Bit by Bit: How Video Games Transformed Our World

Leonidas C. Romero said An incredibly wonderful trip through Video Game history and it's affect on our culture and world, handled deftly by Andrew Ervin. An incredibly wonderful trip through Video Game history and it's affect on our culture and world, handled deftly by Andrew Ervin. The author gives us a beautiful history, giving us insights to how video gaming changed, and continues to change our world. The introductions to those pioneer women and men who built the foundations of this unique art form, was eye opening and gives so much information into the how's, what's and where's. A great read and one that I was so happy to pass to the young gamers in my own house to read.. Daniel L DiFranco said A Treat for Even the Casual (or Not So Casual) Gamer. As someone whose last new system was a Sega Dreamcast and after that a used Playstation 1, I wouldn't call myself a gamer. I found this book enjoyable and informative. Ervin's book sheds light on the history of video games (of which I knew virtually nothing) in an engaging and easy manner. There's plenty of academia in here as far as the nuance of creating a well-researched argument, but it does not come across as stuffy. Here we have a book that is full of joy, written by a person who sees the wonder and cultural currency that gaming an. Steven Halle said A Quick Bit on Bit by Bit. As a bookish Gen X/Millennial cusper, I would venture I’m precisely the target audience for Bit by Bit by Andrew Ervin, a book that is by turns a critical history of video games as an emergent popular entertainment medium and a memoir of the author’s lifelong relationship with playing video games, which maps well onto the medium’s forty-plus year history. In the book, Ervin makes a good case for why people interested in immersive or communal aesthetic experiences more and more often look to games as cultural touchstones

As Ervin argues, games can be art because they are beautiful, moving, and even political.. Whereas gamers once constituted a small and largely male subculture, today 67 percent of American households play video games. In Bit by Bit, Andrew Ervin sets out to understand the explosive popularity of video games. He travels to government laboratories, junk shops, and arcades. The average gamer is now 34 years old and spends eight hours each week playing - and there is a 40 percent chance this person is a woman. Video games have seemingly taken over our lives. In charting the material and technological history of video games from the 1950s to the present, he suggests that their appeal starts and ends with the sense of creativity they instill in gamers. He interviews scientists and game designers, both old and young. An acclaimed novelist and critic argues that