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In Real Life by Cory Doctorow, Jen Wang
4.0

This was a quick and easy read, perfect for a lazy weekend afternoon. But don't let that fool you as there were also layers to this that I really enjoyed reading about, especially being a bit of a gamer myself, and it was very interesting to read about the varying points of views that come with the world of MMOs. This includes gold farmers and the reason why they may have this profession, people who try to stop them, either due to feeling they take away from the intregity of the game or not liking the competition, and people who join the world of gaming for varying reasons.

Those are not the only layers there; there is the difference in the person we are in the world versus the avatars that we choose in our gaming worlds. There is the a scene showing the difference between various types of gamers, such as RPG and board games, and how even that can cause lines to be drawn and people to be left out. My only complaint on this is that since it was a short graphic novel, there wasn't a lot of time to develop and flesh out more of the topics it wanted to cover such as girls in gaming and how it only recently became acceptable, or how People may not be willing to branch out and try different types of gaming due to being excluded.

I don't want to go into too much detail since I don't believe in giving review that just recap the story. But I do want to emphasis to not pass it up just because you think it is a story bout gaming, since ther is so much more to it.