Books like Game Over, Pete Watson — picked by fans

I love Gordon Korman’s books. Slacker is a great way to get young gamers hooked on a great author. Hard-core gamers will relate to the main character, Cameron. This kid does not even notice the fire alarm going off because he is so engrossed in his game.

When his parents tell him he has to join a school club he just makes up a fake one. Why? So he can keep gaming. Of course, things don’t go as he planned – people want to join the club and then a beaver needs to be saved. Cameron learns a lot about being a friend, a brother, and how great it feels to be part of a real-life community.

It’s always great when middle-graders find a series they like. The books in the My Life as… series are fast-paced, full of laughs, and not overwhelming. The text is large and the chapters are short, with little illustrations along the sides of the pages to explain vocabulary. The main character, Derek, doesn’t like to read, which makes him very relatable for reluctant readers. 

In My Life as a Gamer, Derek gets the chance to participate in a gaming company’s focus group and test new video games – a dream for any gamer.

Game-obsessed kids will love Josh Baxter. While the story is realistic, his whole worldview is informed by gaming and pop culture. Josh is trying to fit in at a new school and he treats it like a video game. Each chapter ends with a video game-inspired graphic showing his level, health, and new skills unlocked. There is barely a page where he doesn’t reference a character from The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario, Final Fantasy, Minecraft, Pokémon, Marvel, or some other game. You can just tell the author loves video games as much as Josh does.

It’s not easy to find a book about a female gamer. This one explores many of the same themes as the second book in my gaming series, but in a futuristic setting. It’s always interesting to see how an author envisions the future. What new technologies can we expect? What will gaming be like? 

The main character, Reyna, is a Chinese American girl taking part in an elite tournament playing virtual reality games. She hides her identity because, maybe not surprisingly, misogyny and racism are still problems in the gaming world in 2067. A great book to bring these issues to a child’s attention.

I truly believe that video games are the art form that defines our present and, at least, our near-ish future. So, it was a great pleasure to encounter Zevin’s novel about the relationships behind a video game studio’s origins, which both elevates and scrutinizes the medium’s potential to revolutionize narrative storytelling.

Zevin deftly translates gaming's embodied perspective, including one stand-out moment in the back half that is perhaps the book’s defining triumph. Through her expansive prose, Sam, Sadie, and Marx play out their lives: their moments of intense and sometimes myopic creativity, their intricate interpersonal joys and devastations, and the fantastically rendered worlds, some built from reality and others from pixels which bring them together, push them apart, and might just bring them together again.

If we want to heal the world, we first need a little love. Some might not associate games with emotions, care, and love, but they couldn’t be more wrong. I think about all the virtual creatures, critters, characters, and real friends that I have connected with through games. Love and Electronic Affection provides a fantastic overview of love and affection in games like Dragon Age, Life is Strange, and Bioshock.

Often, the magic of three is not so obvious. In the newly-published picture book, Treasure Hunt by Stephanie Wildman, three children play a new game. Older brother Luis turns his two younger siblings away from video games by creating a scavenger hunt in which they must use riddles as clues to gather ordinary household objects. And yes, they get three clues and so three chances to gather all the objects, which then become the materials to create a puppet show using a discarded cardboard box the new stove came in as the stage. The use of three here, as in all stories, produces a feeling of a satisfying completion. This is a mystery story for children 3-8 with a surprise ending and guidance for kids on how to make simple puppets.

Ayami Kojima has held my heart for as long as I was an artist. Her visual style is something anyone can recognize, and the aftershock of knowing that this artist defined an entire video game industry aesthetic made me love her work even more. I managed to find only pieces of this book online until I was able to finally afford this super rare book filled with her hyper-detailed oil paintings.

Sometimes you have to know “how the sausage is made” not so you stop eating sausages, but so you can appreciate them all the more.

Jason’s book does an excellent job of explaining the behind-the-scenes of video game development. From this, I really learned how any game that is released is a miracle born out of the blood, sweat, and tears of its creators. 

This smart and at-times hilarious book takes serious, analytical, video game criticism and runs it through the meatgrinder of the gaming- and drug-addicted mind of an adult player. It is a memoir, a love story, and a guide to understanding why, as the title suggests, video games absolutely matter.