Death by Video Game ─ Danger, Pleasure, and Obsession on the Virtual Frontline

"The finest book on video games yet. Simon Parkin thinks like a critic, conjures like a novelist, and writes like an artist at the height of his powers—which, in fact, he is." —Tom Bissell, author of Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter

On January 31, 2012, in an internet cafe on the outskirts of New Taipei City, Taiwan, 23-year-old student Chen Rong-yu was found dead at his keyboard while the video game he had been playing for three days straight continued to flash on the screen in front of his corpse.

As Simon Parkin reconstructs what happened that night, he begins a journey that takes him around the world in search of answers: What is it about video games that inspires such tremendous acts of endurance and obsession? Why do we lose our sense of time and reality within this medium, arguably more than any other? And what is it about video games that often proves compelling, comforting and irresistible to the human mind?

In Death by Video Game, Simon Parkin meets the players and game developers at the frontline of virtual extremism, including the New York surgeon attempting to break theDonkey Kong world record; the Minecraft player three years into an epic journey toward the edge of the game's vast virtual world, and the German hacker who risked prison to discover the secrets behindHalf-Life 2.

A riveting and wildly entertaining look at the impact of video games on our lives,Death by Video Game will change the way we think about our virtual playgrounds.

SIMON PARKIN is a journalist whose writing has appeared in NewYorker.com, Harper's Magazine, the Guardian, ESPN, and a number of other publications. Death by Video Game is his first book.