Who killed the video game?

Since spending many many hours on Sunday listening to Wil Wheaton read Ernest Cline’s fabulous book Ready Player One, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about video games. This book is pretty fabulous even if your nerdy-inclinations don’t bend towards Sci-Fi or 80s pop culture or classic video games (mine don’t and I still loved it).

So when I stumbled upon Cory Doctorow (who is mentioned in the book) posting about the death of video games on Boing Boing my heart raced a little. Doctorow’s post points to Tim Rogers’ “who killed video games?” (a ghost story). Which is a bit misleading because I’m not entirely sure if social games (ala Farmville and Social Sims) should be put in the same bucket as other games (like, I don’t Pac-Man. Remember how I said my nerdy-inclinations didn’t include video game knowledge?).

Regardless, Rogers’ piece is pretty interesting about how calculating and evil-genius-y the creators of these social games are and how they program the fun out of the game and put more on the suffering part of it. Sure, the article is white text on a black background and is firmly in the tl;dr zone, but if you got some time to spare and good eyes give it a read. With everything we do becoming increasingly ‘gamified’ it’s kind of cool to see how these game-makers are pulling our strings.