How many hours have you spent playing?
Do you know how many times you stayed up late to finish a level?
What is the sum of money you have invested in games, consoles, equipment?
Most people will not be able to answer any of these questions accurately. It is likely, in fact, that those inquiries have never been raised.
When this happens in the most thriving digital industry of the moment, such as the video games one is, the reasons for such ignorance should be considered. Video Games & Addiction, tells a series of logical stories about the evolution, progress, and revolution of digital playful entertainment. However, instead of just a mere historicist analysis, it puts the most important people, the players, first. Narrating, in turn, numerous real-life anecdotes. Reflecting in perspective the difference between passion and vice, taste and necessity, choice and escapism. Confessional at parts, with its good dose of thought, more than one reader will be thinking about the final conclusions or recognizing attitudes common to all video gamers. When not, feeling identified in the anecdotes. Or at least informed about the changes, for better and worse, from pixel to polygon over the past 50 years. And how addictive components have always been there through different names and mechanics, including:
•Continue?, the perpetuation of the game through uninterrupted attempts.
•Player 2, going from playing in the living room to the massive rooms of online competitiveness.
•Inventory, our digital and physical equipment, brands, and gaming inequalities.
•Replay, the gamer culture consumed on platforms, videos, streamers.
•Insert Coin, the industry understood as a validation and a game format from the very arcades.
•Game Over, when the game doesn't end and ceases to be one.
Insert a coin and go through this book-made-deconstruction, which analyzes at what level we like, and how much we get entertained or trapped in that world behind screens.
