Publication date:
19 September 2013Length of book:
234 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersDimensions:
234x159mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9781442216945
From school lunchrooms to the White House press room, video games are an integral part of our popular culture, and the industry behind them touches all aspects of our lives, gamer and non-gamer alike. Business and entertainment, health and medicine, politics and war, social interaction and education, all fall under its influence.
Virtual Ascendance tells the story of a formerly fringe enterprise that, when few were paying attention, exploded into a multi-billion dollar industry affecting the very way we live. Griffiths paints a thorough and vivid picture of the video game industry, illuminating the various, and often bizarre, ways it’s changing how we work, play and live. He brings readers along on his own journey of discovery, from the back room of a small Irish pub where members of the second-largest industry enclave meet each month, to a university clinic where the Wii is being used to treat Parkinson’s sufferers — and everywhere in between.
Virtual Ascendance is more than just a story about video games, though. It’s the story of an awakening, of a realization that a childhood pastime has exploded into a thriving enterprise — one rooted in entertainment but whose tendrils reach into virtually all aspects of life and society.
Virtual Ascendance tells the story of a formerly fringe enterprise that, when few were paying attention, exploded into a multi-billion dollar industry affecting the very way we live. Griffiths paints a thorough and vivid picture of the video game industry, illuminating the various, and often bizarre, ways it’s changing how we work, play and live. He brings readers along on his own journey of discovery, from the back room of a small Irish pub where members of the second-largest industry enclave meet each month, to a university clinic where the Wii is being used to treat Parkinson’s sufferers — and everywhere in between.
Virtual Ascendance is more than just a story about video games, though. It’s the story of an awakening, of a realization that a childhood pastime has exploded into a thriving enterprise — one rooted in entertainment but whose tendrils reach into virtually all aspects of life and society.
This slim volume (171 pages of text) will be an eye-opener for anyone wanting to understand the world of gaming from a sociological viewpoint. Griffiths (who runs his own business communication company) is quick to both acknowledge and dispel cultural clichés surrounding gamers (geeks and dorks, socially maladjusted young males), and in a sense, this is the key to the book. While providing a concise popular history of computer and console gaming, the author demonstrates that gamers and gaming are pervasive in contemporary society–to an extent that few are aware of. He points to the money generated by the industry, to its emerging champion players, and to its prominence in all forms of media. This book should be required reading for legislators as they grapple with violence and attempt to link it to video gaming, if only to force them to look at the phenomenon in its entirety. It is an excellent primer on video gaming and its present place in culture. Summing Up: Essential. All readers.