Game Changers: The Video Game Revolution Article

gamingnexus.com:

This bad boy is beefy. At just over 350 pages, Game Changers: The Video Game Revolution packs a lot of info into every page. Phaidon Press has taken 300 of what it considers the most influential and pioneering games, consoles, and publishers, and put them all into one place. There are two introduction essays, a handful of biographies, and a chronological map of the games covered in the book. But the vast majority of this 352-page book is about videogames. I was surprised by some of the entries, how little I knew from the biography section, and how cool it was to look at the chronological order of releases covered in the book.

There are two introduction essays before getting into the meat of Game Changers; neither one did much for me in terms of enjoyment. The first essay by Simon Parkin talks about the history of games, how they started, who makes them, and how they’ve evolved over time. I found his intro a bit too heavy. A lot of big words and phrases are used to highlight how important and epic this essay is. It feels like a highly intelligent person has written this for us peons to try to understand. It is informative, I did learn, but I did not care for it. The four pages of text took me two attempts to finish because I felt like I was being spoken down to while reading.

The second essay is by India Block. I found it more enjoyable and a better read. Block’s intro felt a little more welcoming; this one talks about the communities that games bring. But overall, it also didn’t do much for me. Gamergate is given about a page in her three-page essay. It might be because I am familiar with that situation that I didn’t feel the want to read more about it. I also don’t want to come off as not caring either. She is a woman