Respawn: Gamers, Hackers, and Technogenic Life

Computer games, and by extension the gaming life and hackers, have been around for quite a while now. The story has been told many times, by many different authors, and you can chalk this up as another book in a similar vein, though Colin Milburn does focus more on how hackers hacked the games they played to find shortcuts and to work around seemingly impossible choices in games.

Professor Milburn gives us a fairly standard history of the computer game, from its early origins and the role it played as people learned about computers and how to hack them, both for good and bad. At the same time, Professor Milburn examines modern hackers, especially the group Anonymous.

This is not a bad book, it is easy to follow, and he does not get too far into computer jargon. If you have been using a computer for a while, you will be able to follow the different types of programs and code. It is just that it does not stand out in any way–it’s pretty much a by-the-book account of different trends and technology. While it is one of the newer books to be published on this topic, it is not the best.