You may have noticed that over on the Technology Blog, Jack Schofield has been running a survey to discover the Top 20 geek books of all time. This got me thinking about videogame books, and whether there were enough bona fide classics to compile a similar list. I reckon there are - as long as you stay well clear of game-based novels which are almost exclusively a disastrous waste of paper, and those academic tomes about 'digital play in the post-modern virtual space'. With these provisos in mind, here is my essential videogame reading list. Feel free to add your own suggestions - I need some ideas for Christmas presents...
Masters of Doom - David Kushner Begins with a young John Romero getting his faced smashed into an Asteroids cabinet and amazingly goes uphill from there, detailing the irresistible rise of Id software. The writing is slapdash at times, but like one of those strangely watchable 'true story' TV movies, the content is usually compelling enough to excuse the delivery.
Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age 1971-1984 - Van Burnham Videogaming's original and best coffee table book is a long, lascivious leer at the finest arcade cabinets of the golden era. Over 400 pages of swooning retro love.
Game Over - David Sheff Sheff's detailed but accessible romp through the history of Nintendo was required reading when I joined Edge Magazine back in 1995 and has been updated since to give it more contemporary relevance. It's hugely biased toward an American audience, but provides some really interesting human insights into the workings of a videogame giant.
Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames - Steven Poole This is a very idiosyncratic look at videogaming from the regular Guardian contributor, combining history, philosophy and cultural analysis into one reasonably short and snappy polemic. At times it reads a bit like an abandoned PhD thesis, but Poole always manages to combine academic intentions with readability. And it's fun to disagree with books.
Electronic Plastic - Jaro Gielens This beautifully illustrated tribute to the golden era of handheld videogames is like porn for Game & Watch fanatics. Hundreds of rare machines, lovingly collected by Dutch obsessive Gielens, and displayed in all their garish plastic finery. It was out of print for a while, but is now back in the shops. You can find out more at the author's equally lovely website.
Phoenix: The Fall & Rise of Videogames - Leonard Herman As an exhaustive history of videogames I prefer this to Steven Kent's more obviously approachable Ultimate History of Videogames. It's really just a very dense chronology dealing in facts and dates rather than analysis. Anyone interested in how the industry got to where it is today should probably own this book - or at least repeatedly borrow it from an ex-editor of Edge Magazine like I do.
Everything Bad Is Good for You - Steven Johnson In this much-needed antidote to the generally held 'videogames are evil' consensus, Johnson discusses the positive elements of digital entertainment that even gamers probably haven't thought about. It's accessible and funny, too.
Lucky Wander Boy - D. B. Weiss or The Beach - Alex Garland Thrown in together, two novels that make non-judgemental use of characters obsessed with videogames. The former is not a brilliant read, but it is filled with fun gaming references. The latter is, of course, a gap year traveler essential where the lead character's videogame addiction is alluded to matter-of-factly, like smoking or drinking. This really struck me when I first read it. Although I was a stereotypical studenty traveler at the time.
