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A very interesting piece of long form journalism cum memoir about the way video gaming has subsumed and changed the way we live, interact, and think.
To the uninitiated, the figures are nothing if not staggering: 155 million Americans play video games, more than the number who voted in November's presidential election. And they play them a lot: According to a variety of recent studies, more than 40 percent of Americans play at least three hours a week, 34 million play on average 22 hours each week, 5 million hit 40 hours, and the average young American will now spend as many hours (roughly 10,000) playing by the time he or she turns 21 as that person spent in middle- and high-school classrooms combined. Which means that a niche activity confined a few decades ago to preadolescents and adolescents has become, increasingly, a cultural juggernaut for all races, genders, and ages. How had video games, over that time, ascended within American and world culture to a scale rivaling sports, film, and television? Like those other entertainments, video games offered an escape, of course. But what kind?
In 1993, the psychologist Peter D. Kramer published Listening to Prozac, asking what we could learn from the sudden mania for antidepressants in America. A few months before the election, an acquaintance had put the same question to me about video games: What do they give gamers that the real world doesn't?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06 2017, @02:17PM (4 children)
And the Greywolf(?) series.
We've had book based interactive fiction since the 60s-70s and possibly much longer.
Given that and the fact that higher level code doesn't look much different than it, given simple inputs and outputs, and gaming has been going on in both genres for around 50 years now.
(Score: 2) by driven on Monday March 06 2017, @02:44PM (2 children)
When you say "interactive fiction" are you referring to the "choose your own adventure" type books? I used to love those as a kid but they are much too simple now. Is there anything similar out there at an adult reading level?
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Wednesday March 08 2017, @03:16PM (1 child)
I picked up one of those books in my teens from some book club or other; it was called 'Grailquest: The Castle of Darkness' and I must have read it a fifty times or more. There was a dry, absurd sense of humour running through it and although it seems there were 8 books in total, they were never easy to get hold of in my little one horse town in the eighties, nor did we have much in the way of disposable income (see Monty Python's "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch for extra notes on equivalent deprivation).
Details on that book series here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grailquest [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Wednesday March 08 2017, @03:27PM
Should have put the title through a search engine before posting: they're all available on archive.org in multiple formats. The distraction this provides from the bureaucratic hell that is the UK probate system is very welcome.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 06 2017, @03:06PM
I can't recall when I first stumbled over those sort of books. I guess that I was a young adult. The books seemed so simple, no real plot, the characters couldn't develop. I ran through the story, came back and took a different route, came back and did things differently, all within a short period of time - half an hour, maybe an hour. I watched for similar books for a little while, and they were all so simplistic, that I just quit looking for them. To make such a thing complex, you would need thousands of pages, not a mere hundred or so. An extremely complex story would require tens of thousands of pages. Pages in a book can probably be equated to lines in game code, if you try. That makes the book far to unweildy to tell a complex story with real characters. No one wants to drive to the library, just to load that one book in the trunk, and bring it home for two weeks.