New book: Alter Ego: portraits of gamers and their avatars

This comes from Boing Boing, who say:

Robbie Cooper’s Alter Ego project collected photos of gamers and paired them with their in-game avatars. It’s just been collected in a handsome hardcover edition with a nifty lenticular cover that shows a nice Korean couple morphing into chaotic evil game-characters.

I read this last night — what I loved about it was the broadly construed notion of “player.” Cooper doesn’t just get people who play games for the fun of it, but also an old-school MUD developer (his “avatar” is a block of text from his game), several gold-farmers and miscellaneous other cheats; game developers and models for in-game avatars, and so on. The breadth of gamers interviewed by Cooper is really awe-inspiring: rich and poor, western and Asian, able-bodied and disabled, young and old. It’s not all terminally shy, heavyset guys playing skinny little women (though there are some of those) — Cooper has plenty of people who defy the stereotypes, too. The net effect is to demonstrate the common cause between all the players, no matter what their background: they are all living virtual lives.

Also: it doesn’t hurt that these are beautifully shot portrait photos.

Link to thumbnail gallery of photos 1
Link to thumbnail gallery of photos 2

I haven’t see the book, but it looks like an interesting project. I don’t give a crap about video games, but I find identity, particularly online identity, a fascinating mess.