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More than half a century later, it’s still not clear what place videogames have in culture. Some would celebrate them as heir apparent to cinema’s throne, the art-form of the twenty-first century. But this seems unlikely, and not just because games remain a niche interest despite the fact that so many people play them, but also because the twenty-first century is an era of media fragmentation, of tweets and Instagrams and animated GIFs and memes, but one still built around traditional media forms: text, image, and moving image. Maybe it’s because games are as much like appliances—toasters or rice cookers, say—as they are like art and media. We operate games, we use them like we use soaps and rice cookers. But yet, also use them like we use cinema and literature. It’s time to embrace both halves of games, the art and the appliance, by treating each game as the weird, unholy confluence of culture and apparatus that it really is.

In recent years, computer games have moved from the margins of popular culture to its center. Reviews of new games and profiles of game designers now regularly appear in the New York Times and the New Yorker, and sales figures for games are reported alongside those of books, music, and movies. They are increasingly used for purposes other than entertainment, yet debates about videogames still fork along one of two paths: accusations of debasement through violence and isolation or defensive paeans to their potential as serious cultural works. This book contends that such generalizations obscure the limitless possibilities offered by the medium’s ability to create complex simulated realities. This book explores the many ways computer games are used today: documenting important historical and cultural events; educating both children and adults; promoting commercial products; and serving as platforms for art, pornography, exercise, relaxation, pranks, and politics. Examining these applications in a series of short chapters, the book argues that together they make the medium broader, richer, and more relevant to a wider audience.