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(Wall Street Journal) - In "Fun Inc." (Amazon: http://xrl.us/FunInc
), Tom Chatfield presents an ambitious overview of the videogaming
industry, from its beginning in 1972 with the dramatic success of
Pong, a game in which the object was simply to hit a "puck" from
one side of the screen to the other, to today's immersive multi-
player online games, like World of Warcraft, a sword-and-sorcery
adventure. Currently more than 12 million World of Warcraft
subscribers pay $10 a month to inhabit a virtual world where they
can choose to be any character they want, from mage to warrior to
goblin. Last year World of Warcraft had revenues of $1 billion.

Chatfield considers videogames to be a rapidly evolving art form.
He notes that the industry is now attracting a higher caliber of
professional and that technological advances have made all sorts of
new designs possible, from vivid in-game cinematics that visually
rival their big-screen brethren to the latest game platforms, which
use the player's body movements to play the game rather than a
traditional hand-held controller.

To launch a game, as Mr. Chatfield shows in engrossing detail,
requires coordinating a team of concept artists, graphic designers,
music composers, scriptwriters and the code-writing techs who build
the game's digital structure...

Continued: http://sn.im/FunInc2