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Also by Shanna Compton:

Gamers, November 2004
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GAMERS
By: Shanna Compton

Writers, Artists, and Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels

Soft Skull Press
November 2004
280 pages
ISBN: 1932360573
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Non-Fiction

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.

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Studio 360 - July 16, 2006