Virtual Ascendance: Video Games and the Remaking of Reality

by Devin C. Griffiths

From school lunchrooms to the White House press room, video games are an integral part of our popular culture, and the industry behind them touches all aspects of our lives, gamer and non-gamer alike. Business and entertainment, health and medicine, politics and war, social interaction and education, all fall under its influence.

Virtual Ascendance tells the story of a formerly fringe enterprise that, when few were paying attention, exploded into a multi-billion dollar industry affecting the very way we live. Griffiths paints a thorough and vivid picture of the video game industry, illuminating the various, and often bizarre, ways it’s changing how we work, play and live. He brings readers along on his own journey of discovery, from the back room of a small Irish pub where members of the second-largest industry enclave meet each month, to a university clinic where the Wii is being used to treat Parkinson’s sufferers — and everywhere in between.

Virtual Ascendance is more than just a story about video games, though. It’s the story of an awakening, of a realization that a childhood pastime has exploded into a thriving enterprise — one rooted in entertainment but whose tendrils reach into virtually all aspects of life and society.

234 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2013

About the author

Writing is in my blood: I began creating stories for myself (and anyone else who’d read them) in second grade. When asked by my teachers to keep a journal, all my entries centered around a character undertaking some sort of adventure–usually perilous. And while my peers were learning to type using instruction books and teaching templates, I taught myself the keyboard by composing stories on my dad’s manual typewriter, an old blue and white Smith-Corona with faded keys. At 15, I began writing professionally, and though the path has rarely been straight, I’ve kept on it ever since.

My first book, Virtual Ascendance: Video Games and the Remaking of Reality, was recently published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. It's a non-fiction book that explores the impact of games, game technology, and the video game industry on society, health, education, business, culture, and entertainment. As books, once published, are static, I also maintain the blog Reality Evolved: video games and the end of the world (as we know it), which covers a variety of current events and evolving issues, and follows the constantly-developing world of video games (http://devingriffiths.wordpress.com).

I've also started work on my second book, which is a departure from the topic presented in Virtual Ascendance. My second blog, A Symphony of Feathers: Wanderings and rambles in the company of birds (http://devincbirder.wordpress.com), provides a hint as to the subject.