Michael Bywater
Virtue & Virtuality
Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
By Jane McGonigal
Jonathan Cape 390pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
The Internet – more specifically, the Web – is hell for authoritarians. It’s broken all the codes. There’s free assembly. There’s sex. It’s a fiery pit. No wonder commentators are divided. The Web makes you intellectually – even neuroanatomically – stuporous, argues Nicholas Carr in The Shallows (2010). Not so, rejoins Steven Johnson in Everything Bad is Good for You (2005). The moral argument pitches between poles.
Meanwhile, the punters vote with their mice, holing up with xhamster.com or spending three billion hours a week playing online games. Gaming and pornography are the only two human activities that have been consistently and successfully monetised from the outset. It goes to show.
What exactly it
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'"The Last Colony" is, among other things, part of the campaign to shift the British position through political pressure. As with all good propaganda, Sands’s case is based in truth, if not the whole of it.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/empire-strikes-back
'To her enemies she was the alien temptress who led Charles I away from the "true religion" of Protestantism and towards royal absolutism.'
Lucy Hughes-Hallett reviews @LeandadeLisle's 'colourful', 'persuasive' new biography of Henrietta Maria.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/royalist-generalissima
'Empathy is our moral portal gun, and it jams from underuse.'
Don Paterson on Portal 2, catching Covid on the Eurostar, and rereading Ian Hamilton’s 'Against Oblivion'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony