A warm and melancholy philosophical novel about a group of friends that design video games together. I love how this book explores the art and sociality around video games – how they bring people together to live through certain kinds of shared imaginative experiences. It’s a novel about friendship, community, loss, and gaming.
Sam Mazer suffers from chronic pain after a childhood accident left him motherless and traumatized. While his body is a source of constant pain, video games give him a feeling of freedom that he can’t have in the real world – the freedom to move through the world and accomplish meaningful tasks. Gaming and the art of game design is framed as a correction for the arbitrary cruelties of the world, a way to start over in an imaginative alternative world.
Sadie Green first befriends Sam in the hospital and starts to accumulate community service hours for hanging out with him (unbeknownst to Sam). And their friend Marx, helps produce the games they build together.
This paragraph of internal dialogue from the first few pages caught my eye for the way that develops from neurotic second-guessing to a rumination on the nature of time and emotion.
He was about to call her name, but then he didn’t. He felt overwhelmed by how much time had passed since he and Sadie had last been alone together. How could a person still be as young as he objectively knew himself to be and have had so much time pass? And why was it suddenly so easy to forget that he despised her? Time, Sam thought, was a mystery. But with a second’s reflection, he thought better of such sentiment. Time was mathematically explicable; it was the heart–the part of the brain represented by the heart–that was the mystery. (5)
Paragraphs like this one use free indirect direct discourse to track the streaming thoughts of the characters in an excited and melodramatic rush, kneading together backstory and development through the forward and backward pendulum of the character’s internal monologue. Zevin captures the way that Sam’s emotional landscape magnifies and equivocates ordinary occurrences in a way that makes him eager to create another world.
I enjoyed the surprising way that the novel deployed the concept of the NPC – taking a character that was less self-absorbed that the two “main characters” and fully developing his story. Marx becomes completely sympathetic not just because of the turn of events that the novel takes, but also because his role in facilitating the creative work of his friends without pursuit of credit for himself.
One of the most successful chapters (“Pioneers”) occurs later in the book and describes a character’s life in a virtual world. The chapter simply narrates the character’s actions and what they encounter in the game and it entirely succeeds in evoking the emotional resonance of the underlying character’s struggle at that moment in the novel.
I also appreciated the book’s use of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The title references a speech from the play and I had been a bit worried that the quote would be used in only the most superficial way. Instead, the novel explores parallels between “plays” and “game-play” – both immersive narrative experiences that ask us to suspend our disbelief to immerse ourselves in an aesthetic worlds unlike the “real” world. Not to mention, it makes the jealous paranoia of Shakepeare’s play operates as an atmosphere throughout portions of the novel – a kind of emotional engine to drive the actions.