Steven Poole
British writer

Steven Poole (born 1972) is a British author, journalist, and video game theorist. He particularly concerns himself with the abuse of language and has written two books on the subject: Unspeak (2006) and Who Touched Base in My Thought Shower? (2013).
Biography
Poole studied English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and has subsequently written for publications including The Independent, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Times, and the New Statesman. He has published two books and currently writes a weekly nonfiction book-review column in the Saturday Guardian called Et Cetera, as well as regular longer book reviews, plus a monthly column in Edge magazine. Poole was invited to deliver the opening keynote address at the 2006 Sydney Writers' Festival, and also gave a keynote at the 2008 Future and Reality of Gaming conference in Vienna.
Books
Trigger Happy and Trigger Happy 2.0
Trigger Happy was published in 2000 by 4th Estate in the UK (with the subtitle 'The Inner Life of Videogames') and by Arcade Publishing in the US (with the subtitle 'Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution'). Investigating the aesthetics of videogames, Poole notes similarities and differences to other artforms such as cinema, painting and literature, and finally offers a description of games as semiotic systems that may provoke 'aesthetic wonder'. In 2007, Poole released a PDF version of the book for free download on his website, calling it an 'experiment' in the tip-jar model for writers.
In 2013, a collection of Poole's Edge columns was published as Trigger Happy 2.0.
“Steven Poole” enters the record as british writer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Steven, Poole and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q3499265. VIAF identifies the subject as 66696214. The Library of Congress control number is n00088620. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1972, 2006, 2013 and 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “Steven Poole” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.