Gamers: Writers, Artists, and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
No longer just for kids and fanatics, video games have been growing in sophistication and popularity with each passing year and their cultural reach is expanding too - spawning magazines, international conferences, university courses, and blockbuster movies. In Gamers, noted writers, artists, scholars, poets, and programmers talk about what gaming means to them and discuss the growing impact of video games on fashion, fiction, film, and music. Contributors include Richard Powers, Colson Whitehead, Shelley Jackson, Matthew Sharpe, Marc Nesbitt, Daniel Nester, Whitney Pastorek, and Jim Andrews. Essays feature a glittering mix of topics from the esoteric to the purely entertaining: gender identity in relation to gaming, video golf as a meditative exercise, Ms. Pacman versus The Sims, the similarities between writing fiction and programming, the confessions of a video poker junkie, and much more in this witty, wide-screen look at how video games are becoming part of the cultural landscape.
From the Inside Flap
Novelist Salman Rushdie once remarked to "eXistenZ" director David Cronenberg, that while he didn't consider current video games to have attained the status of art quite yet, we should "[n]ever say never. Somebody could turn up who would be a genius. But if one thinks about noncomputer games, there are many which people say have the beauty of an art form. People say that about cricket, people say it about every game."
Never say never. The writers, poets, programmers, visual artists, cartoonists, game testers, and championship gamers who have contributed to this anthology aren't ready to. Video games have provided each of us with reasons to love them, whether as nostalgic links to childhood, imaginative escapes from the workaday world, competitive challenges to be met and conquered, or as vibrant steps toward a promising new art form. From the creation of "Spacewar!" in 1962, through the golden age of the video game arcade in America, to the console-in-every household proliferation today, games have provided us with something books, music, the plastic arts, and even film have not. We get to act as well as react. We get to play.
Gamers: Writers, Artists, and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels
Gamers: Writers, Artists, and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels,Shanna Compton,Soft Skull Press,1932360573,Games,Games / Gamebooks / Crosswords,Games/Puzzles,Psychological aspects,Social aspects,Video & Electronic - General,Video games,Games / Video & Electronic
Gamers: Writers, Artists, and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels
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