Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever by John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade promises to explain how players learn skills from video games that they and businesses can utilize, how businesses can harness these skills, and how gamer idiosyncrasies shape business. Instead, the book offers hyperbolic claims on the 'typical' gamer and then more hyperbolic claims on how this unreal typical gamer operates in the business world. Despite some rather huge failings, Got Game could be beneficial those unfamiliar with video games by explicating the positives available from video games. However, Got Game is most useful as an artifact depicting the inaccuracies of how non-gamers view games and gamers. Got Game could also be useful for interesting readers in the benefits of video games and the movements studying those benefits like the Learning Games Initiative, the Serious Games Initiative, and the Games for Health Initiative.

The book offers eight short chapters, and just barely over 200 pages (202 to be exact). The chapters are:

"Introduction. Planet of the Rotting Minds? How Video Games Forged the Next Baby Boom"
1 "Space Invader: How Games Became So Important without the Rest of Us Noticing"
2 "Sex, Violence, and Stereotypes: What We Worry About in Games... and Why We Don't Need to"
3 "Not the Real World: How the Experience of Gaming Differs From Just About Everything Else...and Why that Makes Gamers Different"
4 "Want 'Tude with that? How Gamers' Values and Skills Shape Their Professional Performance"
5 "Play Nice: After All that Time Alone, Can Gamers be Great Team Players?"
6 "Win or Go Home: How Video Games Built ROI into this Generation's DNA"
7 "Gamers on Top: What to Expect from Gamers as Executives"
8 "Press Start to Continue: What's Next for Gamers--and Us"

Each chapter serves as primarily an opinion piece on gaming and business. In the introduction and first chapter, Beck and Wade situate their analysis of typical gamers and their relation to business within the growth of the video game industry and the business strategies of the dotcom boom and bust. In defining the typical gamer, Beck and Wade state that gamers believe, "It's all about competition[...] Relationships are structured[...] Young people rule[...] People are simple" (13). While these bits are accurate to some degree, like most of the book, these details are also overly general and inaccurate for the most part. Chapters three through eight try to glossily cover the benefits from game-play, the typical attributes of gamers, and how these connect to the typical business world and new possibilities for the typical business world. Statements range from those relating to gamer-as-worker production "All that experience with video games has made these people more passionate about adding value" (78) to generalizations on gamer-worker loyalty, "Odds are that the more you played games as a youngster, the more you care about the company you work for" (84). Considering the astonishingly high percentage of game-players that the writers note in the earlier chapters, it is just these sort of generalizations that mark the book as inaccurate and ineffective.

While Got Game promises to focus on how gaming affects business, its most interesting insight stems from the fact that it was published at all. Its publication shows that gaming studies is invading all aspects of popular culture and that those unfamiliar with games are in the market for some basic primers, which makes sense given the recent emphasis on in-game advertising companies and programs. In all, Got Game could serve as an interesting note in game studies and gaming and popular culture. However, for actual content, accuracy, and information, Got Game fails with flair. As the writers advise managers handling gamers:

Give Game Boys to your board[...] If they're ever going to understand the customers, staff, and executives rising inexorably through the ranks, they need to feel for themselves the addictive power of certain games[...] and the practical problem-solving challenges that lurk just beneath the edgy surface of many games. (169)

Overall, Beck and Wade should have taken their own advise, playing games to see that games and gamers cannot be truncated into simplistic generalizations.

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