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David Thomas

Video Game Examiner
David Thomas is a nationally syndicated videogame journalist, critic and teacher. He co-authored the Videogame Style Guide and Reference Manual, so he knows that PONG is written in uppercase and that it wasn’t the first videogame. His current favorite game of all time is Rock Band.

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    This Gaming Life

    August 5, 6:04 PM
    by David Thomas, Video Game Examiner
     
     
    This Gaming Life
    Gamerz can read
    If I had to pick my favorite book about videogames, I'd probably select Steven Poole's Trigger Happy. Even though the examples are horribly out of date at this point, no book has asked better questions about the nature of the medium and answered them in a popular culture package.

    So, comparing Jim Rossignol's This Gaming Life to Poole's work is a compliment.

    A sort of travelogue combined with a writer's journal combined with a fair amount of expository musing, TGL tries to answer the big question: Why videogames?

    His answer hems and haws and looks for answer in all the typical places: Because they make us smarter, or healthier or happier in some cosmic sense.

    And while he finds a lot of reasons to argue for videogames, he seems happy to settle on the idea that games just help us beat boredom.

    A good book for someone just wondering about videogames.

     

    For more info: This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities Jim Rossignol, University of Michigane Press, $24.95

    Topics: journalism , books
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