Ervin - Bit by bit: how video games transformed our world

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say

What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,

Which in the very thought renews the fear.

So bitter is it, death is little more;

But of the good to treat, which there I found,

Speak will I of the other things I saw there.

Dante Alighieri, Inferno (c. 1320)

about these old video games? You know, thats a question that some people might ask.

Warren Robinett (2015)

The massive HDTV loomed in front of the windows and blocked the view of the beach. Two of my nephews, John and Logan, were watching cartoons at a volume that came to find me even after I retreated three rooms away. It was Christmas Day at my parents house on the Jersey Shore. I heard sound effects but no dialogue to speak of. The background music seemed cheery at first, but the steady repetition of some sort of crunching noise called to mind a deranged celery-eating contest. The soundtrack was dominated by a Philip Glass-esque exercise in serialism: rapid crashes interrupted by bleating sheep that went on, full blast, for an hour. I was trying to read, but my noise-canceling headphones proved useless.

The headache kettle-drumming at my temples shot pinpricks into the backs of my eyes. My face burned bright red because I was wearing a new cashmere sweater the color of reflective bibs worn by highway work crews, and Im allergic to wool. In the kitchen, my father was loading his Crock-Pot with the ingredients for his broccoli surprise, but it sounded like he was performing Flight of the Bumblebee using every metal pan and piece of flatware in the house. My wife Elivi, the smart one in the family, had gone out for a long run. Unfortunately, my sneakers were in the nephew-colonized living room. I closed the Inferno and then my eyes. The microwave started beeping and no one made it stop, so I took a breath and ventured out to the kitchen.

I found my running shoes buried in the living room amid the discarded wrapping paper and Legos and cardboard boxes. I planned to make a hasty exit and catch up with Elivi, but the TV grabbed my attention. The picture quality looked terrible, like a chunky 8-bit Atari game but in 3D. I sat on the rug between my nephews, who didnt notice my presence, and saw that John was tethered to the screen. In his hands was no simple joystick, but rather a plastic device shaped like a bat that had been squashed, taxidermied, and shellacked. The game was called Minecraft (2011) and I had never seen anything like it. that it had sold over 100 million copies worldwide.

There existed no narrative structureno storyto Minecraft, at least as far as I could tell. John toggled between pop-up boxes when he was not making his way among abstract trees and along poorly-rendered bodies of water. Block-like animals lumbered around. Though rudimentary, I found the action on screen enthralling. What I would have thought of as the camera didnt adhere to a stable or situated point of view. Instead, it flew around to capture the action from different angles. It was incomprehensible and yet I knew deep in my bones that it was a work of absolute genius, albeit one that I didnt understand.

Maybe every generation believes as much about their childhoodsor at least I hope they dobut the 1970s were the best imaginable time to grow up in America. We had the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, the first Star Wars movies, Dungeons & Dragons games, Monty Pythons Flying Circus, and I, Claudius reruns on PBSand emergent video game technology that every year matured and grew in sophistication right alongside us. I played my share of arcade and computer games growing up, and worked briefly as a video game designer in the 1990s for a Budapest-based startup. Later, I spent more hours of my life than might be reasonable playing World of Warcraft (2004). And yet, for some reason, I never thought of myself as a gamer.

I dont remember ever looking down on video games and the people who played them, but as a voracious reader, and eventually a graduate student in fiction writing, I naturally spent far more time with books than with video games. My interests leaned more toward the literary than the technological, but on that day down the shore I began to see how intertwined those two concerns could be. Although essential differences remain, and always will, literature and video games have more in common than I could have predicted.

Having been buried nose-first in books for so long, I had missed a fascinating cultural sea change. In my lifetime, video games have expanded from a small, geeky diversion to a mainstream phenomenon as popular in many regards as professional sports. I set out to write this book in order to learn what I had been missing. In doing so, I discovered that video games are not just games, but constitute a powerful storytelling medium, one that has provided startling new ways to think about my own life and the world in which I live.

of American homes have video games of one sort or another. Many universities now offer MFA degrees in video game design, and the Museum of Modern Art has added games to its permanent collection. Instead of herding into noisy arcades or gluing ourselves to a single boxy TV in the den, we now hide our heads in mobile games like Angry Birds (2009), Canabalt (2009), and Pokmon Go (2016). The flows of data that Pynchon mentioned have indeed augmented our reality.

But who exactly is playing all these video games? Reliable statistics are tough to come by. made up half of the video-gaming demographic. Yet the gaming community is still widelyand unfortunatelyperceived as a boys club.

56%were digital downloads. Baseball might be Americas national pastime, but video games have become a global obsession. To call games like