Bit By Bit

Bit by Bit: How Video Games Transformed Our World by Andrew Ervin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


In a breezy little book, we go through a 15 chapter survey tour of both the history and the impact of video games on our culture, exploring the role they have served in our lives, debating the big questions like: are video games an art form? Ervin has provided a decent background and set up for a uniquely modern phenomenon and laying out it’s legacy, as we now have entered a phase where people play video games in leagues, for money (actually, that’s been going on for a while now, this book came out in 2017).

As a former casual gamer, I was excited to check this out. I came up with the Atari 2600; had a dalliance with a Coleco; moved on to the Original Nintendo Entertainment System --which I got bored with after a month and sold to a friend-- played A Sony PlayStation 2 for about a year in 2004. My last serious gaming came more than a dozen years ago with the Nintendo Wii. I have been out of the game for a while now, mostly due to lack of interest.

Bit by Bit starts even before what I had initially believed to be the first video game (SpaceWar!) and starts us at Tennis For 2, which he argues is really the first video game, though others consider it a quasi-computer game. We move on the SpaceWar! as a logical product of the Cold War, finally moving up through Pong and the Atari system, the video game crash of 1983 and then the rebirth of the industry with Nintendo and beyond. It’s stuff I’ve read before, but nonetheless I still find it enjoyable.

Bit by Bit is not an exhaustive history or analysis, but it is a journey through a world that exists just under our noses.




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