Video Games & Addiction: Game Over
About this ebook
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.
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About the author
Hi, I'm Byron Rizzo. I am an independent Argentinean writer born in Neuquén, in the North of Patagonia and South of the rest of the world, a land full of stories and lacking people.
I came into the world in the allegorical year 1990. The influence of the decade can be intuited in every interest, taste, and lyrics of my authorship. From the literary presence of magical realism to the patronage of Japanese anime, or the obsession with music from around the world. I have been writing or trying to (with results at the reader's discretion) since a very young age. Antes de que te des cuenta, published in 2021, dates back to when I was 10 to give an example.
Adolescence and youth saw me publishing in digital media of all kinds, ephemeral as the time we have to live. Many of them have already disappeared, luckily for my modesty, like my own and borrowed blogs. Like a Fotolog page in which I dedicated those few 5000 characters per post, to go through the history of Rock, Britpop, Shoegaze, Jazz, and more. First rehearsals of showing my art to others. Some instead can still be found online, such as my articles on technology, culture, video games, digital archaeology, networks, nostalgia, and computing at Tecnovortex.
My published books deal with related, contemporary topics, and walk between genres. Science fiction, cyberpunk culture, fantastic tales of horror adapted to an era almost without secrets to the naked eye, and other concerns of current cyberspace. I seek to write about the time we have placed in to live, finding like the masters of literature before me the magic and mysteries hidden in the machines.
Starting in 2020, I began publishing those same concerns in book format, being the first Videogames & Addiction: Game Over. An essay and anecdote about my great hobby and art of the new century. At the end of that same year the first fiction to see the light was Polypticon, a (no longer so) dystopian epistolary novel through chats and messages on forums. That fiction was soon accompanied by works such as El Sonido, a novel about isolation and obsession. Conoces a Tsuki-chan?, which deals with human-digital transmigration. Or VA-Tek, a transhumanist Neo-Gothic literary experiment mixing alchemy and quantum computing. All of them live in the same expansive universe, in which I plan to continue publishing books.
I appreciate you getting to this point. I invite you to follow my path and value my books, letting me become another secondary character in the narrative of your life. One that I hope you enjoy and enriches your own story.
