The critic Leslie Fiedler was writing about comic books, not video games, when he tallied up the charges against “vulgar art” in 1955. The censors and middlebrows, Fiedler wrote, claimed that this kind of stuff  not just comics but pulp novels, too  was “sadistic, fetishistic, brutal, full of terror; that it pictures women with exaggeratedly full breasts and rumps, portrays death on the printed page, is often covertly homosexual, etc., etc.”

Fiedler reeled off this list, pacing the courtroom like Perry Mason, before turning to the jury and declaring: “About these charges, there are two obvious things to say. First, by and large, they are true. Second, they are also true about much of the serious art of our time, especially that produced in America.” (Order in the court!) You can’t condemn “Superman,” he added as an example, “and praise the existentialist-homosexual-sadist shockers of Paul Bowles.”

Fiedler’s defense of comic books was ringing, many-angled and way ahead of its time. He saw something in comics that few other intellectuals did, not merely that they “touch archetypal material” and are the inheritors of “the inner impulses of traditional folk art,” but that they are weird, funny and engrossing. He was moved by them in much the same inchoate way that Tom Bissell, in his new book, “Extra Lives,” is moved by another lurid and often frowned-upon art form: video games.

Mr. Bissell is a young journalist and fiction writer, best known for “The Father of All Things” (2007), a book about returning to Vietnam with his father, a Vietnam War veteran. He’s serious and gifted, with an agreeably open, floppy-haired prose style. His new book bored me, though: viscerally, crushingly. Reading it was like sitting on a hot tractor, mowing a big weedy field of Ambien.