Video Games FAQ - All That’s Left to Know About Games and Gaming Culture Review

Before the days of the internet, and being able to look everything up with a few clicks, key presses or voice commands, we had these things called books. They were the corpses of dead trees, processed to be malleable, scrawled with ink so as to impart a message. They had no batteries or backlighting and they were portable if not pocket sized. Perhaps you remember them? If so, good, because I’m going to tell you all about one now.

Video Games FAQ - All That’s Left to Know About Games and Gaming Culture (VGFAQ) is a hefty tome, detailing the history of video games from their initial inception, right up to the modern day (at the time of writing, the Switch hadn’t been fully confirmed so that’s the only mainstream device not covered). I imagine there’s a few people that are wondering why we need a book on this when there’s so many YouTube videos, online articles, blogs and archival sites dedicated to videogames, but you’d be hard pressed to find a resource that’s anywhere near as detailed as this one anywhere else.

Author Mark J.P. Wolf has some impressive credentials to his name, with decades of research into videogames and other entertainment media under his belt, and that’s before we’ve even mentioned the PhD in critical studies. He’s also an Associate Professor in the Communication Department of Concordia University in Wisconsin, USA. The point I’m making here is that this is someone who has studied the field greatly and knows how to write a book. He’s written numerous books on gaming and this is just the latest of those.

It’s worth nothing that Wolf is based in the United States of America, and this is reflected in the point from which some of the history is viewed. He does cover some of the UK history, but systems like the ZX Spectrum, Dragon 32, and Amstrad CPC get little more than a passing reference. There’s probably a whole other book to be written about the UK home computer scene of the eighties, but instead, that period of time in the chronology is dedicated here to the second North American videogame crash of the eighties. To be fair to the author, there’s a lot of ground to cover in what is an ambitious title, with the coverage that is here amounting to around 400 pages already. If the book was to be smaller than the average encyclopedia, then there was going to have to be some brevity involved, and it’s natural to expect an American author to consider the history in America to be less worthy of hitting the cutting room floor when space needs preserving.

The information that did make it in is presented in largely chronological order, starting from the early days of electromechanical games, through the creation of basic electronic games, right up the modern behemoths like the Xbox One and PS4. All the oddities in between like the Casio Loopy, the Apple Bandai Pippin and the Watara Supervision are covered too, so even if you consider yourself a pretty seasoned videogame enthusiast, there’s likely still plenty of information to learn here. The information within is well-researched and accurate (although I did spot one slight error in the details of an obscure Master System model!)

Although this is a fact-based book, it’s very readable. The language used is neither overly simplified, nor overly complex, making for a book that’s very readable as a cover-to-cover book. This isn’t one of those coffee table type books that’s designed for flicking though in a waiting room, but a real page turner. If you’ve got any curiosity about the history of video gaming, this is a title that will help satiate it.