George E. Osborn is a leading expert on the video game industry with over a decade and a half experience explaining games to the wider world. He is the former Head of Campaigns and Communications at Ukie, the UK video games trade association, where he advised politicians, business leaders and the public on the video game industry and its political, economic and social impact. George has been featured across the media discussing the impact of video games on the wider world, including The Guardian, Sky News, The New York Times, BBC World Service, Politico and Gamesindustry.biz. He is the creator of the Video Game Industry Memo newsletter, and founder of video game consulting business Half-Space Consulting. He lives in London
Power Play: The Inside Story of How Video Games Influence the World
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The global market for video games software is valued at $183bn each year and over 3 billion people play games across the world every year. Whether we play video games or not, their emergence as a technological, economic and cultural force has seen the medium reshape society in profound, yet often poorly understood, ways – for better or for worse.
Video games, then, sit at the heart of an immensely powerful Venn diagram of influence. They merge an enormous community of players around the world, economic scale incomparable among the media and entertainment industries, and are the foundations – and enablers – of the technology that is shaping the modern world.
And as with anything that can capture hearts and minds, make hundreds of billions of dollars, or shape the technologies of tomorrow – let alone do all three at once – both state- and non-state actors want a piece of that influential pie.
A revolutionary look at an underappreciated industry that is transforming our modern world, in Power Play George E. Osborn tells the inside story of how video games evolved from a form of entertainment into a channel of influence contested by Big Tech, non-government organisations, non-state actors, and governments themselves. Featuring interviews with politicians, policy makers, public health officials, game developers, counter terror experts, business leaders and academic researchers, Power Play is an essential and accessible guide to how video games are shaping the modern world and what this means for the lives we lead.
Power Play demonstrates how a once niche entertainment medium transformed into a global behemoth capable of reshaping the technology, economies and communities that underpin digital life and, as a result, wider society.