I am writing my debut non-fiction book, 25/07/2024
Power Play: The Inside Story of How Video Games Influence The World releases in Spring 2026
I introduce you to my debut non-fiction book, Power Play
Trump assassination games raise questions about UGC moderation
F1 Manager 2024 races onto the grid for this week’s video game launches
Good morning everyone,
I am delighted to announce that I am writing my debut non-fiction book and it is all about my favourite topic: how video games are changing the world.
The UK and Commonwealth rights for Power Play: The Inside Story of How Video Games Influence The World were picked up at auction earlier this year by Wildfire, with the hardback and audio book due for release in Spring 2026.
Power Play will tell the surprising story of how video games have evolved from a niche hobby into a force that has reshaped the technology, economies, communities and politics that underpin everyday life.
Joe Thomas, Commissioning Editor and Deputy Publicity Director at Wildfire (and a man who quite possibly likes video games more than I do), is working with me to make Power Play happen. This is what he said about it - and me - in a press release circulated this morning.
“Power Play is a brilliant, eye-opening and timely book, packed with astounding examples of the unseen ways that video games influence the modern world. With an eye for fascinating detail, a phenomenal range of expert interviews and years of experience helping explain video games to a broad audience, George truly is the perfect guide to help all of us understand the influence of video games on modern society, whether we play games or not.”
Very kind words, you’ll agree. And from my perspective, I have to say what an absolute privilege it is to be working on this.
Writing a book has been one of the main goals of my life. To be handed the opportunity to create one on a topic so close to my heart is unbelievable and I can’t wait to - eventually - get my work into your hands in the years ahead.
So in a slight change to usual VGIM service, I won’t be telling you a story about the business, media or policy behind video games.
Instead, I’m going to tell you the story behind this book to help you understand what Power Play will be about, why I’m writing it, what comes next for me as a result of this and how you might be able to help me bring it to life.
The big read - I am writing my debut non-fiction book
The ambition for Power Play is a simple one but feels terrifying when I actually write it down. My goal is to write the book that does for video games what Chris Miller’s Chip War did for semiconductors.
Power Play is a big swing for the fences which seeks to establish in one book the proper place, value and power of video games within modern society.
For years, the conversation around video games has been deeply dissonant. Despite its growth into an economic and cultural force generating hundreds of millions of dollars per year from billions of players, the perception of games within our culture has tended towards treating it with hysterical moral panic (e.g. video games violence scares) or as a banal form of entertainment that isn’t worth engaging with - let alone understanding.
However, a cursory glance at major public developments across the world challenges that way of thinking almost immediately.
We live in a world where Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard King for more than the cost of LinkedIn, X, Instagram and WhatsApp combined, where Nvidia sits at the heart of the AI economy and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia chairs a $38bn video games business.
The disconnect between the perception of games and their tangible impact on the world is enormous. Yet there has been little effort to close that perception gap, making it difficult for the industry and wider society to make sense of one another - causing plenty of problems along the way.
My aim with Power Play is to bridge the divide by writing an accessible book that shows how the factors that turned the video games industry into a global powerhouse - such as its role in turbocharging the evolution of computer hardware, its impact in democratising high-end development and its ability to glue together enormous thriving online communities - has plugged it into all corners of digital society: providing it with the power to change the physical world in the process.
As I’ve done so with VGIM, I plan to assess the impact of video games on the world in a full, fair and even-handed manner.
I will be bringing many of the positives of video games to the fore, demonstrating its importance as the frontline of new technologies that have made our lives better, as an economic force capable of redressing regional inequalities and as a social force able to bring people together to do good in the name of play.
But Power Play will also wrestle with the challenges that the success of video games has had on our world.
This will include exploring how the principles of game design can be (and have been) perverted for uncomfortable purposes, the ways that bad actors seek to turn the power of games communities towards malevolent outcomes and how the medium’s importance has seen it become a little spoken about battleground for influence amongst nation states - who increasingly seek to manage or control the space in ways that could quickly becoming concerning if left unchecked.
Crucially, I plan to tell this story by speaking to the people who have experienced all of these issues first hand - whether they’re deep inside the video games industry or within the parts of society engaging with it.
As well as speaking to games industry professionals, I am interviewing figures such as leading investigative journalists, public health officials, academics, civil and public servants, law enforcement experts, charity leaders, big business figures, Government ministers, influencers and representatives from industries that have been shaped by games to provide the global picture of how the medium influences, well, just about everything.
In doing so, Power Play will demonstrate how our misperception of the influence of video games on society is both wrong and potentially damaging - challenging all of us, whether inside of games or outside of it, to tackle the issue head on.
What inspired you to write Power Play?
The simple answer is my experiences during my time at Ukie. I headed up communications for the UK’s video games trade association during the Covid years and I quickly learned that the Janus faced perception of the industry mentioned earlier was a fact of day-to-day life on the industry frontlines.
Shortly after I joined the trade association, Linda Griffin, who is now VP of Policy at Mozilla but used to hold senior policy roles at King and Activision Blizzard, warned me that I’d have to negotiate a world in which games were perceived as irrelevant or a major threat - words that proved prescient throughout my time in post.
Yet despite this perception issue, the reality of my day-to-day life quickly became different. As the pandemic set in, my time was increasingly taken up by people in civil society who were taking games very seriously indeed.
As others laughed at (or overreacted to) games, I was fielding requests from charity fundraising teams, public health organisations, major brands, leading media outlets and even central Government communications teams that either sought to more effectively understand games because they were having a big impact on their job (e.g. they were shaping developments in competition policy) or they wanted to reach and influence the audience (e.g. Cabinet Office’s Stay Home, Save Lives campaign).
And as they did, they also asked a question: where can I read more about the industry and its impact on society?
In response, I gave away fragmented reading lists of specialist books, video games news sites and occasionally relevant influencers to try to fill the gap. But every time I did, I wished that there was a book that could fulfil this purpose in one fell swoop - leading to the idea for Power Play in the process.
From then onwards, I said to myself I would try to write that book at some point in the future. But for the best part of three years, I did, frankly, nothing about it because I had literally no idea how to make it happen.
Then towards the tail-end of a coffee meeting in late Summer 2023, I tentatively mentioned to Jared Shurin - strat comms expert, compiler of The Big Book of Cyberpunk and semi-professional barbecue judge - that I was sitting on this idea and wasn’t really sure what to do with it.
Jared, as you can see, is a man of many skills. And on this occasion, he used his knowledge of the big wide world of book publishing to start a chain of events that dragged the thought out of my head and into existence.
Almost immediately after we had spoken, he introduced me to Max Edwards - a literary agent who had previously worked in the games industry at Sports Interactive back in the day.
After sharing an initial proposal for a book with him, Max kindly informed me that what I had written was structurally rubbish.
But it contained the kernel of an idea that he thought could sell if I could show the breadth of ways games influenced society and leant on my unique strengths - an oddly broad contact base and a strange position as an interlocutor between games and the rest of the world - to convince publishers that I could actually pull it off.
Fast forward roughly 8-10 months, and four drafts of a 15,000 word proposal later, Power Play was successfully pitched and sold at auction to lovely Joe and the Wildfire team - leading to this newsletter and plenty more as a result of it.
What impact does writing Power Play have on VGIM and Half-Space Consulting?
Initially, the short term impact of writing the book has arguably been to strengthen the work that I’ve done elsewhere.
As you’ll now be aware from reading the contents of this newsletter, I’ve been balancing growing VGIM and Half-Space alongside getting my book related ducks into a neat orderly line.
Power Play has therefore ended up forming a handy arm of a three part portfolio business, strengthening my overall pitch for VGIM and Half-Space - hey, I’m the guy who can explain games to the wider world! - by bumping up my contact base, deepening my expertise and giving me the confidence to keep going.
But getting down to brass tacks, writing this book will, inevitably, change the way I work in the year ahead.
Unfortunately for me, but perhaps more fortunately for you, I can’t give up the day job. I am not in the Book Writing Big Leagues just yet, so I don’t quite have the financial clout to simply disappear into a log cabin in the woods for a year and re-emerge once I’m done. Disappointing, I know.
So between now and late Spring 2025, it will pretty much be business as usual for me. I’ll still be available for consulting work via Half-Space, I will carry on selling sponsorships in these hallowed virtual pages for businesses interested in it and I’ll continue to write extra content for my paid VGIM Insider subs.
However, I may need to take myself off on book leave for a month or so in late Spring/Early Summer 2025 if I need to get my head down to crank out thousands of words before I hit my deadline.
If that happens, I’ll make sure to update you - whether you’re one of my readers or one of my clients - about my plans to make sure we can plan and prepare for any possible disruptions to my usual service.
Can I do anything to help?
Yes, you can! There are three ways that you can help me out.
First, if I approach you or your organisation for an interview then please do what you can to help me get something on the record for the book. I want to tell this story as fairly and fully as possible, so anything you can do to support my efforts to do that is massively appreciated.
Second, if you would like to book me for work via Half-Space or sponsor VGIM then get in touch sooner rather than later. I am locking down as much work as I can between now and Spring 2025 to allow me to plan my writing, research trips and probably indulge some minor hyperventilating about everything in between. So if you want to work with me, then do drop me an email here.
Finally, and perhaps most obviously of all, express your interest in pre-ordering the book by filling out this form. A pre-order link will be created for the book nearer the time but indicating that you’re keen for Power Play now will help me argue that I should do a swanky launch event with free booze at Waterstones in Piccadilly, actually.
But for now, I want to end on a massive thank you for supporting me by subscribing to, and reading, Video Games Industry Memo.
By taking the time to flip through the newsletter every week, you played a major role in showing to publishers that there is an audience for writing about video games that takes a much wider view of where the medium sits in the world today.
Without your support, I literally could not have successfully turned a long held loose idea into a concept for a book that someone actually snapped up.
I am immensely grateful for your help in doing that and I can’t wait to - hopefully - repay your faith in me when Power Play hits bookshelves in a little over 18 months time.
Want to find out more about Power Play or book me to talk about it at your conference, event or birthday party? Please contact my agent Max Edwards via max.edwards@appletreeliterary.com for more details.
News in brief
Trumped down: Nathan Grayson has written an interesting piece for The Aftermath about the emergence of user generated content recreating the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft. It explores the murky middle ground that shows how UGC services are used to generate ‘meme’ games on inappropriate topics - often without actually publishing the game online for moderators to take down - raising questions about how viable it is to stop such content in the modern age.
Roblox reporting: In further UGC platform news, Bloomberg reports that Roblox has reported over 13,000 incidents of child exploitation to The National Center for Missing and Exploited children in 2023 as part of a piece investigating a predator who used the platform to groom victims. Roblox’s Chief Safety Officer Matt Kaufman provided a counter to the reporting via the company’s website, highlighting the range of work Roblox does to mitigate harm and showing that just 0.0063% of content on the platform was flagged in its most extreme categories of concern. More on this in The Debrief tomorrow…
Microsoft vs the FTC, round 197: Microsoft has hit back against the Federal Trade Commission after it claimed that the company’s decision to whack up the cost of its Game Pass subscription service was “exactly the sort of consumer harm” it warned against when the company acquired Activision Blizzard. Microsoft contends that the FTC is talking nonsense though, pointing out that its concern at trial last year was over foreclosure (i.e. denying Call of Duty to players) and not related to pricing at all. Fight, fight, fight, fight!
Staff-field: Nearly 250 staff working at Bethesda Games Studio have formed a ‘wall-to-wall’ union, according to the Communication Workers of America (CWA) union. Microsoft has officially recognised the union, after enough members of staff across a range of job roles expressed an interest in joining a union by signing an authorisation card or indicating their approval via an official online portal.
Humbling news: The entire staff of Humble Games, the publishing offshoot of Humble Bundle, has been laid off. Despite publicly claiming that the move was part of a ‘restructure’ within Ziff Davis, social media is full of reports indicating that every member of the team has been laid off - with all remaining publishing work handed to a third party consultancy. Grim.
Moving on
Alain Tascan has jumped ship from Epic Games to become President of Netflix’s games division…John Hight has been appointed as President of Wizards of the Coast…Holly Barbacovi has returned to Hasbro as Chief People Officer…Alejandro Marin Vidal has popped up as an advisor at Newzoo after a stint at Activision Blizzard…Artur Grigorjan is the new Director of Game Economy at Kwalee…And Lars Boe has recently started as the new Community Manager at Hutlihut Games…
Jobs ahoy
Criterion Games is hiring for a plum Studio Talent and Operations Director gig…There’s a premier job going at Premier as an Account Manager - Gaming…A super secret stealth mode games business is hiring a Video Games Junior Strategist…There’s a Senior Product Manager role open at Unity if you fancy it…And Build a Rocket Boy is hiring a new Head of Live Product…
Events and conferences
A MAZE, Sheffield - 2nd August
GDL Indie Games Expo, London - 9th August
ChinaJoy, Shanghai - 26th-29th July
Serious Play Conference, Toronto - 12th-14th August
Gamescom, Cologne - 21st-25th August
Games of the week
F1 Manager 2024: Latest entry in Frontier developed Formula 1 management sim introduces ‘create a team’ mode for the first time.
Earth Defense Force 6: Play the game described as the “sequel to Earth Defense Force 5” in its own Steam description.
The Star Named EOS: The walking simulator genre gets a photographic twist to offer up some thoughtful puzzling.
Before you go…
The Cybertruck, Tesla’s absurd vehicular monstrosity, is coming to Fortnite and Rocket League as an in-game unlockable from 7th August.
Players can get access to the truck for free by completing a series of challenges in either game.
More importantly, players of all stripes can enjoy blowing the ridiculous car up - to the delight of me and some disgruntled developers working at Epic.
Congrats!
If you're looking for more people to chat with, Dr Garry Crawford from Salford University is both awesome and lovely. We're working on a big EU funded research project about video games' connection to wider culture. That project came out of an earlier one I did for the EU - this is one of the research publications from that: https://www.gaminghorizons.eu/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2018/02/D3.4-Gaming-Horizons-Manifesto.pdf
Congratulations George!