Video Game Sociology Books

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Joystick Nation, by J.C. Herz
If you’ve never thought about how videogames changed people and society, especially during the seminal 1980s years, start here. Joystick Nation is a good introduction to the sociology of videogames, placing them in context as a cultural phenomenon. A word of warning: this is a book for the general public, not for the scholar of videogames – it’s long on personal insight but short on argumentation, and written in a breezy, sometimes hyperbolic style.

Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, by Gerard Jones
This controversial book provides a welcome counter-argument to the simplistic assumption that media violence is necessarily and always bad for children. Most people who assert it do so without any consideration for why children enjoy this material and what it might mean to them. Jones argues that children need to learn to “process” violence and dark emotions in a safe way, through fantasy… which explains why traditional fairy tales are so violent. Killing Monsters suffers from a lack of scholarly rigor – it relies heavily on anecdotes – but it’s a step in the right direction.

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, by James Paul Gee
If kids are switching off from books and on to videogames, can we find a way to make use of that phenomenon instead of just wringing our hands about it? James Paul Gee argues that games teach in a way very different from conventional educational methods, but one that can be harnessed. He presents, and argues for, 36 principles of learning that he believes can be found in the design of good games, and can be applied to both future educational games and in some cases, to the classroom as well.

Everything Bad Is Good for You, by Steven Johnson
Subtitled 'How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter' this is enormously popular in industry circles even if, or possibly because, the hypothesis is as unproven as it is attractive. It does, however, investigate the nature of entertainment today in quasi-scientific ways that can help the industry understand what we are creating, the impact we are having and how to combat prejudice against games.

From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, edited by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins
A collection of essays on gender and games, many of them rightfully critical of the game industry’s narrow-minded male-centered approach to its market. The book came out about the same time as the industry’s first effort to make 'games for girls,' which fizzled, so some of its observations are a bit dated now. Nevertheless, if you want to know why so many women are turned off by videogames, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat will serve as useful background to Sheri Graner Ray’s Gender Inclusive Game Design.

Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon, edited by Joseph Tobin
The anatomical dissection of a fad. Pokémon took the kid world – and I literally mean world – by storm in the late 1990s, and then it faded away. The book consists of a series of essays addressing what it meant. Why are children so vulnerable to fads? Are they harmless fun or corporate brainwashing that produces an addiction which parents are powerless to control? What’s up with that whole Japanese mania for collecting cute things, anyway? While some of the authors in this volume see something sinister in the Pokémon phenomenon, the editor remarks in his introduction that like many children’s fads, parents tend to react with moral panic to things they don’t understand.


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