Burn 'em all.
About 8-10 years ago we did a big ol' search for books about gaming and aside from hilarious compilations and dry history of computing books there was virtually (ha ha) nothing. Searching on Amazon this weekend and boy oh boy are there a load of books with interesting titles about video games (aside from Halo novels, Prima guides etc.): Exodus to The Virtual World, Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World, Casual Revolution, Introduction to Game Studies: Games and Culture, Computer Games: Text, Narrative and Play, Teaching Video Games (Teaching Film and Media Studies), More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form and a shed load of others. Sadly most of them are more than a bit hand wavy and 90% of them start with the same hundred or so pages pleading with the non-existent non gaming reader who accidentally picked up the book: "Games are important, my university tenure is so valid, games really are important". I recently went to a book shop to pi