This Gaming Life by Jim Rossignol
Its always good to start a book with a bang and This Gaming Life does just that.
In May 2000 I was fired from my job as a reporter on a finance newsletter because of an obsession with a video game. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.
From here the stage is set for Rossignol to take you on a semi-autographical tour of the real life world of the games industry. The book is basically split into three. London, Seoul and Reykjavik with a conclusion added to the end. Splitting the book up into cities reflects not just in the geography of Rossignol’s travels but the subjects of the book.
London is autobiographical and about the gaming industry and its transforming power in peoples lives. Of course anything that generates so much money must by definition mean that people can make a living in it, that it becomes an industry by default anyway. But it acts as a way into the world of gaming well enough. That gaming is capable of Feeding back into the real world for example in Luis Von Ahn’s ESP game or Nina Ferrerman’s looking at mapping disease spreads within computer games illustrates one of Rossignols’ key insights that there is a two way street between gaming and reality.
That they can alter each other that they may be different in different parts of the globe in different situations. Seoul shows this effect really well the computer gaming bars of S.Korea perhaps setting a standard for East Asia which is quite different to Europe and the U.S. That games can be a feedback process and this process may not be directly related to that of playing the game. Suddenly for me the book started to spark across different ideas and subjects and really came alive at that point. The third part Reykjavik deals mostly with Eve Online which for many reasons is quite different from most other online games and is capable of emergent behaviour, even in real life. It brings me onto a quote from Will Wright in the book which really helps to sum up the bridge I felt between Architecture and Gaming reading this book.
When we do these computer models, those aren’t the real models, the real models are in the gamer’s head. The computer game is just a compiler for that mental model in the player. We have this ability as humans to build these fairly elaborate models in our imaginations, and the process of play is the process of pushing against reality, building a model, refining a model by looking at he results of looking at interacting with things. - Will Wright 2006.
I’m tantalised and seduced by the beauty of the architecture of video games, also not a little jealous of their freedom and power where in real life Architects seem constrained by conditions, culture and themselves too often.
There is something more in this book too, gaming culture is a thing that is effected by and effects in turn the real world. That we find ourselves in an age where Simulation starts to replace representation not only as a narrative structure but in design and conceptual terms that may in turn effect architecture, cities, even cultures. This seems to be a powerful message in the book which Rossignol only begins to touch on. I look forward to the follow up to further investigate this new frontier.
note: This is a review I wrote and first published in 2009 but republishing here. Gaming is so much bigger now than when this book was first published that this cultural change in gaming is now much more taken for granted. But This Gaming Life I think will always be a good reference for that moment in time culturally when gaming and digital culture had escaped its own community and spread out into the mainstream.