cover image Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds

Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds

J. C. Herz. Little Brown and Company, $35 (244pp) ISBN 978-0-316-36007-4

As much as Herz's (Surfing the Internet) new book is an enthusiastic and diligently researched history of, as she puts it, ""the evolution of videogames from blips to behemoths,"" it is also an engaging exploration of ""the human drive to play."" Herz describes how that drive has persisted and developed in response to wave upon wave of technological refinement. She begins with a time line that plots the growth of the interactive entertainment from 1962, when an MIT electrical engineer created Spacewar, a videogame that scientists across the county copied and installed in university computer systems across the country, to today's $6-billion-a-year global industry. Especially intriguing are the interspersed profiles of the behind-the-scenes programmers who start out tinkering with code, become obsessed with a new game form and wind up millionaires. Only fellow gamers will share Herz's adulation for some of these programmers (""I've never been starstruck. Until now. I can't believe. I'm actually talking to the guy who wrote Defender,"" she writes), but most readers will be fascinated--and some concerned--by the sense of generations being formed and changed by this latest collision of entertainment and a technology that, unlike TV, film and music, has been designed primarily for solitary consumption. (June)