Over the next couple of weeks, four chapters from the new book Smartbomb will be posted on next-gen.bizThe book explores the gaming revolution from the "grandfather of the videogame" William A. Higinbotham, a scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project and created a game called "Tennis for Two" in 1958, to the emergence of the multi-billion dollar industry that has unleashed the current next-gen console war.
I've just started reading the book over the past few days and so far it's engaging and interesting, peppered with facts and anecdotes accumulated over five years of research by the husband and wife team of Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby.
From the intro:
This is a report from the game front—a place where bleeding-edge computer science and wild creativity have fused to produce a new medium that is poised to dramatically alter not only how we play but also how we communicate and learn.
Until recently, videogames were a boom-and-bust culture, considered by many to be only a notch or two above pornography. Indeed, for most of their thirty-odd years in existence, videogames have been consistently vilified, charged with the corruption of our youth (a role once ascribed to Socrates), blamed for the destruction of our attention spans, and heralded as a precursor to a society of alienated, socially incompetent automatons.
Read on - the official blog for the book
