Video and Computer Game History
Explore the fascinating history of video and computer games with our curated list of must-read books. Discover the evolution, milestones, and cultural impact of gaming through expert-authored titles.
Book
The Ultimate History of Video Games
by Steve L. Kent
Traces the history and development of video games, providing information on the first games, influential developers, how the games have changed over the years, and the most popular games.
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Book
Masters of Doom
by David Kushner
"To my taste, the greatest American myth of cosmogenesis features the maladjusted, antisocial, genius teenage boy who, in the insular laboratory of his own bedroom, invents the universe from scratch. Masters of Doom is a particularly inspired rendition. Dave Kushner chronicles the saga of video game virtuosi Carmack and Romero with terrific brio. This is a page-turning, mythopoeic cyber-soap opera about two glamorous geek geniuses--and it should be read while scarfing down pepperoni pizza and swilling Diet Coke, with Queens of the Stone Age cranked up all the way." --Mark Leyner, author of I Smell Esther Williams Masters of Doom is the amazing true story of the Lennon and McCartney of video games: John Carmack and John Romero. Together, they ruled big business. They transformed popular culture. And they provoked a national controversy. More than anything, they lived a unique and rollicking American Dream, escaping the broken homes of their youth to co-create the most notoriously successful game franchises in history--Doom and Quake--until the games they made tore them apart. Americans spend more money on video games than on movie tickets. Masters of Doom is the first book to chronicle this industry's greatest story, written by one of the medium's leading observers. David Kushner takes readers inside the rags-to-riches adventure of two rebellious entrepreneurs who came of age to shape a generation. The vivid portrait reveals why their games are so violent and why their immersion in their brilliantly designed fantasy worlds offered them solace. And it shows how they channeled their fury and imagination into products that are a formative influence on our culture, from MTV to theInternet to Columbine. This is a story of friendship and betrayal, commerce and artistry--a powerful and compassionate account of what it's like to be young, driven, and wildly creative.
Book
The Medium of the Video Game
by Mark J. P. Wolf
In this book, Mark J.P. Wolf and four other scholars conduct the first thorough investigation of the video game as an artistic medium.
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Book
Classic Home Video Games, 1972-1984
by Brett Weiss
This reference highlights popular video games of the 1970s and early 1980s, covering virtually every official U.S. release for programmable home game consoles of the pre-Nintendo NES era. The book is organized alphabetically by console brand, with encyclopedia-style entries for every game released for that console.
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Book
The Video Game Explosion
by Mark J. P. Wolf
This title traces the growth of video games, showing how they have become an integral part of popular culture today.
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Book
How we became posthuman
by N. Katherine Hayles
In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age. Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman." Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel Limbo by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems. Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, How We Became Posthuman provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here.
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