‘Video games are something to educate yourself about, to embrace’
" Death By Video Game extract: The sometimes fatal attraction of video games
You've forged a successful career writing about gaming culture for publications such as the New Yorker and New Statesman. What made you want to write a book?
The past few years I've been doing a fair bit of reporting about video games, and what particularly interests me are the human stories in and around them - both about the people playing them, who do interesting things, and those about 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 particular?
Video games generally get a bad reputation from the wider - non-playing - world, especially when compared with other forms of culture. Why is this?
I think it's rooted in the idea of play. Play is viewed as something childish and childlike and something that you should move 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 part of their entertainment diet, alongside literature, film, music and all the rest. I think that generational distrust is going to go away eventually.
