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Johan Huizinga's work is pretty foundational to the philosophical underpinnings of games.

Man, Play, and Games is another significant work that predates video gaming.

On a less academic level, Inside Game Design is a book of interviews with several studios of varying success on the game design process and how it adapts from game to game.

These titles might be pretty fringe to what you're looking for, but I can recommend some web pages that provide more easily digested, general interest material that would be helpful to you. I also know of a number of relevant academic journals, if that is of interest to you.

I know this isn't a movie, but The Ultimate History of Video Games is a pretty great read. By this point, its age is showing a bit (it only goes up through the end of the 90's), but it covers the early history of video games really well, and includes a number of pretty great anecdotes in there.

(note /u/sockpuppettherapy this post isn't really aimed at you in any way I'm just using your post as a launching point)

> There is no Roger Ebert of gaming

Speaking of Ebert as far as I'm aware he and Martin Scorsese are friends. Ebert still continues to review Scorsese's films and even wrote an entire book on him.

Is this a lack of proper objectivity? Is it a minor form of corruption as well? I agree that taking sexual favours for coverage would constitute a blatant breach of ethics but where does the line of corruption start? Is it writing about a friend? A close friend? A former lover? A current lover? A significant other? When does one cross the line from simply writing about someone they know through work to it becoming a conflict of interest? Is it only when sex is involved or does it start earlier? Is Ebert violating the ethics of journalism that people are trying to uphold here?

Many of the suggestions on this list are great (Koster's "A Theory of Fun" is especially good in my opinion), but one of the best books I've read is Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's "Rules of Play".

In some ways it's an introduction to game design for designers, but it's way more than that - it touches on the philosophy behind "play" and "games," histories of gaming, personal anecdotes, insights from famous designers and way more.

You can ind a PDF of it very easily on Google, but I think buying it is very, very much worth it.

Also, as a shameless self-plug, I did my PhD work on videogames so I'm happy to talk about resources etc. - PM me or reply and we can chat about it!

This afternoon: Torchlight II with Synergies Mod, farming those two final legendary set pieces in Derinkuyu.

Shortly after dinner, introducing a friend to Archer with the Archer drinking game. (I mean, it's a game, right?)

Finally, after dying from exactly one episode, we'll be having board game night with friends. I'm guessing we'll be playing Shadow Hunters with cards we made ourselves, but I'm hoping that we play something different, like Splendor or City of Thieves with draft picking.

Your best bet for learning yourself is to get a book. The biggest issue is their isn't really a generalized book. They are mostly specialized for exactly what you want to do. For example Michael Quinn's "Parallel Programming in C with MPI and OpenMP" is great if you want to wriate a parallel program in C with MPI and OpenMP. You would probably do pretty well getting Using OpenMP and going from there. It should have plenty of examples in C++ to get you started on th right track.

The two most interesting books I've read on video games have been Tristan Donovan's fascinating history of the medium, "Replay: The History of Video Games". It is a very in-depth history that gets down into a lot of nitty gritty stuff about the birth of video games and stays very in-depth up until about the late 90s when it starts to go big picture. Still a great read.

If you're looking for something that's more of a critical piece, I'd suggest Brendan Keogh's close reading of Spec Ops: The Line, "Killing is Harmless". It's an incredible way to enhance your playthrough of what is already an incredibly emotional game. Keogh breaks down everything from the allusions to literature and film to the significance of scripted events in the game. The only advice I have is if you haven't played the game before and you try and read along as you play the game you do get hit with some spoilers as Keogh assumes you've finished the game when you're reading the book. Still def worth your time though.

Not a very popular book, but I would pick Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Half the book takes place inside of a computer game that is eerily similar to Second Life (eerily because the book came out in the late '80s), with a lot of action packed scenes in both the computer game and the "real life" bits. So it would kind of play like, "Yo, dawg, I heard you like video games so I put a video game inside a video game so you can play a video game while you play a video game".

Check out the book 1,001 Video Games to Play Before You Die - it covers a mix of noteworthy and excellent titles from the 1970s forward across a wide mix of platforms.

While the list transcends PC content, it's worth noting that owning a gaming PC also means you own an extremely high end emulation platform. This makes playing older titles from any console a reality.

Okay, since everyone here keeps recommending $100+ keyboards instead of an actual cheap mech, I'll link some stuff for you. Cheap made-in-China mechs give you a great price to performance ratio.

If you're looking for something affordable that's kinda GAMER-y, Redragon's not bad. Here's a full-size model with RGB lighting and linear red MX-type switches (typically made by Outemu or Gateron). As of posting this, it's on sale for $34.

Here's a similar, non-backlit keyboard with MX blue equivalent switches. less than $30 at the time of posting.

Here's a few books I can recommend

The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon--The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World
https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-History-Video-Games-Pokemon/dp/0761536434

Up Up Down Down Left WRITE: The Freelance Guide to Video Game Journalism
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0989533506/ref=pd_aw_fbt_14_img_3?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=MSPBR3N4XXNTK22E7VBG

Critical Path: How to Review Videogames for a Living
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/098514372X/ref=pd_aw_fbt_14_img_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=MSPBR3N4XXNTK22E7VBG

The Videogame Style Guide and Reference Manual
https://www.amazon.com/Videogame-Style-Guide-Reference-Manual/dp/1430313056

Hope that helps!

I got these back in April and have been pretty happy with them so far.

https://www.amazon.com/HyperX-KHX-H3CL-WR-Gaming-Headset/dp/B00JJNQG98

This one is actually pretty good. If, like you said, you are just using it for in-game chat, it is fine. I have had one for years, and bought several (broke one, my fault - vacuumed the cord), and bought it for other people.

> if I wrote a book about a sexy 12 year old no one is gonna let me put it in their library

https://www.amazon.com/Lolita-Vladimir-Nabokov/dp/0679723161 fairly certain you can find that in some libraries.

http://www.amazon.com/HyperX-Cloud-Gaming-Headset-KHX-H3CL/dp/B00JJNQG98/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1426711379&sr=8-2&keywords=kingston+hyperx+cloud

$80 on amazon

Check out Ian Bogost's How To Do Things with Video Games and Jane McGonigol's Reality is Broken. Both books revolve around exactually what you ask for.

Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell is going to be required reading. As others have posted here, YouTube is where most of the games crit and dissection is happening.

This is what I have. Turns out it's less than $15. I've had zero issues.

Link time!

>I'm hoping we can get a law to pass later down the line.

IP law is corrupt and is never going to be non corrupt, capitalism is not compatable with rule of law. You do not live in a democracy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYFxtNgOeiI

Book:

http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf

Before I begin your brain does not reason nor see reality as it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

Manufacturing consent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwU56Rv0OXM

https://vimeo.com/39566117

Testing theories of representative government

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

US distribution of wealth

https://imgur.com/a/FShfb

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

What goes down in the US goes down in all capitalist western states, they all follow the same model of "politics as show" where the public has no input if you look at the research.
From war is a racket:

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil Interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."[p. 10]

"War is a racket. ...It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." [p. 23]

"The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." [p. 24]

General Butler is especially trenchant when he looks at post-war casualties. He writes with great emotion about the thousands of traumatised soldiers, many of who lose their minds and are penned like animals until they die, and he notes that in his time, returning veterans are three times more likely to die prematurely than those who stayed home.

http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/dp/0922915865