Prima e oltre “Ready Player One”: la fantascienza videoludica fra “Skill” e la bizarro fiction

This paper concerns some video game science fiction novels written by various writers. The focus, in particular, is on the Italian case of Skill (Einaudi, 2004), written by the journalist Alessandra Contin (or Alessandra C). Skill anticipated by a few years not only Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2010), consecrated by Spielberg’s eponymous movie (2018), but also the eSports phenomenon, currently in continuous growth. This Italian novel is compared with the production of some women writers related to the Bizarro Fiction genre: Amanda Billings (8-Bit Apocalypse, 2013), Amber Fallon (Angel’s Armageddon, 2017), and Andy de Fonseca (The Cheat Code for God Mode, 2013). These texts, sometimes prophetic, show a different view on the world of video games, because they observe video games from a different medium and because they show the specificities of a female perspective.