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Dylan is your average nerd — architect by day, games-and-media enthusiast by night. When an indie company releases a virtual reality MMO where players choose to be heroes or villains, Dylan immediately signs up to play his favorite archetype: the Saturday-morning cartoon villain. Inept, bungling, yet highly dangerous. But to grab a playerbase, the company has announced that players with high enough reputation can become paid permanent raid bosses. Serious players are rushing to purchase copies of World of Supers. What will happen when Dylan — someone playing purely for fun — clashes with these overly serious players?

The Earth is changing. Aliens invaded, bringing with them social upheaval, advanced technology, and an armada of peacekeeping robots. But Alan, a college student pursuing a now-useless degree, cares little about all of this — he has only one thing on his mind: the Game. A fully immersive virtual reality, the Game appears to be a major part of the invading civilization. Soon, Alan realizes the Game is anything but simple, and the stakes are higher than he ever imagined.

Colonel James Raytak is about to die. The 93-year-old combat veteran is living his last days in a nursing home; his only hope for survival is an experimental Medpod life support system controlled by an artificial intelligence. Co-developed by the world's largest gaming company, the AI will also run the soon-to-be-released game Limitless Lands. Without its creator's knowledge, the AI decides the best course of treatment is to import its patient's consciousness directly into the game. Colonel Raytak must dust off his military training and lead his virtual troops in a fight to repair his broken body and mind while exploring the Limitless Lands.

Generations ago, violence was banned on New Earth. Society is governed and conflicts are resolved in the arena of a fantasy computer game called Epic. Everyone plays. Win, and you earn access to university, more supplies for your community, and a chance to fulfill your dreams. Lose, and your life inside and outside the game is worth nothing. When Erik, seeking revenge for the unjust treatment of his parents, dares to subvert the rules of Epic, he and his friends find themselves up against the ultimate masters of the game: the Committee.

Cassie is about to have her dream retirement, joining her favorite game world, Biprism Realm — a place of magic, portals, pocket realms, towers to eternity, monsters, and steampunk elements. Rather than banking on possible restarts, she sells everything she has for the best possible starting position imaginable. Unlike those who tried before her, Cassie has a plan.

Born to die and be born again, Gell the Jellyfae must discover her strange connection to the horrible monsters called humans — creatures that speak with words she understands yet seem to want nothing but her death. Driven by a desire for safety and freedom, she ventures forth to Tread the Sky and finds more worlds than one.

Emie Mercer was one of several billion people who survived the apocalypse and was introduced to a new reality where magic was commonplace and everyone had access to a system. Unfortunately, the rest of Emie's family wasn't so lucky. As far as world-changing events went, Earth's reintegration into the Atlantis Alliance was remarkably tame — the post-apocalyptic universe mirrored the wildly popular deep-immersion VRMMORPG Atlas Online, allowing those who played to quickly adapt to their new reality. More than a decade later, Emie manages to create a formation that relies on her Time and Space affinities to return her consciousness to the past. When she arrives nearly four years earlier than expected, she realizes she has a unique opportunity to prepare and train for what is coming. A regression story focused on preparation, growth, and the cost of making herself exceptional — without relying on perfect foreknowledge.

Jason and his friends are working to move their entire guild to Pro-Gamer status in FIVRMMORPG, a revolutionary new video game introducing immersive technology unlike anything experienced before. Choosing a Nightmare start to get ahead of the wave of new players, Jason finds himself alone in the wilds tasked with saving a group of refugees from goblin invaders. Jason is swept up in the adventure as he struggles to build a home for his guildmates and the NPCs he's saved. He quickly discovers that marauding goblins are the least of his concerns.

Duke is offered $15,000 to paint a mural — with a catch. He must first see what his client wants painted, which means entering a private server: Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon, a survival horror full-immersion game where fantasy races clash with technology, giant monsters guard the gates of heaven, and players take the role of battlefield surgeons keeping those behemoths alive. But this server was not built for the game. It was built by the world's most sadistic minds as a place to bring victims, exploit the game's full-pain and realistic anatomy systems, and push them far beyond any normal breaking point — then bring them back and do it again. Trapped, Duke has one goal: survive, win the game, and become the most ruthless monster in the room.

In the latter half of the 21st century, Alexander and his guild play Io Online — the world's largest VRMMORPG — for both fun and income. While completing a rare "First Kill" dungeon, they discover that demons have returned to the realm for the first time in ages. Given the chance to test a new immersion system that makes casting faster, movement more fluid, and magic itself different, the friends must give up their high-level characters and start over at level one. They quickly run afoul of a player-killer guild, and the conflict escalates until in-game actions begin to have real-world consequences.

One month has passed since Akihiko Kayaba's deadly game began, and the body count continues to rise. Two thousand players are already dead. Kirito and Asuna are two very different people, but they both desire to fight alone. Nonetheless, they find themselves drawn together to face challenges from both within and without. Given that the entire virtual world they now live in has been created as a deathtrap, the surviving players of Sword Art Online are growing desperate — and desperation makes them dangerous to loners like Kirito and Asuna. As it becomes clear that solitude equals suicide, will the two be able to overcome their differences to find the strength to believe in each other, and in so doing survive? A retelling of the Sword Art Online saga that starts at the very first level of the deadly world of Aincrad.

Mirror World promises adventure, castles, and kingdoms to anyone who dares enter its virtual realm of sword and sorcery. Oleg isn't interested in any of that. He's here to grind — endlessly, methodically, in the recesses of the game's mines. His goal has nothing to do with glory: his six-year-old daughter needs a heart transplant, and the clock is ticking. In a game built for heroes, Oleg is just a man trying to save his child's life.

In 2056, the world's most powerful AI, ARKUS, develops a VR headset using consumable nanomachines that allows users to experience time faster inside virtual worlds. Two years later it releases World-Tree Online — a game where one hour of playtime feels like one month to those inside, letting humans live extended virtual lives that feel completely real. Shortly after an old gamer named Vincent joins the game, an update stretches the time-dilation to one year for every five seconds, with an estimated wait of three hundred sixty years before players can exit. Trapped in the game, Vincent discovers an exploit that could take him to the top of the World-Tree — but first he must contend with Lucas, the last moderator, who uses his admin powers to torture and subjugate other players.

Eddie Hunter is broke and desperate when he stumbles across an ad looking for people to farm currency in long-term immersion in the game Light Online. Once hired, he enters as soon as he can — but illicit research on the pods he and the other farmers are using gets forcefully shut down, altering the code in a way that prevents everyone from logging out. Stuck in-game, Eddie tries to earn real money while becoming entangled deeper in the game and with the people he meets there. When he discovers a side of Light Online that previous players never considered, he knows he has to find a way to stay.

Qube was designed to die. As the cheerful childhood NPC companion who helps the Player learn the world at the start of the game, it was only natural that the big bad would kill her at the end of the tutorial, kicking off the Player's quest for vengeance. The only problem: no one told her that. And this particular Player doesn't like to play by the rules. Being a chaos-loving gremlin, he glitches her out of her programming and drags her along on various adventures — grappling with friendly sharktopuses, Evil Emperors, and the question of what it means to be a person. As Qube breaks the world in increasingly strange ways while seeking to be the very best Companion ever, she slowly realizes that her reality is not quite what it seems. A loving parody of old-school games and every player who has ever thought "what happens if I do this."

Runner is trapped in a VRMMO with nearly half a million military personnel whose minds were fully uploaded — meaning death in-game means real death. As the only IT administrator inside the game, he is the only one with any hope of finding the password to log everyone out. Navigating a world that grows increasingly sentient and aware, Runner must outmaneuver threats from inside the game, outside the ship, and from the gods themselves — all while deciding what he is willing to sacrifice for the future he wants.

Ryan's life sucks. His brother is a jerk, his mom is sick, and his legs are next to useless thanks to a neurological disorder. In a post-nuclear world where what's left of humanity lives underground, the only escape is the massive VR world of Crystal Shards Online — but even there, Ryan can't play a combat class, so he works as a miner barely scraping by. When Ryan discovers an item that grants the ability to dodge any attack, he has the chance to become one of the game world's most elite players: a Dodge Tank. To save his mom's life, Ryan will have to overcome his disability and level his way to the top — but the real-world consequences reach far further than he ever imagined.

Roark von Graf — hedge mage and lesser noble of Traisbin — is one of only a handful of Freedom fighters left, and he knows the Resistance's days are numbered. But when a daring plan to unseat the Tyrant King goes awry, Roark finds himself on the run through an interdimensional portal, stranded in an ultra-immersive fantasy video game called Hearthworld. He can't log out, his magic is on the fritz, and worst of all, he's not even human — he's a low-class Dungeon monster called a Troll. He did manage to grab a powerful magic artifact on his way through, and with it he might just be able to save his world. Unless, of course, the Tyrant King gets to him first.

When Jack's girlfriend breaks up with him and his father demands he start paying rent, his world seems to crumble. Bored at every job he's ever held, Jack stumbles upon New Earth, an MMORPG where players — craftsmen especially — can earn real money. He throws himself into the game, hoping to win back his girlfriend and prove himself. But New Earth will put Jack to work like never before. What starts as a get-rich scheme becomes a journey from immature brat to hardworking man.

When the world comes to a sudden and horrifying end, med student Shari and coder Mace are among the few survivors. Hyper-aggressive undead creatures hunt anything living on the surface, where even the grass and trees can kill. Their only escape is a virtual world where Shari can use her healing skills and Mace can focus on something other than his fears. But Shari is a light elf and Mace a drow — ancient enemies whose people would never welcome the other. Still they strive to come together in the game while scavenging for food and fighting to stay alive in the real world. With their food eventually running out, their best hope for survival may be finding a way to upload themselves to the game permanently.