Video games unite a young creative couple in a charming and playful novel with a difference
hen Macbeth soliloquises of “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”, he speaks of the relentlessness and futility of life. When Gabrielle Zevin employs the same words, she speaks of the “possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption” offered by video games. In the virtual world, death is not the end and losing is but a chance to try again; there are endless chances, endless restarts. You do not have to be a gamer to see the appeal.
– which is being made into a feature film by Paramount – is an unusual one. But playing and reading are natural companions, and Zevin gracefully weaves together the two in language that is pleasingly accessible to non-gamers. Their relationship is a joining of minds and of worlds that is both purer and sweeter than any base physical attraction
Her story begins around the turn of the century, when two college students, Samson Mazer and Sadie Green , bump into each other at a train station. The pair haven’t spoken since childhood, when they met in the games room of a hospital – Sadie, visiting her sister; Sam, recovering from the car crash that killed his mother and broke his foot in 27 places – and bonded while playing.
For Sam, whose injured foot becomes a long-term disability, gaming is a particular freedom, divorcing him from his broken, limited body. When he experiences phantom pain, he thinks of it as “a basic error in programming, and he wished he could open up his brain and delete the bad code”. This is just one of many instances in which Zevin blurs the lines between reality and play, the one elucidating the other.
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