These images of kids playing video games were created by Robbie Cooper, a British photographer who employed a Red camera — a very-high-resolution video camera — and then took stills from the footage. Cooper, who says he was inspired by the camera technique that Errol Morris used to interview people in his documentaries, arranged his equipment so that the players were actually looking at a reflection of the game on a small pane of glass. He placed the camera behind the reflection so that it could look directly into their faces as they played. Cooper and his collaborators, Andrew Wiggins and Charly Smith, videotaped children in England and in New York.

Cooper, who grew up in Britain and Kenya and played a lot of video games as a child, says he tries to capture “people interacting with worlds that aren’t real.” In his last major project, which was published in the magazine in 2007, he photographed participants in Internet-based games with their virtual-world avatars. Cooper is particularly struck by the intensity of people’s experiences while interacting with digital realms. Drew Hugh, shown above, stares so intently at the screen that he doesn’t blink, and his eyes quickly fill with tears, according to his mother. Cooper says, “It’s fascinating that a world that’s purely visual can have a physical effect.”