In “Ready Player One” by Ernest ClineVIDEO GAME CULTURE

What Do You Know About Video Games? How many of you play video games? If so, what kind of games? There are

different types!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_genres

How often do you play?

As We Read the Novel, We Will Examine: Demographics (Characteristics of a

Population) Socialization Vs. Anti-socialization Offline and Online Gaming Slang and Terminology Competitive Gaming Video Games as an Art Form Representations of Gaming Selves Vs. Real

Selves Anonymity: Good or Bad? Issues and Benefits of Games In Popular

Culture

But Before We Get Into All That…

How Big Do You Think Video Games Are?

Let’s Put This Into Context! The Highest Grossing Movies

Worldwide are:1. Avatar: $2,782,275,1722. Titanic: $2,185,372,3023. The Avengers: $1,511,757,9104. Harry Potter And the Deathly

Hallows-Pt.2: $1,328,111,2195. Transformers: Dark of the Moon:

$1,123,746,996

Now Let’s Compare Top Video Games Sales World Wide 5. Wii Play: $1.25 billion 4. Grand Theft Auto 4: $1.35 billion 3. Mario Cart Wii: $1.4 Billion 2. Call of Duty Black Ops: $1.5 billion

And the Number One Top Selling Game of All Time Is….

$10+ BILLION It continues to sell enough copies

and expansions to have its gross total continue to be counted, thus the +

Released on November 23, 2004 Has sold over 15 million copies since

its release Brings in over $1.5 billion PER YEAR

Think That’s Crazy?

Let’s look at the most played video game in the world per month at the moment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdr6jAPkf04

Some Quick Statistics About L.o.L People from more that 145 countries play daily Over 32 million people play monthly, which is

more than the 12+ million peak subscribers to World of Warcraft

There are 12 million active players daily, with and average of 3 million people being online at any given moment

Worldwide, 1+ billion hours are spent playing the game EVERY MONTH

The Season 2 Championship from the video used around 5% of all of North America’s internet bandwidth during its occurrence.

Keeping These Facts and Your New Knowledge About the Popularity of Video Games in Mind We will now start out unit on video

game culture and Ernest Cline’s novel, “Ready Player One”.

But before we open the book…

You Will All Create Your Own Avatars! We will use your avatars throughout the unit,

so be sure to put some effort and thought into them. Don’t lose them!

You can either draw your own or use HeroMachine

Your avatar can be anything you want! Male, female, wizard, warrior, space marine, Jedi, or anything else: it doesn’t matter. Just make your avatar into something you would want to be or how you would want to represent yourself in a game.