Todd playing Test Drive, 2002

Kevin playing Fight Club

CJ playing Enter the Matrix, 2003

Matt playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, 2003

From Game Boys by Shauna Frischkorn (2004):

Game Boys is an ongoing portrait series of young men engaged in a familiar pastime — they are playing video games. For the past two years, I have been photographing video game players who come to my studio, sit in the dark, and play for hours while I quietly watch and shoot. The studio setting lends a theatrical quality to this commonplace activity. Sometimes, I watch the game to see a particular interesting sequence, but mostly I just watch the game players. I seek to explore the popular culture phenomenon of video games by examining “gamers” who play them. Because my work is rooted in the tradition of portrait photography, I look beyond the hype surrounding video games and focus on the players themselves. Traditionally, the belief has been that a portrait could tell us a great deal about a subject: a window into a person’s inner character could be found through facial expressions. Although the expressions on my subjects may appear passive, the gamers in these photographs are actually performing fast-paced maneuvers and executing split second decisions, making these portraits of intense concentration.

From Immersion by Robbie Cooper (2008):

Immersion is a project that records video of people “through the screen” as they play games, use the internet and watch TV. There’s three of us involved in the actual production of the footage- Andrew Wiggins is a camera man based in London, whilst Charly Smith is a First Assistant Director, also based in London. In 2009 we’ll be working with the Media Center at Bournemouth University, on an 18 month study called “War and Leisure”, of teenagers and war in the media. Using the Facial Action Coding System, developed by Paul Ekman, we’ll be analysing the reactions of teenagers to war in video games, movies, news footage, documentaries and online video. Outside of this study we’re also filming people consuming a range of media- everything from the shopping channel, porn, sports, to programming created for babies.