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I have something of a book buying problem. I walked into a bookstore because I was bored, saw this sitting on the shelf and read names like Andy Weir, Hugh Howey, Rhianna Pratchett... and the darn thing just jumped into my car. Oops. Video games are something of a peripheral hobby for me, but my own limited experience did not diminish my enjoyment of this collection at all. The stories center around games ranging from Zork and Oregon Trail to Warcraft and Halo, so everyone with even a mild level of video game interest can find a reference to which they can relate.

This is hardly a collection of silly stories, though (well, maybe Rouguelike is a bit silly, but it's one of my favorites in the book anyway). Instead, the anthology makes a point of using video games to address the issues facing the video game generation. Racism, sexism, homophobia, apathy, climate change, war, grief, a healthy sampling of issues from which people might escape into video games, only to confront them head on. That, however, is just how they need to be confronted, and something that makes this anthology stand out on the shelf.

The other thing that makes it stand out is the colorful cast, altough my favorite stories in the collection were not from my favorite authors. It's hard to pick a favorite, but Holly Black's “1Up” and Catheryne Valente's “Killswitch” rank pretty highly. The only one I felt a little odd about was “Survival Horror” which seems like a spin-off from a much larger universe that I just couldn't digest in such a short amount of pages.

So if you like gaming and/or socially conscious science fiction, you'll find something to enjoy here. You can laugh and cry and think deeply about your character selection process right through the final page.