This book seems to be sweeping the nation as the new “The Fault in Our Stars“. It’s got higher than 4 and a quarter stars for having 300,000 reviews, which means it’s a box office smash (at least as far as books ago). So what is it about? Is it a romance? An adventure? A family saga?
Kind of all three, but also not all three. It’s the story of two people who create a video game company. These two, a girl and a guy, used to be friends as pre-teenagers, but had a falling out. In college, they both fall into programming which leads to video game making, which leads to the story at hand as they become friends and business partners. Also, it’s about the other people that come into their life as a result of that, such as the best friend/roommate who goes from theater major to video game producer and the girl’s college professor. The story takes place from 1995 up to present day.
Let’s talk about the two main characters. One is Sam. His trauma is that he has a foot that was broken in a million places, a handicap which has made him taciturn and stoic, though he reads like autistic–overanalytical, judgemental, aloof.
The second is Sadie who also found solace in video games, as her sister had childhood cancer and became the focus of the family’s attention. She bonded with Sam since they both were often in the children’s ward of the hospital. Sadie has bouts of depression and insecurity, even though she’s a game-making genius. This leads to an affair with her foreign-born video game professor who’s one of “those” types (egotistical, pompous, always thinks he’s right and everyone else’s opinion is wrong) and much unhealthy relationshippage occurs.
From the first chapter, I wasn’t sure how this would go down. Since the first main character is Sam, it sounded “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time“. The writing sounded like writing. The dialogue did not sound like how people talk. But I gave it the benefit of the doubt and continued. It starts out almost being a sick kids romance (The Fault in Our Stars, Everything, Everything, Five Feet Apart) But I was able to get past that and into the core of the book, which is about the creation of video games–what ludonarration means, video games as art, as ways to make the audience feel something.
It romanticizes the idea of video game development, ignoring things like “crunch time“, running a business, office politics, and other meta elements that come with complex media production. Instead, the author focuses on the relationship between the people working on the project (e.g. game producers as public figures such as Will Wright or Richard Garriott).
The author is writing video games not as they were but how she wishes they could be. Which would be fine… if the majority of this book didn’t take place in the past. See, the big video game they make is called “Ichigo” and the way they talk about it, it seems to be along the lines of “Limbo” or “Undertale”. It sounds artsy and avant-garde, which would be fine if this took place today. But in 1995, there were no such things. Video games didn’t make people cry in 1995. And they certainly weren’t used as pack-in games for new consoles, which is what this game becomes (as part of a plot point). The top games in 1995 were Quake, Duke Nukem 3-D, Command and Conquer, Super Mario 64, etc. War games. Shooters. Well-established franchises.
You couldn’t be successful unless you were at least a little bit commercial. There is no freakin’ way someone would have made an artsy game as the pack-in. (They weren’t even using pack-ins anymore by this time.) And certainly not a game from a new unproven studio with just two people. There were no Bastions or Insides or Journeys or even Bioshocks that you could point to and say “here’s a successful example of the video game we’re making and that’s why this is going to work.”
So that’s what bothers me the most–the backdrop is not plausible, and I pointed out a hundred times where “this wouldn’t have happened”, “no way should this have happened”, “the industry would have reamed them out if this happened”. The only game during this era I could even try to point to that succeeded was “Myst”. And that game succeeded because it had a big new gimmick–the CD-ROM which allowed complex graphics and FMVs. No such innovations in this book. It wasn’t until 2003 that companies started taking chances with non-traditional games (e.g. “Katamari Damacy” and “Shadow of the Colossus“).
On the other hand, maybe this is the author writing about video games and how they evolved as she wishes they had been. Instead of it all being guns and gore and misogynistic heroes like Duke Nukem and Solid Snake, she wrote a universe where video games catered toward all genders instead of just guys. There’s no reason video games had to be marketed toward boys. It was just what they did in the eighties because executives believed in “there are toys for boys and toys for girls and there is no crossover.”
There is good writing here. I particularly fell for the beautiful chapter in the third act break (no spoilers!). If you don’t know anything about video games as an industry, you will enjoy this book. If you do, you will probably be tempted to throw it away because of how unrealistically it portrays the industry. Myself, I’m halfway on it. The story itself feels like something that could make an excellent Netflix short series. The video game backdrop drove me nuts, but I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t the kind of book I wish I could write.
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