In General Gaming

As many of you may know I'm doing "Japanese Studies" as my major in university.
In a few days I will start to write my Master's thesis with the tentative title

"From Famicom to Playstation. Correlation of videogames and the Japanese society."

This title might change to a better wording still, but this is the general direction I want to go.

I already have tons of Japanese books (11 books to be exact) and some English books about videogames and influences on people.
I bought POWer Up by Chris Kohler and Trigger Happy by Steven Poole, which should give me some insights I may not be aware of yet.

Now I ask you. Do you know of good books, or better, do you own good books about videogames? Or articles in magazines? If yes, would it be too much to ask you to scan the stuff in for me an send it to me?
Some books I already have an eye on:

(Routledge Introductions to Media and Communications), by James Newman
, by Mark J. P. Wolf
, by Mark J. P. Wolf
, by J.C. Herz

If anybody has one of these I would be endlessly thankful for a scan. That way I wouldn't have to by those. The Japanese books were already expensive enough.

All other hints, magazine articles, webpages are welcome.
And if somebody was really helpful to me I'd also think about sending the one some goodies when I'm in Japan the next time as a little reward.

These aren't in written form, but have you tried tracking down some of the classic collections (Midway Classics II for PS2 is a good example), many of these games have interviews with people who designed and programmed a lot of the older games, and they have some really interesting stories (there's one collection where the creator of Defender talks about people being "intimidated" by the arcade game on its debut because of all the buttons).
Just a thought.

Good thought, thank you. I'll look for such ones, too. Unfortunately I don't have a PS2.
But I have recorded and downloaded some documentaries and newsstories about games already.

That's really cool Manuel! Good luck.

In grade 12 I did an Independent Study on 20 Years of Video Game History. In my first year of college, I started a very open debate about the effects of violence in video games on today's society. Everyone was very shocked on my opinion... most of the people (except for the stubborn old women in my class age 40+) ended up seeing that video games don't cause violence.... it's the lack of parenting.

Today I got another load of Japanese books.
Now I'm quite complete.


6 books in Japanese about videogames. First load I got about 3 weeks ago.


The second batch of Japanese books that came this week.
One of those has a Mario 20th birthday special. The Famicom book on the left has photos of ALL 1252 Famicom game boxes in it. Yay. I might post some photos from inside the book if I can manage to do so. I don't want to scan it, because it was expensive and I don't want to ruin it.


4 English books I will read through for my thesis.


That's quite a heap... Well, it doesn't help complaining, better start reading those.

And there are 5 more Japanese books on DVD, which a friend of mine scanned for me.

edit: As you can see by the number of books... now I'm broke. Not normal broke, but TOTALLY broke.

edit2: The longer I think about it... I could have bought a Wii for the price of the books (including shipping).

Some photos again!
The book I'll show here is "Family Computer 1983-1994"
They have it on

It features photographs of all 1252 Famicom games ever produced. Indeed very nice.






It has interviews with famous game creators like Shigeru Miyamoto. Text is in Japanese and English by the way...


Some pics show other consoles.


It wasn't cheap, but I'm in love with that book.
And somehow I'm now obsessed with the idea of getting a complete Famicom game set (of course all CIB)...

Another nice book I got from Japan (see photos in above post also).

It's an issue of the Japanese gaming mag "Continue", a bimonthly.



They had a feature on Mario's 20th "birthday".




Apart from a Mario "game-ography", interviews and stuff I found this article interesting. It's about Mario merchandise.


On the left page here they show unlicensed Mario stuff.


Look at that! Mario looks like a bad guy. Man I love that photo. I'd like to own that fake Mario stuff. It's hilarious.