Over the last decade, through digital media, we have crossed a number of significant thresholds: the interconnection of over half of the world's adult population through mobile telephony and the internet and the devotion of more than half the waking hours of a western generation to mediated experience. Yet little mainstream thought has been given to what these transitions signify for the business of daily living; and what thought there has been too often focuses on grand claims of loss or gain. This book asks what it means not simply to live within a digital century, but to live well with it and within it. Unlike most other contemporary accounts, it is neither a tale of technology doom nor glory, but a pragmatic guide to what questions we need to ask of the world around us; what it might mean to answer these; and what practical steps might allow us all both to choose and to use the tools at our disposal, and to live within a digital century in as fully human a sense as possible.

The sheer pervasiveness of game experience — 99 per cent of teenage boys and 94 per cent of teenage girls having played a video game — means that instant naffness falls upon those who express a musty disdain for the medium. This book shows that computer game-playing has a strong claim to be one of the most vital test-beds for intellectual enquiry.