This Gaming Life [book]

Just finished reading This Gaming Life of Jim Rossignol and I enjoyed it. I don’t think I’ve read a book that’s mostly about games before, so I can’t really compare it with anything. He attempts to place games into perspective, writing how it changed his and other people’s life and questioning the purpose of games, which is a bit like like questioning the purpose of life, even if you’re able to answer it, it’ll be a personal answer and most won’t agree with it. But it’s interesting nonetheless.

It doesn’t really come to a conclusion and doesn’t really bring any answers (for me at least), but it does raise a lot of interesting thoughs. I think gaming really is one of those phenomenons that hasn’t been properly put into perspective yet, if that’s even possible, and this book helps with it. I also liked how it looked into the future of gaming in the end of the book.

There’s also a lot of stuff on EVE Online and he makes a good case of how a not-so-restricted virtual sandbox world allows players to create their own content and set their own goals (way beyond high scores and bragging rights), with using Interstellar Starbase Syndicate outpost project (+shareholders project) and Istvaan Shogaatsu’s Great Heist as example. Not much news overall for an EVE player like me, but I didn’t know that much about ISS and I enjoyed reading about it. Always good to see EVE promoted in a way like this and I hope other MMO developers start to pick it up.

Anyway, it’s a good read. I did hope though I could use this book as a “why-I-game” book and point to it when non-gaming friends start to bother me with that question, I don’t think it’s a good book for that. I also am not sure how much ‘fun’ this book is for non-gaming people, it might get a bit boring somewhere in the middle.

PS. You can read most of the stuff on Korea in the book here actually, it’s very interesting.

~ by nuyan on July 16, 2008.