Joystick Nation:
How videogames ate our quarters, won our hearts, and rewired our brains
Published by Little, Brown
Written by J.C. Herz
$23.95
When a publication decides that the knowledge of something's quality is important to its readers, it will do a review. That's the essence of Pyramid Picks, anyway. The authors, and the Editor, think that readers will want to know if a particular game is good. It's not surprising then, that Pyramid doesn't do dance reviews. The authors, and the Editor, don't think that enough readers care. Dance reviews, after all, appear in stodgy old publications like The New York Times. They would never do a game review.
Think again. For nearly three months now, The New York Times (which my high-school history teacher called, "America's Newspaper of Record" and is still proud of the slogan "All the News That's Fit to Print") has been running a column on gaming. Each Thursday in the section called "Circuits," which is dedicated to electronic issues, is a column called "Game Theory." The column is written by the highly literate and techno-savvy J.C. Herz. Check it out.
Ms. Herz is also the author of the most lively history of videogames that has yet to appear on the market, Joystick Nation. Having been born the same year as the first coin-operated video game, she is well qualified to discuss the matter. After all, she does not remember a time without videogames. She does not know what it was like to wonder what these . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: June 19, 1998
Copyright © 1998 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.