What is this book about?
This book attempts to capture the still short, yet deep history of video games in a form accessible to the average reader.
How is this book organized
- Timeline - Offers a year by year timeline of video game history and related developments.
- Platform History - Contains history related to specific platforms.
- Standardized platforms - Covers gaming on platforms not mainly intended for gaming. Covers the evolution of computer, web, and mobile gaming.
- Arcade Gaming - Covers topics specific to arcade gaming. Strongly focuses on seminal arcade games.
- The section on Video Game Console History offers an enhanced glossary that focuses on the history of most major or notable game consoles and dedicated platforms. This is meant to also serve as a resource for fans of a particular console line, or as a handy reference guide for game collectors.
- Specialized topics - Covers gaming history in specific topics that tend to be more obscure or interdisciplinary.
- Gaming Culture - Covers the history of cultures in gaming, and how they change over time.
Who is this book for?
Gamers
Gamers can learn a great deal about their favorite series and developers from this book. There are a number of surprising and interesting stories in gaming history, from humble beginnings to surprising twists. Furthermore, gamers may also learn about interesting games and hidden gems that they might have missed out on.
Educators
This book seeks to offer a deep chronology of gaming history, and also seeks to include interdisciplinary subjects when appropriate.
Here are some examples:
- There is such a large number of pictures included in the game console section is to allow readers to fully grasp the visual designs popular in a given time period, making this book a potentially useful resource for an industrial design class.
- Almost all console and computer pages include specifications, which could be used when studying a history of technology to see how cheap commodity hardware has changed over time.
- When possible, economic, demographic, and geographic factors are briefly mentioned to enhance the learning experience of the reader.
Researchers
This book seeks to offer interesting leads on video game history, which may be of interest to scholars of gaming related subjects, as well as more broad fields like popular culture studies, business management, and other topics.
Whenever possible this book cites the best available sources for a fact, and tends to exclude anything non-obvious if it can not be sourced. However when it comes to more obscure subtopics, the quality of sources tends to diminish. Often, there are conflicting accounts of older obscure subjects, and this book attempts to preserve these viewpoints when it is not exceedingly clear that one is in error. As with any collaborative work, you should confirm what is listed here before repeating it.
Preservationists
Almost all consoles and computer pages include technical information, and many also include pictures of console internals. These resources may be of use for those working to preserve video game history, or make repairs on old hardware.
What is not covered in this book?
Detailed lore about specific game series
Other Wikibooks like the Metal Gear Series book and the 0 A.D. book cover such matters in depth, so to avoid redundancy such material is only briefly explored when needed in this book. New in depth material for a series should go in an appropriate book - if no such book exists, you can make one!
Strategy guides for specific games
Per Wikibooks:What is Wikibooks?, this book contains no strategy guides. Even if it were permitted, it would be a distraction from the primary goals of this book. While specific novel mechanics may be mentioned and explained occasionally, as well as the subject of strategy guides themselves from a meta historical perspective, they are not a substitute for a strategy guide offering advice for a specific game.
Every gaming fact ever
This book makes no attempt to cover all facts about the history gaming, simply the most important and most interesting ones. For notable topics in gaming, there is Wikipedia. This book is not an attempt at an all inclusive gaming encyclopedia, nor should it be.
In general the following are excluded
- A list of every game to come out for a console. There are some exceptions for the readers sake when a console only saw a handful of games, and a full listing can typically be found at Wikipedia.
- Detailed biographies of significant game developers. While facts about game developers may be brought up in relation to the topic at hand, full biographies are usually covered adequately on Wikipedia.
A succinct history of gaming
There are already many books which cover the most important aspects of gaming history, the best selling consoles, and the people who lead them. Those stories also belong in this book.
However there are many more stories of failure, reckless ambition, and once popular games forgotten. For the benefit of the reader, failures, canceled projects, and other less glamorous subjects are not excluded, because they are also part of gaming history. Without them, it is hard for the reader to understand that the road to a successful gaming industry project has been historically wrought with peril and fumbles. In some cases, failures and limited releases have been important tools in a company strategy to succeed elsewhere, and these cases certainly should not be ignored.
In general, if a subject received significant citable coverage, it should go in regardless of its overall success or impact.