Press start to play
No romance or no physical intimacy at all.
Closed door. No anatomical or crude language.
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Blurb
IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS. You are standing in a room filled with books, faced with a difficult decision. Suddenly, one with a distinctive cover catches your eye. It is a groundbreaking anthology of short stories from award-winning writers and game-industry titans who have embarked on a quest to explore what happens when video games and science fiction collide. From text-based adventures to first-person shooters, dungeon crawlers to horror games, these twenty-six stories play with our notion of what video games can be—and what they can become—in smart and singular ways. With a foreword from Ernest Cline, bestselling author of Ready Player One, Press Start to Play includes work from: Daniel H. Wilson, Charles Yu, Hiroshi Sakurazaka, S.R. Mastrantone, Charlie Jane Anders, Holly Black, Seanan McGuire, Django Wexler, Nicole Feldringer, Chris Avellone, David Barr Kirtley,T.C. Boyle, Marc Laidlaw, Robin Wasserman, Micky Neilson, Cory Doctorow, Jessica Barber, Chris Kluwe, Marguerite K. Bennett, Rhianna Pratchett, Austin Grossman, Yoon Ha Lee, Ken Liu, Catherynne M. Valente, Andy Weir, and Hugh Howey. Your inventory includes keys, a cell phone, and a wallet. What would you like to do?
Read it? Rate it
A Damsel in Distress
Same playful, gamelike plotting and comic set pieces, but swapped for Edwardian country-house romance instead of futuristic tech.
A Civil Campaign
Keeps the SF setting and wry humor, but trades short-story variety for a long, character-driven courtship comedy with real romance.
Dead of winter
Shares the game-like survival logic of players with assigned roles and powers, but it's a romance-driven YA series with a love triangle and gore.
Poison princess
Another apocalypse structured like a deadly game of Tarot-card avatars, though the focus shifts to slow-burn teen romance rather than speculative invention.
Robot uprisings
Same editors and anthology format, same genre-star lineup; darker and more apocalyptic, with killer machines instead of video games.
The Abandoned Bride
A complete tonal shift: no SF or gaming, just a slow-burn Regency romance with betrayal and a guaranteed happy ending.