Alter Ego: portraits of gamers and their avatars

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.