Everything to Play For: An Insider’s Guide to How Videogames Are Changing Our World

Videogame critic Did debuts with a blistering critique of the gaming industry’s ethical and political shortcomings. Charting how gaming became a boys club, she notes that a sales slump in the mid-1980s led companies to focus their marketing on “boys aged eight to sixteen and their fathers,” even as such megahits as Barbie Fashion Designer, which outsold Doom in the 1990s, proved the industry was leaving a lucrative market untapped. As games became increasingly by and for young men, problematic character design and gameplay became the norm, Did contends, lamenting the proliferation of “women [nonplayer characters] in tiny bikinis who can be brutally beaten.” Conditions inside EA, Rockstar Games, and other developers are often as unethical as what they put on screen, marked by notorious “crunch” periods in which employees work 60-to-100-hour weeks without overtime compensation. Arguing that better alternatives are possible, Did details the business model of French gaming studio Motion Twin, where employees share “equal salary and decision making powers.” With nuanced analysis (she asserts that games, contrary to their reputation as the purview of alienated loners, often provide the basis for community, recounting how Doom “inspired conversations and hours of socializing” around amateur modifications of its levels), Did offers a damning portrait of the gaming industry that nonetheless finds reasons for hope. This one’s a winner. (Sept.)