Gaming History

An exuberant ode to play and the epic story of a company that has redefined it—their quirky beginnings, their singular ethos, their endlessly innovative leaders and developers, their massive cultural impact, and most of all the video games themselves, which have inspired joy and creativity in...

Die Videospiele-Industrie sorgt seit Jahrzehnten nicht nur für virtuelle Unterhaltung, sondern sie schreibt einige ihrer größten Geschichten in Form von Skandalen, Kontroversen und denkwürdigen Ereignissen auch selbst. Dabei ist alles: von unterhaltsam und amüsant bis hin zu ekelhaft und abstoßend, aber auch überraschend.

Gambling captures as nothing else the drama of the "long eighteenth century" between the age of religious wars and the age of revolutions. The society that was confronted with games of chance pursued as commercial ventures also came to grips with unprecedented social mobility, floated by new wealth from new sources created fortunes from trade in sugar, cotton, ivory, silk, tea, or enslaved human beings. The Gambling Century focuses like no previous work on those who enabled, facilitated, and profited from gambling, as well as on efforts to regulate or outlaw it.

Before Indian casinos sprouted up around the country, a few enterprising tribes got their start in gambling by opening bingo parlors. A group of women on the Oneida Indian Reservation just outside Green Bay, Wisconsin, introduced bingo in 1976 simply to pay a few bills. Bingo not only paid the light bill at the struggling civic center but was soon financing vital health and housing services for tribal elderly and poor.