responses from 71 contributors to 13 maddeningly direct questions about videogames. For example, the question that opens the tome is, “What is a videogame?” The answers always seem obvious until you actually try to articulate an answer.

I haven’t yet plowed through the book in the detail it deserves. But my first pass through shows that the project lives up to its promise, colliding a wide variety of contributors offering a delicious collection of answers. Although packaged in an attractive square-bound package, the book has all the electric random energy of the blogsphere, ideas bouncing and shooting about.