Parkin, Simon

Describes how ten women who were members of Britain's Woman's Royal Naval Services used a game played much like the childhood game "Battleship" in an attempt to discover the tactics of German U-boats and to develop a counter-maneuver that helped turn the tide of World War II.

On January 31, 2012, in an internet cafe on the outskirts of New Taipei City, Taiwan, 23-year-old student Chen Rong-yu was found dead at his keyboard while the video game he had been playing for three days straight continued to flash on the screen in front of his corpse. As Simon Parkin reconstructs what happened that night, he begins a journey that takes him around the world in search of answers: What is it about video games that inspires such tremendous acts of endurance and obsession? Why do we lose our sense of time and reality within this medium, arguably more than any other? And what is it about video games that often proves compelling, comforting and irresistible to the human mind? Simon Parkin meets the players and game developers at the frontline of virtual extremism.