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The State of Play
- Sixteen Voices of Video Games
- Narrated by: Zachary Webber, Alex Hyde-White, Tonya Cornilesse, Liane Curtis, Steve Marvel
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged Audiobook
- Release date: 12-03-15
- Language: English
- Publisher: Audible Studios
Regular price: $19.95
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Three years ago, 32-year-old Markus "Notch" Persson of Stockholm was an unknown and bored computer programmer. Today, he is a multi-millionaire international icon. Minecraft, the "virtual Lego" game Markus crafted in his free time, has become one of the most talked about activities since Tetris. Talked about by tens of millions of people, in fact.It is the story of unlikely success, fast money, and the power of digital technology to rattle an empire. And it is about creation, exclusion, and the feeling of not fitting in.
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In today’s society, games are fulfilling real human needs in ways that reality is not. Hundreds of millions of people globally - 174 million in the United States alone - regularly inhabit game worlds because they provide the rewards, stimulating challenges and epic victories that are so often lacking in the real world. Jane McGonigal argues that we need to figure out how to make the real world—our homes, our businesses and our communities—engage us in the way that games do.
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Publisher's Summary
Featuring: Ian Bogost, Leigh Alexander, Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian and Katherine Cross, Ian Shanahan, Anna Anthropy, Evan Narcisse, Hussein Ibrahim, Cara Ellison and Brendan Keogh, Dan Golding, David Johnston, William Knoblauch, Merritt Kopas, and Ola Wikander
The State of Play is a call to consider the high stakes of video-game culture and how our digital and real lives collide. Here, video games are not hobbies or pure recreation; they are vehicles for art, sex, and race and class politics.
The 16 contributors are entrenched - they are the video game creators themselves, media critics, and Internet celebrities. They share one thing: They are all players at heart, handpicked to form a superstar roster by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson, the authors of the best-selling Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game That Changed Everything.
The State of Play is essential listening for anyone interested in what may well be the defining form of cultural expression of our time.
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- Bryan
- 03-09-16
A mixed bag
As someone who has been playing video games since the early 90's and has considered myself right there at the traditional core of the gaming community this book opened my eyes to many of the atypical views of video games.
Its a compilation of different articles read by different narrators and some of these are much better than others. A handful of the truly eye opening ones were undermined by the narrators reading, particularly the ones detailing transgender roles and sex in video games. While I found the content of the piece fairly good the reading of it made it sound almost like an erotic novel rather than social commentary and that was the low point of the book for me.
The book definitely is worth a listen despite its flaws because the gaming community at large does need to have an elevated awareness of these issues and can only benefit from a broader definition of what constitutes a game and why people play them.
7 of 9 people found this review helpful