Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic: Brad King, John Borland: 8601406525191: Amazon.com: Books

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Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic 1st Edition

by Brad King (Author), John Borland (Author)

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Enter the quiet living rooms and cacophonous gaming environs of gaming kingpins like Richard Garriott and John Carmack, who invented games such as Quake and DOOM. Learn about gamers who make their living by winning gaming tournaments, and secrets of devoted gamers who practically live at LAN parties and gaming conventions.

ISBN-10

9780072228885
ISBN-13

978-0072228885
Edition

1st
Publisher

McGraw-Hill Osborne Media
Publication date

August 19, 2003
Language

English
Dimensions

6 x 1 x 9 inches
Print length

273 pages
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

King and Borland's crisp study of computer game specialists reads like a screenplay and would make ideal film material. The authors offer an intriguing protagonist in Richard Garriott, who overcame disapproval from his astronaut father and the lonely isolation of being a geek to produce the Ultima Online series. Vowing to create dungeon worlds as rich and frightening as Tolkien's, Garriott went into business with his brother and pursued his goal through lean years and unsatisfying corporate alliances. The authors, both journalists, also profile other colorful characters, such as Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw, creators of the first MUD (multiple-user dungeon), a place where gamers could meet online; John Carmack and John Romero, creators of Doom ("the ultimate visceral experience of kill-or-be-killed"); and Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, Dungeons & Dragons' masterminds. King and Borland cover dramatic events, including attacks by conservative Christians, who felt Dungeons & Dragons was satanic and encouraged worship of the occult, violent behavior and suicide. Equally involving is the gaming world's exclusion and harassment of women until such rebels as college student Vangie Beal formed a women's gaming network called PMS (the Psycho Men Slayers). Garriott comes across as an inspiring figure when he introduces a system of ethics and morals into the games, stressing honesty, compassion, values, justice, sacrifice, honor, spirituality and humility. Even non-tech-inclined readers will be intrigued by the sense of community King and Borland describe, and their epilogue image of Garriott living in a castle, complete with moat, will delight fantasy lovers.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

... documents manically creative lives of gamers by tracing the career of eccentric "Lord British," as Garriott is known... -- Wired News, July 8, 2003

A great beach read, Dungeons & Dreamers will leave you feeling proud to be a game geek. -- Philadelphia Inquirer, July 3, 2003

Anecdotal and close-up it's a highly readable peek into a whole 'nother social realm. -- TexasMonthly.com

King... Borland ...pulled off a neat trick managed to write a book as compelling as a really cool game -- ComputerUser, August 2003

From the Back Cover

"Dungeons and Dreamers has the best attributes of the sometimes geeky computer culture it chronicles: compassion, humor, and computer-like accuracy. Anyone interested in the history of computer gaming should read this book." --Lisa Mason, Game Informer Magazine

"If you've read King and Borland in Wired and CNET, you don't need convincing. If you haven't, buy this book. Read it, visit their blog for daily infusions, and thank me later. --Brad Hill, The Digital Songstream

"Gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry. How it became one is possibly the biggest business story of our day." --Richard A. Martin, Complex Magazine

From the dreamers who created the medium to the players who make it a worldwide phenomenon, witness computer games' laser-beam rise from blips on university computer science program screens to their pervasive presence in our everyday lives. Inside, you'll meet the creators, the crusaders, and the celebrity players, including:

Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, masterminds behind Dungeons & Dragons--the role-playing game that inspired generations of computer game developers
Willie Crowther and Don Woods, creators of the early text-based computer role-playing game Adventure, which eventually became Zork!
Richard Garriott, whose popular series of Ultima games eventually spawned the massively multiplayer online world, Ultima Online
Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw, creators of the first MUD, a place where gamers could meet online and go adventuring in a shared world
John Carmack and John Romero, the programming geniuses who created DOOM!, the ultimate visceral experience of kill-or-be-killed
"Thresh," whose deathmatch skills were so great he won Carmack's Ferrari and earned a front-page profile in The Wall Street Journal
Henry Jenkins, the media critic who found himself unexpectedly defending such violent games as Mortal Kombat before a Senate subcommittee
Dungeons and Dreamers weaves together threads of influence from Gary Gygax's Dungeons & Dragons and Richard Garriott's Ultima through John Carmack and John Romero's DOOM and beyond. The story of computer gaming's early days stretches from California's balmy shores through the hill country of Texas to a sleepy little town in the south of England. It is the ultimate "revenge of the nerds" tale in which D&D players, Society for Creative Anachronism aficionados, science fiction fans, and young computer programmers come together to produce a multi-billion-dollar industry that merges with the burgeoning telecommunications industry and the Internet boom of the 1990s to explode into a mass-market phenomenon.
Former Wired correspondent Brad King and CNET writer John Borland take you on an all-access tour of the wild, weird, wonderful world of PC gamers. Learn why violence seems to be inherent in computer gaming, why the medium attracts mostly men, and why the violence sometimes spills over into reality, as it did at Columbine. Explore how the face of the average gamer is changing with deathmatch teams such as PMS--Psycho Men Slayers--the first all-female Quake clan, as well as the women who use Quake templates to create online sex parlors. Go inside the increasingly popular LAN parties, where gamers spend sleepless weekends in the dark glued to glowing monitors, as well as Internet gaming parlors--also called PC Bangs--that are sprouting like mushrooms along the West Coast. Visit the EverQuest Fan Faires where role-playing gamers come full circle and actually meet in person.
Electronic games have become so culturally pervasive that they influence the way we perceive the world. Dungeons and Dreamers serves up a slice of the origins of today's computer game culture and gives us a sense of the amazing realms into which it may be heading.

About the Author

Brad King (Austin, TX) is currently a freelancer writer in technology and culture. He will be teaching a class on new media journalism at the University of Texas this coming fall.

John Borland (San Francisco, CA) is a senior writer at CNET Networks News.com, where he covers digital entertainment, including music, movies and video games.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0072228881
Publisher ‏ : ‎ McGraw-Hill Osborne Media; 1st edition (August 19, 2003)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 273 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780072228885
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0072228885
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.35 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,775,769 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6,373 in Video & Computer Games
- #8,381 in Computer & Video Game Strategy Guides
- #13,928 in Popular Culture in Social Sciences

Customer Reviews:
14 ratings

About the author

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Brad King

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Brad King earned his master's from the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism in 2000. While there, he won the Wired magazine "Excellence in Technology Writing" award. After graduating, he worked for Wired and Wired.com.

In 2004, he was the producer and senior editor for the MIT Technology Review Web operation. He's been an advisory board member for South by Southwest Interactive for more than a decade, and he's hosted its Accelerator program since 2009. He's an editor and advisory board member for Carnegie Mellon's ETC Press. In 2014, he joined the advisory board for the Carmel Arts Council and the board of directors for the Indiana Writers Center.

King is currently an assistant professor of journalism at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where he's also the director of the university's Digital Media minor. In his spare time, he's running The Geeky Press, a small, experimental long-form writing collective.

Customer reviews

3.5 out of 5

14 global ratings

5 star		32%
4 star		24%
3 star		16%
2 star		18%
1 star		10%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Googled my name and it came up in this book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 8, 2010

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I Googled my name and it came up in this book so I had to buy it, LOL. :) They should have called me when they wrote it, however. :) I have not read the book, but I read the page where my name was and I have to say it is so full of inaccuracies I never rest of the book.

I was there. I could clear up a couple of things that I saw.

It says that "Richard was not much of a dungeon master." I LOLed at that. Richard and Bob White were the two BEST dungeon masters in our group.

Also, it says that Richard had no interest in sports. LOL! He excelled on the track team. I went to many of his track meets!

In addition, it said that there were parents at our games. This thing that they say about the porch being relegated to the parents "smoking and drinking" ??? I never saw anyone's parents there. And I was there every weekend.

I wish that they had interviewed one of us that was there. This was a very magical time. We had a lot of fun playing D&D. We started playing the game when there was only the one box with some dice and one book. Later we bought all the additional supplemental books.

Then, of course, Richard got his Apple II and wrote Akalabeth. :) That all came later...after we had been playing D&D for a while.

Richard had a knack for the computer because of his science fair project. He did a project that studied the wave propagation from the sun (at the time his dad was one of the world experts on the Sun and because he had been studying it had the world EVA record - he had been changing film in the camera on the spacecraft) that had computer analysis. So we were always going up to NASA and using their computers to analyze his data. (But we were up there already because that was where our Explorers post met.)

good times :)

13 people found this helpful

Inspirational Book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 25, 2007

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First of all- this is one of the few books I bought and could not put it down for more than a few hours. I will admit I'm a bit bias as Richard Garriott is one of my personal heroes in life. But added surprise of how Dungeons & Dragon got started in the first chapter really pulled this book together for me as an indie game developer. Hoping to walk in the very foot steps of those mentioned in this book, I found it more as a roadmap of how to plan ahead for my own future gaming company and things I should consider. Without trying to, this book represents the D&D-SCA-Gamer type of person, who wishes to escape the mundane world around us. To live and breathe in a Fantasy world where the possibilities are only limited by the imagination. Growing up in Texas myself, I was surprised to find out how many other Texans game developers there were, aside from Richard. I would recommend this book for any interested in RPGs/Gaming/SCA.

One person found this helpful

In-depth exploration of *why* gaming is the way it is

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 19, 2003

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What first surprised me about Dungeons & Dreamers is that it's entertaining. I picked it up intending to get a quick sense of it then couldn't put it down--this book is funny, from Richard Garriott's whacky childhood projects before he developed games to the inside spats that tore up later, successful developer teams. What continued to surprise me is the book's scope. All the history is there, from star developers, companies, and even players like PMS (psycho men slayers) and LAN party-goers who shaped the gaming world. But the book pushes further to tell why people play games, why games have progressed the way they have, and why they're here to stay. Gaming is elevated from just a "mind-numbing weird thing" to the creative, productive community it is; I don't think anyone--gamers or anti-gamers or anyone in between--can read this book without gaining a deeper understanding and respect for the community and where it's headed.

5 people found this helpful

Good overview, a little too much on the Garriott

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 2, 2004

Overall, the book provides a good overview of the evolution of the genre detailing the early use of university computing resources for covert sessions of SpaceWar, Adventure and Colossal Cave thru to the emergence of the Professional Gaming League.

Where the narrative starts to get bogged down is when it gets to Richard Garriott (aka Lord British), the creator of the Ultima series of games. (For the record, I'm a huge Ultima fan - the original Ultima packaging, with a knight on a black warhorse facing off against a dragon emerging from hot lava, was the reason I bought my first computer.) Once the authors get to Garriott, the pace slows as we explore his life in extended detail from his early family life to the release of Ultima Online. In contrast, significantly less time is spent on the other pivotal computer games like Doom, Half-Life and EverQuest. While I'd be the first to point to Garriott's role in the development of this genre, all roads don't necessarily lead to Lord British.

Net/Net: Decent overview of a topic that has often been eclipsed by the more glamorous console videogames industry. Would have appreciated less detail on Garriott, and more on the other games.

Full Disclosure: Reviewer works as a marketer for Windows and Xbox games at Microsoft.

9 people found this helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Dr. Michael Heron

Great in places, just grates in others

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 27, 2015

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If the book suffers from anything, it's the lack of a clear narrative to bind it together. It's more a collection of anecdotes than a serious factual investigation, with a focus more on the personalities than anything else. For large parts of the book, it was like reading a biography of Richard Gariott - truth be told, there are a lot of missed opportunities here.

But, it's a book that deals with topics that few others really take a swing at, and it has to be commended for that. It's very readable, and it goes along at a brisk old pace as it races through the evolution of video games. If you know anything about the evolution of games like Ultima and Doom, there won't be much new in here - it doesn't delve deeply enough into any incident to really offer much illumination beyond what's already pretty well known. It also has some jarring elements that bubble up at the end, and it is in these sections primarily that we see the limits to the research undertaken by the authors. In the chapter on violence in video games, for example, they make an attempt to offer a balanced view, but they fail dramatically in even scratching the surface of contemporary literature. The relationship of violent games to violent behaviour is not at all simplistic, and can't be meaningfully rendered down without losing most of the key nuance. The whole section is so poorly done that it actually detracts from the quality of the rest.

I'd recommend the book, with these provisos, purely because if this is a topic in which you're interested you're not likely to have much choice of alternatives. It's by no means a bad book - it's a great book in fits and spurts. Just... be mindful of the fact it doesn't do much more than dip its toes into some very deep, and in some cases very treacherous, waters.

3 people found this helpful

R. A. S. Brown

Great, except for the 'out of place' sections

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 17, 2004

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This book was, on the whole, a good read but I did wonder why some things were in it.
It starts out as an excellent account of the history of computer role playing games, starting with the pen and paper games and then on to the early multi-user dungeon (MUD) computer games. It details the struggle to launch Ultima Online, the first of the big massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs), and looks at Everquest and Sony Online Entertainment’s entry into the genre. It finally ends with the announcement of the proposed launch of Star Wars Galaxies showing how computer role-playing community was merging with the big entertainment brands.
All this is great and very interesting and makes you appreciate the effort that people like Richard Garriott the creator the Ultima series had to go through to move computer role playing games on from a hobbyist activity to mainstream entertainment.
My only issue though, was what were the chapters about Quake and computer games causing violent behaviour doing in the book? My guess, as other reviewers have said, is that it was to widen the appeal of the book away from just role-playing anoraks. But it doesn’t work makes the book feel disjointed.
I wanted more golden nuggets of info like how some players set up a theatre group in Ultima Online and how one guy role-played a thief a bit too convincingly for Garriott. There wasn’t even a detailed account of the biggest event in online gaming when another thief killed Garriott’s own character Lord British causing outrage and a life ban for the player. This is the stuff that there should have been more of, rather than the boring accounts of how good some people were at Quake.

4 people found this helpful

Danielle

Loved it, brought back so many memories.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 30, 2013

Verified Purchase

First off, this is by no means a perfect book, it's disjointed, has some out of place pieces and is a little but messy.

But...

None of that matters!

I absolutely loved this book and read it from cover to cover almost without putting it down; in fact I challenge anyone who remembers the early PC Shareware scene to not be completely hooked reading this book.

I won't cover the contents of the book here, there it's pretty much all covered in the description (though the book does seem to focus more on Carmack and Romero more than the other people of the era).

What would be really nice is if the authors could write similar books for the other great, early computer era stories (Sinclair Vs. Acorn, The rise and fall of Imagine Software, 'Atari, Commodore and Apple' etc.)

In summary then, I cannot rate this book highly enough, I thorougly recommend it to fellow computer geeks everywhere :) x

3 people found this helpful

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