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A review by saidtheraina
Alter Ego: Avatars and their creators by Robbie Cooper
3.0
What a cool concept. This is a book that shows pictures of people and the avatars they created online. It includes some basic facts about each pair, and includes an excerpt of the person talking about their avatar, their relationship to gaming, gaming in general, etc. Totally fascinating. Sometimes the avatars look identical to their creators. Sometimes they look completely different.
And that's pretty much all I had to say to a teen to get his eyes to light up. Such a fun book to flip through. I read it all the way through, which exposed some issues. For one thing, this came out in 2007, which means the content gathering must have happened in the couple of years before that. So the games the people were playing were different. Second Life has a huge presence (are people still even using that?). The CG isn't always very good compared with what we're used to currently. And the book itself is tall and skinny, which can sometimes be difficult to hold open while you read. Totally worth flipping through, and would definitely catch teen interest, but I'm not sure how low to booktalk this. Jr. high? Would definitely be fine content-wise, but might be a bit sophisticated for wide-release at that level.
And that's pretty much all I had to say to a teen to get his eyes to light up. Such a fun book to flip through. I read it all the way through, which exposed some issues. For one thing, this came out in 2007, which means the content gathering must have happened in the couple of years before that. So the games the people were playing were different. Second Life has a huge presence (are people still even using that?). The CG isn't always very good compared with what we're used to currently. And the book itself is tall and skinny, which can sometimes be difficult to hold open while you read. Totally worth flipping through, and would definitely catch teen interest, but I'm not sure how low to booktalk this. Jr. high? Would definitely be fine content-wise, but might be a bit sophisticated for wide-release at that level.