Rossignol_Jacket Given that only yesterday I wrote about how Valve is converting pirates into paying customers with its computer game distribution system Steam, it seems to be good timing to note that an e-book on the sociological and cultural significance of video gaming can now be read for free on-line.

This Gaming Life by Jim Rossignol is a collection of essays looking at different aspects of the gaming experience. It is posted online at the University of Michigan Library’s website in HTML format, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license. (While it does not seem to be available in any downloadable precompiled e-book format, there is nothing preventing someone from saving all the HTML files to disk and compiling his own.)

While I have not read all the way through the book myself, the first essay is interesting and it has gotten good reviews from BoingBoing and Wired. It is also available via Amazon.com.

(Found via BoingBoing.)

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