ICON SIGNS LOST IN A GOOD GAME BY PETE ETCHELLS

Posted on 2017/07/20 , tagged as Video games, digital, gaming

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Game on! Icon sign a personal investigation into the psychological benefits of videogames

Tom Webber, Commissioning Editor at Icon Books has acquired World English Language rights to LOST IN A GOOD GAME: How digital worlds show us what it means to be human, and why we need to rethink our fear of them by Bath Spa University psychology lecturer and Guardian writer Pete Etchells from Will Francis at Janklow and Nesbit for an undisclosed sum. Icon will publish in spring 2019.

When he was 13, Etchells’ father died from motor neurone disease. To cope, he immersed himself in a virtual world, first as an escape, but later to try to understand what had happened to his dad.
Video games are still fundamentally a new technology. Should we compare them with films, or paintings, or tools? Why are so many of us convinced that they’re harmful, and scared of what too much screen time might do to us or our children? What does the evidence show about the relationship between gaming and violence? Why do we do love to play games at all?

Ranging from Turing’s chess programme to multiplayer online games like EVE and World of Warcraft, and illuminating the intimate relationship between game development and scientific research, LOST IN A GOOD GAME is a journey through the history and development of video games – but also a very unusual memoir of a writer coming to terms with grief through a virtual world.

Tom Webber says ‘Pete Etchells is a completely original thinker and writer and I’m thrilled to be publishing him. Illuminating, funny, humane and occasionally very moving, this is the book about games and technology I’ve always wanted to read but have never been able to find.’

For immediate release
Press contact – Ruth Killick (publicity@ruthkillick.co.uk / 07880 703741)