Gamers: Writers, Artists, and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels - Softcover

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9781932360578: Gamers: Writers, Artists, and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1932360573 ISBN 13: 9781932360578

Publisher: Soft Skull, 2004

In Gamers, 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. 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.

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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.

About the Author:

Shanna Compton is a poet, freelance editor and writer whose work has appeared in numerous publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York City.

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