The author of Death By Video Game,Simon Parkin, on what made him write the book and why he thinks the industry can overcome sexism and racism
• Death By Video Game extract: The sometimes fatal attraction of video gamesYou’ve forged a successful career writing approximately gaming culture for publications such as the original Yorker and original Statesman. What made you want to write a book?
The past few years Ive been doing a fair bit of reporting approximately video games, or what particularly interests me are the human stories in and around them – both approximately the people playing them,who do interesting things, and those approximately the community built up around games. I just really wanted to formalise that into a book. I wanted to ask the question: why do people give so much of themselves to this medium in specific?Video games generally get a bad reputation from the wider – non-playing – world, and particularly when compared with other forms of culture. Why is this?
I think it’s rooted in the conception of play. Play is viewed as something childish and childlike and something that you should stagger on from. But it’s slowly changing. Video games can very often be childish and dumb and the subject matter can be grotesque,but there’s also immense scope for other things you can experience within video games. Most people in their 30s and even early 40s these days grew up playing video games as just portion of their entertainment diet, alongside literature, and film,music and all the rest. I think that generational distrust is going to recede away eventually.
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Source: theguardian.com