Daily Archives: February 15, 2009

Review of Mia Consalvo’s Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames

I’ve been a fan of Mia Consalvo’s work for a while so I was really looking forward to her book, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. If you haven’t heard anything about it you can find a pdf of the introduction (and the index too, but that seems to be less valuable) on the MIT Press site.

Despite the book being from MIT Press, I found it a bit less academic than I would have hoped. This isn’t to say that it is a bad book but it isn’t the hardcore theory-filled analysis that I was hoping for. As it stands, the book seems to sit somewhere between Masters of Doom and the stuff in the DiGRA Digital Library. I found the book to be entertaining if a bit too mainstream. There is some very interesting analysis of cheating, game guides, and faqs to be found in it though.