I have had fun reading a few LitrPG books a week (a fair percentage—maybe ~30%?—of the 10 or so books I read in a week are from this relatively new genre). The big appeal if getting inside thee heads of the writers, since almost all of them fall into a demographic that I have had little exposure to. *heh* Lil sidebar: this Olde Pharte surprised a fast food worker when I recognized his GamerSpeak™ and simply looked at him and said, “Gamer, eh?”
Oh, and filed under “Guilty Pleasures of Which I Should be Ashamed But Am Not,” I spend at least 25% of my time in the average LitRPG book marking it up with comments on errors. Almost universal crap editing of not-ready-for-publication writing. Yeh, yeh, I couldn’t write these things, but I can critique ’em. Shameful. . . that I’m not more ashamed of that than I am (which would be ANY shame at all. 😉 )
Well, it’s a hobby.
My fav of the LitRPG self-pubs are those from native Russian speakers/writers, even though the translations are sometimes a bit. . . rough. eh, maybe even a wee tad because the translations are sometimes a bit rough. English idioms and syntax are the most common problems. Still, even though the demographic the writer pool is drawn from may not be that of the average contemporary Russian people (well, not any more than US RPG gamers/writers are typical of the average American. . . though sometimes it seems they share a lot of common ground with typical 23-30-somethings. Sometimes), I still am able to get a feel for deep-seated psycho-sociological traits, and that is fascinating. What is even more fascinating, is that the attitudes of the Russian LitRPG writers, though less literate than 19th Century Russian authors (still more literate than most 21st Century American writers, IMO) are fairly consistent with earlier writers. Fascinating.
One thing that annoys me about roughly, well, almost all LitRPG writers is that they seem to have knowledge bases almost completely circumscribed by what they learned from gaming, thus, for but one recent example, a character “destroying” a bioweapons research center with a large ANFO bomb. No. In order to INCINERATE biological materials, and ANFO explosion must be VERY carefully designed and executed (and no, I will not discuss the construction and execution of such a thing. The NSA is listening, you know, and I do not want to be unjustly persecuted by the feds), and given the description in the book, the character had NO idea what he was doing even with a basic ANFO device. Ah, but maybe the writer feared his own government, so that might not be thee best example. ‘S’all right. There is a myriad of others. . . *heh*
(Then again, the writer/character uses a hydrogen bomb as having analogous destructive characteristics, so maybe allowing the writer an excuse isn’t warranted.)