Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Review of Novel by Gabrielle Zevin
This engaging story of long-term friendship/love hooked me with the first sentence, and despite my mammoth to-do list, I read all 400 pages in two days. It evokes nostalgia for the early days of videogaming, at the same time as delving into the creative process. It is punctuated with insights about gaming that are also insights about life.
That first sentence reads:
“Before Mazer invented himself as Mazer, he was Samson Mazer, and before he was Samson Mazer, he was Samson Masur — a change of two letters that transformed him from a nice, ostensibly Jewish boy to a Professional Builder of Worlds — and for most of his youth, he was Sam, S.A.M. on the hall of fame of his grandfather’s Donkey Kong machine, but mainly Sam.”
Here are some other memorable passages:
“But people — the ordinary, the decent and basically honest — couldn’t get through the day without that one indispensable bit of programming that allowed you to say one thing and mean feel, even do, another. p. 4
“… to be good at something is not quite the same as loving it.” p. 11
“There is no more intimate act than play, even sex.” p. 21
“To design a game is to imagine the person who will eventually play it.” p. 22
“They had the rare kind of friendship that allowed for a great deal of privacy within it.” p. 63
“What, after all, is a video game’s subtextual preoccupation if not the erasure of mortality?” p. 65
“In games, the thing that matters most is the order of things. The game has an algorithm, but the player also must create a play algorithm in order to win. There is an order to any victory. There is an optimal way to play any game.” p. 171
“Sam experienced his body as an antiquated joystick that could reliably move only in cardinal directions.” p. 307
“What is a game? … It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.” p.336
“A programmer is a diviner of possible outcomes, and a seer of unseen worlds.” p. 351
“A good game designer knows that clinging to a few early ideas about a project can cut off the potential for the work.” p. 382
