Jim Andrews
Katie Degentesh
Drew Gardner
Ernest Hilbert
Shannon Holman
J. Brandon Housley
Shelley Jackson
Luis Jaramillo
K. Thor Jenson
Thomas Kelly
Nic Kelman
Roland Kelts
Mark Lamoureux
Aaron McCollough
Jim Munroe
Marc Nesbitt
Daniel Nester
Whitney Pastorek
Richard Powers
Todd Rogers
Laurel Snyder
Bill Spratch
Maureen Thorson
Marion Wrenn

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.
--From the introduction

No longer just for kids and hardcore geeks, video games have grown in sophistication and popularity with each passing year, and their cultural reach is expanding too--spawning blockbuster movies, university courses and degree programs, international conferences, magazines, and even a recent awards show on Spike TV. In GAMERS, editor Shanna Compton and twenty-three contributors talk about what gaming means to them and discuss the intersections between video games and visual art, film, fiction, even life itself in two dozen essays that cover an animated mix of topics from the esoteric to the purely entertaining. In the process, they offer not only witty, widescreen views of how video games have become part of the cultural landscape, but also insight into where they may be headed next.

Shanna Compton is Associate Publisher of Soft Skull Press and the editor of LIT, the literary journal of the Creative Writing Program at New School University. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Excerpt (by poet Shannon Holman):

By day I'm a mild-mannered, reasonably well-integrated lesbian New York poet, but a couple of times a week, I become an American. I go over to my friend J's apartment, where we eat pizza with meats on it, drink full-sugar, full-caffeine beverages, and play video games until our eyes bleed. It's fun to shoot things, and when we make conversation, our eyes never leave the screen.

It's slightly creepy when grownups play kids' games, but less so for queers because our culture is profoundly adolescent anyway. Maybe because all that early repression stunted our emotional growth, being gay means never having to leave behind high school. It's all about cliques, gossip, drama, and spending lots of time in the bathroom, a world where tastes in fashion and music dictate social groupings. I once got branded as a poser and booted from a lesbian chat room for failing to come up with the names of three "wimmin" musicians (I prefer Gershwin), and any bear can tell you that a stroll down 8th Avenue can be a long walk indeed if you don't fit the Chelsea-boy uniform.

Being gay is a haven--an often dangerous haven, true--from the crushing banalities of the straight world, but video games offer an escape from gay life, a refreshing dip in the mainstream. A PlayStation is perhaps the only place in the work where two lesbians can spend an entire evening together and not process a single feeling.

I started sleeping with girls in 1984, the summer of Mary Lou Retton's Olympic thighs, but my first vid was back in 1982. Packing a roll of quarters, I'd be dropped off at the mall and head directly for the arcade, which was--except for the Cineplex, and sometimes not even there--the one place outside the home where I could be safe in the dark. I had a brief thing with Ms. Pac-Man, from whom I learned that the way to escape my pursuers was to consume everything.

Having thus digested the rudiments of capitalism, I moved on to Moon Patrol, which was my gateway game. Moon Patrol is a linear game: you move your cute pink dune buggy across the screen from left to right, "reading" the surface of the moon (Each level is even broken into 26 sections, A-Z). It's kind of a lightweight game: lots of jumping over craters, some shooting. The thing I liked best about it was the Continue button. When the game ended, you could just put another quarter in and pick right up where you left off, no backtracking, no recriminations, just a coin in the slot and you're good to go. Another plus was the fact that--perhaps because of the whole pink dune buggy thing--Moon Patrol wasn't a popular game with the pimply boys sublimating their agression in my local arcade, which meant that nobody ever came up behind me to watch my progress or claim next game by placing their quarter on the plexiglass. I'd just continue and continue and continue. It was like a bar: I was allowed to just be there, for hours, minding my own moonscape for as long as my money lasted, with others, alone. Emerging cottonmouthed, blinking, dazed, with the peculiar brand of hangover known as "video head," was a small price to pay for the privilege of renting such a manageable world.

When I was a young child, before Mary Lou, before Moon Patrol, the loveliest thing I knew was falling asleep--under the dining room table, or on a bed of overcoats--while grownups had a party around me. I heard the collision of glasses and the shouting and laughter and it made me feel safe, not least because I didn't have to participate in any of it. I was there, but not there, and I wonder if maybe I still play vids not because I'm an emotionally immature homosexual, but because I don't drink anymore. Now that my getaway isn't in a bottle, where else but vids can I go for that feeling, that delicious absence? Plus, I know how to do this thing with my joystick that makes Lara Croft's perfect conical tits fill the entire screen.