Joystick Nation
J.C. Herz

If you are familiar with J.C. Herz from her book "Surfing on the Internet" you're bound to compare the two books before even reading this one. If you Joysticknation liked the first you'll probably get a bit disappointed. If you considered the first being to personal and blathering perhaps this one may be something more in your style. There is no resemblance between "Surfing on the Internet" and "Joystick Nation". They're both non-fiction, but that's it.

Herz latest is an account for the video game industry, starting at MIT's electric engineering department in the early 60s till today. Gone are Herz's personal stories and on-line experiences, replaced by a journalistic, investigating point of view. It's certainly interesting if you're more or less interested in video games, but having read a completely different Herz a couple of years earlier I must admit I was expecting something else.

She's at her best in her behind-the-scenes descriptions of the Nintendo programmers, and in her discussion of girls vs. Boys in video games. Are the games with female characters actually made for boys? An interesting thing can be that J.C. Herz is a girl herself, one's often used to encounter boys interested in video games. If someone would write about them I certainly would have expected a man.

The book begins with Herz admitting she was born the same year as the first coin-operated video game was used. For those who are clueless about when people first began dropping coins into the video games it's 1971.

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