You

by Austin Grossman

When Russell joins Black Arts games, brainchild of two visionary designers who were once his closest friends, he reunites with an eccentric crew of nerds hacking the frontiers of both technology and entertainment. In part, he's finally given up chasing the conventional path that has always seemed just out of reach. But mostly, he needs to know what happened to Simon, his strangest and most gifted friend, who died under mysterious circumstances soon after Black Arts' breakout hit. As the company's revolutionary next-gen game is threatened by a software glitch, Russell finds himself in a race to save his job, Black Arts' legacy, and the people he has grown to care about. The deeper Russell digs, the more dangerous the glitch appears -- and soon, Russell comes to realize there's much more is at stake than just one software company's bottom line.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Video Games, Mystery, Gaming, Science Fiction Fantasy

379 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Austin Grossman graduated from Harvard University in 1991 with a plan to write the great American novel; instead he became a video game designer at Looking Glass Studios.

He has since contributed as a writer and designer to a number of critically acclaimed video games, such as ULTIMA UNDERWORLD II, SYSTEM SHOCK, DEUS EX, and TOMB RAIDER: LEGEND, and has taught and lectured on narrative in video games. He is currently a freelance game design consultant,

He is also a doctoral candidate in English Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, where he specializes in Romantic and Victorian literature.

SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE is his debut novel. (from the author's website)"

Reviews

[Caz (littlebookowl) · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a DNF for me, unfortunately. It has been a while since I've put down a book before finishing it.

I stopped reading this at a point in the story where we jump back into the MC's past. Whilst at the start of this flashback, I was liking it, it just stretched on for too long and I couldn't make myself read anymore. Even the things I started out liking, ended up becoming less and less enjoyable as things progressed. A real shame!

I can see the appeal for people who understand game design & production, but while I do really love gaming, this wasn't for me. I would suggest giving this a go if that is your forte and you understand a little about what really happens behind the scenes in game production. I just got confused and lost :(

[Lilian · Rating 1 out of 5]

After five pages, I already had a bad feeling about You (this title makes anything taken out of context sound rude or ungrammatical.) But because I thought it was impossible to make video games boring and unfinished books haunt me, so I decided to keep reading, hoping for some miracle to make this novel bearable. That didn't happen.

You was SO BORING (thanks to the title, I now sound like a toddler). Not even in a rage inducing way so that I can at least laugh about it, but in an incredibly bland and uneventful way. The writing was long-winded, as if the author was trying to reach a word count. Pacing was gut-wrenchingly slow and fast in all the wrong places. The switches between first, second, and third person were confusing. The unannounced flashbacks and spontaneous jumps between Russell's imagination, the video game, and reality didn't help things. It was even worse than taking a philosophy class--there was no point in time while reading this novel that I knew what was going on. There was also no moment that I felt engaged. Everything felt disjointed and lacked direction. The characters were paper cut-outs. Worse of all, the protagonist is a condescending loser I wanted to throw off a cliff.

Expectations, Comparisons to Ready Player One:
Now that I finished the book, I went back to read some reviews of it from other readers. And the consensus is: STOP COMPARING THEM! THEY ARE NOT ALIKE except that they are both about video games. And I completely agree. Both take a VERY different direction with the topic. Why I bring it up is because I wonder if Ready Player One, one of my favorite books of the year, gave me expectations about this novel and therefore influenced my opinion. And I don't think so. Even looking at Austin Grossman's You as a slower, contemplative novel...it still didn't work.

Russell, The Guy I Want to Push Off a Cliff:
He is the reason I had a bad feeling from the first five pages. As the protagonist, he is not very likable. Basically, he wakes up one day with a mid-life crisis. He's twenty-eight, dropped out of law-school, and he doesn't know what to with his English degree. And he sees his high school buddies, all of whom he ignored for the past decade, have great success by starting an award-winning video game company, Black Arts. He thinks they are "cool," so he gets a job with them to join the "cool" party. Douchebag move.

So he gets the job even with no credentials, experience, or passion for the field because he has connections and an English degree. He didn't even do his research, failing to recognize his company's past productions during a meeting. And he only ever had one computer in his entire life. Never mind that he shoved that computer under desks to accumulate cat hair. Why does this guy want to be in the industry again? Oh right, he wanted to be "cool."

At this point I would be questioning if it is really THAT easy to get a job as a video game designer. Doesn't EVERYONE want to get paid for playing games? Seriously, does he at least need writing samples? But apparently back then, it WAS THAT EASY to be a game designer because that's how the author got his job according to an interview (I am envious.) This also makes me lose faith in the writing behind video games.

Then with a stroke of luck, Russell is promoted to lead designer despite having done NOTHING except drag a few elves around on his computer and "not be reduced to incoherent rage" in the process. Does Black Arts only have five people or something that they have to resort to promoting this guy?

I don't mind underdog characters who start out being a loser, but grow as a person throughout the novel. Russell is not that character. He WANTS to be that character, but he isn't. Lisa, his co-worker and former friend, turned herself into my favorite character (which is really not saying much) by calling him out on it:

And so, you know, bye-bye nerds. And that's what you did. And now you're back a decade later saying, "Hi nerds, where's my job?

HALLELUJAH! This is the only time I felt a simulacrum of joy while reading this book. Then Russell acts like a wounded puppy for about five seconds before plunging into another video game.

The highlight of his existence is when he dates a video game character. His tendency to blur the lines between reality and video game makes the novel confusing. It's creative, but leads me to question Russell's sanity. He is the reason why parents are paranoid when their children play violent first person shooters.

Simon, The Dead Video Game Genius:
The blurb makes it sound like the novel is about solving the mystery behind Simon's death. There's no mystery behind his death. The novel makes it clear in the first five pages that he died in an accident. Probably by falling through an elevator or something--nobody cares about the details, not even the author. Instead we see Simon as the stereotypical reclusive genius through Russell's condescending eyes. Poor Simon.

Lisa, The Only Real Female Character:
Like the rest of the characters, Lisa is a paper cutout. It makes me wince to see her portrayed as this uptight character who loves to read, but doesn't know how to have fun. Russell also thinks she has "some cognitive deficit" because she talks too fast. Classic jerk-face Russell. She is thrown into stereotypes, which is saddening when she is the only character with the guts to call Russell out. The only other female character we get is Leira, the princess character in the Realm of Gold video games. The other characters are just pitiful. There's no character development, everyone else is dismissed as reclusive "nerds" and "geeks" under Russell's judgmental eye. But apparently, "geeks" are cool now, so Russell rushes to join the group.

Mystery? What Mystery? And Why Should I Care?
Simon is also somewhat of an antagonist for planting a "bug" into a game: an invincible black sword that wrecks havoc. Because these designers can't do anything by themselves, they just reuse Simon's old coding and software from previous games, which leads to this bug being embedded in all of Black Art's releases. You don't even know that this is the main point of the novel until Chapter 22, when the black sword is finally mentioned a second time from its brief appearance in Chapter 6. Until that point (and even after it,) the novel felt like it was flailing around aimlessly. Everything would be solved if they just started from scratch, but I guess nobody has the talent to do that. Russell, now put in charge of tech support, has to fix the bug. It will be the only thing he "fixes" in 383 pages. I guess all the other bugs don't matter or he is just very bad at his job. And he wonders why none of his co-workers ask him about the bugs, despite them being assigned to him. BECAUSE YOU ARE USELESS! THAT'S WHY.

There's also something about the stock market weaved into the story to raise the stakes and also something about a white flower. I didn't care enough to figure it out.

What I Thought Was The Plot Disappeared--Am I Missing Something:
I didn't read the book blurb before finishing the book, so I thought the book would be about creating the ultimate game since that's how the story opened. Russell is asked what game he would create if he could create anything. He answers with some chess game when he is secretly imagining a game where the user could weave their own storylines and all that romantic, deep stuff about video games. Russell, that game already exists. It's called life, with surround sound, high stakes, and 3d high definition technology--and it's also free! This theme pops in an out of the story. It also randomly appears again a third into the book as if the author forgot he already mentioned it in the beginning. I have a feeling this is what Grossman wanted to convey, that video games could tell stories. But this idea was buried amongst poor execution.

Pacing, Info-dumping, ALL Tell and NO Show:
For anyone who never knew what "show, don't tell" meant, this book is the perfect example. The entire novel left me disengaged because the novel merely told me what was happening, but I didn't feel like I was part of the story at all. There's only so much interest I can muster reading about watching a guy play a game on a monitor: the screen flash rainbow colors with realistically rendered characters, the 8-bit sun was gleaming in all shades of yellow, and the orcs went north, and the elves went east, and I strategically went south to set up an elaborate trap, look at me jump over this bridge--it's so exciting! Yeah, fun for you because YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE WHO GETS TO PLAY, while I have to listen to you brag for fifty pages. I felt like that envious younger sister who has to look at her older brother play video games at a distance, when all she wanted to do was take the controller. For a book titled You, the book didn't give a damn about me.

The sloppy writing dragged down the pace significantly. There's a LOT of superfluous writing. Even though Russell was doing many "exciting" things in his video games, I didn't feel like I was in the game. Rather it felt like I was reading an instruction manual because Grossman would dedicate at least five pages to introducing the video games characters and history. And because Russell embarks on a mission to play ALL of Black Art's games, the banal info-dumping keeps happening. I know it's hard to avoid for the author who wanted to squeeze all these video games into one novel, but in the end, I didn't care for any of them because there wasn't enough room to fully immerse me into all these different games. So you are left with a very boring "summary" of the game which doesn't sound too different from the one you read in the last chapter. Even though it was fast paced in that Grossman covers the entire creation story of Endoria (the Realm of Gold world) in ten pages, it read like a chunk of filler text that didn't play a role in the story as a whole.

I found a trend in Grossman's writing: he LOVES long lists with an intense passion. Lists that go four times longer than they should. Lists that read like space filler. Where's the editor?

Speaking of filler text, here are some puzzling examples I've encountered:
"language and reality have no sacred connection." pffffftttt.
"the prince emerges, ready to do what must be done." Which is?
"He is, without any doubt, what Simon looks like in his deepest, most private fantasies." Why would you know that?
"slightly precious-looking saber stance" Precious-looking? seriously? there isn't a better word for this?

Second-Person Narrative, I Want Nothing to do With This Guy:
I hated it. The use of second person made the book annoying. Maybe it was supposed to make me feel engaged to the novel, but it felt like the book was pointing fingers at me, desperately trying to mold me. Or it sounded too much like a commercial. How ironic for a book about having control and choosing your own path. The more I encountered the second person narrative, the more I felt like being a rebel:
"You should be combing the galaxy for Mournblade and kicking bugs off your to-do list."
Yeah, YOU should, Russell, not me--but YOU. God forbid YOU do the job YOU are paid to do.

"Evidently you have been crying."
No! I have NOT been crying. And even if I was, I don't need YOU to "evidently" point it out.

I knew the second person narrative is addressing Russel or Simon, and not me. But it felt like the book was addressing me as if I was in their shoes. A position I did not want to be in. I didn't want to be the anti-social genius who died in a "ridiculous accident," nor did I want to be the twenty-eight year old loser who came crawling back to his "nerdy" friends.

Stuff I Learned from You:
1) Don't title a book "You"
2) Video game designers from the nineties are masochists and have poorly designed game creating software. These are the people behind user experience?
3) Adding a penis is the perfect way to make readers do a double take. You also know when a penis appears that the author is getting desperate.
4) People said "Screenshots or it didn't happen." in 1998. So hipster.
5) Even professionals have poor grammar and write stuff like, "Fix soonest please."

I literally rather watch paint dry than read this drivel again. CONFESSION: One of few reasons I finished You after the first five pages was so that I can take out my frustrations in a review. I found You disjointed and painfully banal--I didn't even know it was possible to make video games boring, but this book succeeded. I didn't care for the characters, nor the first/second/third-person narrative. It's portrayal of women didn't impress me either. The book tried so hard to be deep, but just fell flat. However, there are others who LOVE this novel for its introspective, authentic look at life and the nineties video game industry.

It makes me sad that I was so excited for this book too. I was squealing inside when I saw it in Barnes and Noble's. Lovely cover though. Now that I've written this review, I can finally delete You from my Kindle.

[Myke Cole · Rating 5 out of 5]

I doubt Mr. Grossman is thrilled to be constantly compared to Ernie Cline's READY PLAYER ONE. Well, he can rest easy here. The two books are night and day, matched only in their root: the cultural debt we owe to video games. YOU is partly a history of game design, partly a crash course in game mechanics, partly a coming of age story, partly a piece of sprawling magical realism. Grossman has done something truly unique here: he has captured the experience of growing up in the 70's-80's in as much fidelity as words can, and helped paint experiences we all were having, but never knew how to describe, and thus couldn't share with one another. I spent the first 2/3rds of my life feeling like I was alone. YOU reminds me that I wasn't, and for that alone, it is more than worth your trouble.

[Victor Almeida]

DNF

[Kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've seen this compared to Ready Player One in quite a few places, but having read both of them, I ask...why? Because they both deal with video games in some way? It's really wrong-headed, because the two books don't really have a lot in common. One is a science fiction action/adventure, the other is more a contemporary bildungsroman. I suppose if you read Ready Player One hoping for some kind of treatise on the experience of playing a video game and the connection formed between game and player and what it ultimately means to the person playing then yes, Ready Player One might have been disappointing. But not every novel can be the great American novel of video games. Ready Player One wasn't. And honestly, neither was this.

You (a title that is confusing to talk about and even misleading) has a very interesting structure to it, which I enjoyed greatly. Basically, our main character, Russell, who now has a job at the video game company his friends founded (while he went off and tried to have a "normal" life) is now playing through all of the company's games chronologically, and as he does so, we are told about the circumstances surrounding the creation of that game, exactly what was going on in the lives of the game creators at that time, both the things that influenced the game and the other things that happened (which is interspersed with what's going on in the present day). And it's a very interesting look at the development of a franchise, and the evolution of game technology, and the history of a company in general. One problem though, is that Russell wasn't there for the middle bits, so there's a gaping hole in there, sometimes between Realms of Gold III and Realms of Gold VII (the game that Russell is working on in the book, where his current troubles begin). So while this structure is interesting, it's unsatisfying since part of it was sacrificed in order to tell another story, Russell's story of him coming to terms with his past and present. If Russell had stayed with the company all this time it would have indicated a level of self-acceptance that he doesn't have, allowing less character growth and eliminating that entire arc and drive of the novel.

The book is billed as a sort of mystery novel, in that the reason Russell is playing through all these games is he is trying to find the source of a bug that has plagued Black Arts' product line for years, a bug that is now appearing more and more in new games, including the one he is the chief game designer for. And it's a fun premise, and while watching him try to figure this thing out and track it down was a nice little adventure through various genres, I felt the ultimate reasons for its existence weren't explained well, and the repercussions weren't really handled in much detail. Was there some greater revelation borne of it? Was there a good reason for it? Was anyone ever punished for the damage done (which, if the characters were correct, was quite bad)? No, no, and no.

There were parts of this book I genuinely enjoyed and lines that I found funny, and that's why it gets 3 stars instead of 2 here. But there were also parts that were not engaging, some boring, and a lot of places where it was just confusing. The book is supposed to be first-person perspective. But then there are parts where it slips into third person, both limited and omniscient, and then sometimes it switches to second person. And when it switches to second person, it's not directly talking to you the reader, but "you" meaning Simon or Russell. Which is not uncommon as a literary device, but who are we meant to be? Are we pretending to be Simon, or are we Russell as Simon, or Russell just projecting his own insecurities? It's odd. And it switches all the time, not just between chapters or even paragraphs, but sometimes right in the middle, with perspectives being played with constantly.

I was willing to accept this most of this switching as a portrayal of a natural train of thought, but there were still points where the editing could have been tighter. Why are three of the archetypal characters' stories told in second person but the last one paraphrased? Why are the names of the games inconsistent between sections? And what was up with that coda? Were the Realms of Gold games based on a pen-and-paper game?

So while I enjoyed many parts of this novel, I walked away feeling a bit empty. This isn't the great video game novel, but honestly, if you wanted to know what it was like to play a video game, you could just play a video game. No one reads a novel to know what it was like to watch movies or TV, we just go do it because we can. The same should be true of gaming.

If after reading all this you still need me to engage in tunnel vision, then I leave you with this. This is not Ready Player One. The nature of the mystery reminds me of Halting State, which is still the most excellent book dealing with computer/video gaming I have read, and the whole business/history of a game company parts remind me of the gaming bits from Reamde, before that book flipped a table and decided it was a novel about terrorism. The weird hallucinations Russell has reminded me of the weird parts of Lucky Wander Boy. But instead of asking yourself if any of these books are enough about video games for you, you should be asking yourself, "what genres do I like?" Because they're all very, very different. Like video games.

[Louise · Rating 2 out of 5]

An account of making video games at a fictional video game company. This sounds right up my alley, right? Unfortunately, it fell short of my high expectations. The writing is noticeably sloppy at times, like when the narrator somehow knows everything another character is thinking, feeling, and seeing. Then it jumps to second person perspective for no good reason. Then there's a whole lot of telling, not showing.

This isn't the 80s face-explosion that Ready Player One is, but it does have numerous references to video games in the 90s and early 2000s. Yes, some of them were necessary, but other times it just seemed excessive.

The main problem I had with this book was that about halfway through it, I wanted it to end. I had already guessed where the story was going and while I could see that Grossman tried to make the characters complex, they were still too one-dimensional and stereotypical for me. They had about as much depth as a video game character. In fact, I've played games that had more depth to the story than this one.

Another major nitpick I have with this are the technical inaccuracies. No, I've never been a professional game developer, but I am a developer and I do know the process we take when trying to examine and fix bugs. And the process Russell and the Black Arts crew took when searching for a large bug was just nonsensical. It's like when Hollywood shows what happens when people are "hacking" or "programming" or doing anything vaguely technical. Yuck.

[Kara Babcock · Rating 2 out of 5]

I missed my Xbox while I was in England. I had access to one for the first half the year, during which time I managed to be completely disappointed by Assassin’s Creed 3. Then I moved, and Xbox-playing became a faded memory for a while. So when I came back home for the summer, one of the first things I sat down to do was play Xbox—and specifically, to play Mass Effect through from the beginning. I love this game series beyond all reason. Getting to be Commander Shepard—and not just anyone’s Commander Shepard, my Commander Shepard—and making choices that span not one but three games’ worth of story is an amazing, immersive experience. It merges my love of storytelling with my love of shooting pixels by proxy, and it does so seamlessly.

I probably shouldn’t have read You while binging on Mass Effect, though, because the juxtaposition makes it abundantly clear that playing video games is infinitely preferable to reading about playing video games.

You is a Coupland-esque sojourn through the halcyon days of 1990s game development. Back in high school and college, Russell and his friends Don, Lisa, Simon, and Darren created a video game. The other four went off to form Black Arts and make more games while Russell said, “See ya later, nerds” and tried to become a lawyer. When that didn’t pan out, he came crawling back, and the book begins with an awkward job interview. A few days later, Russell is lead game designer for the next big Realms game, because that’s life in the tumultuous world of gaming companies!

Reading You is a bit like navigating a very confusing, poorly-laid out series of identical corridors in a video game. The graphics are stunning, mind you—3D so real you think it’s going to spit at you, super-realistic physics on the blood spatters, footsteps that sound appropriate to whatever material you’re walking over. But for all these improvements, the camera never quite seems to be where you need it to be, and it seems like every single time you try to swing Lara over to the next ledge, this causes her to miss and plummet to her death. Oops. Sorry, Lara.

Austin Grossman has a background in game development, so he should know how the development process works. I do not have a background in game development, so I’m not going to nitpick. Much. Most of what he spins here seems realistic enough from what I’ve read elsewhere. The pressure and deadlines from Black Arts’ new, disinterested corporate investors is believable, as is their dismal short-staffing. That being said, the idea that Russell is suddenly the lead game designer, despite having no experience in this field and barely being able to program his way out of a cardboard box, is laughably contrived at best.

I also raise a critical eyebrow at the contention that Simon’s WAFFLE game engine is so ineffably amazing that a) nobody knows how it works and b) no one has replaced it so far. I’m familiar with the fact that, once in a while, a genius programmer comes along and creates something so tightly constructed that it’s difficult for other programmers to wrap their heads around the design and how it functions. These programs then stick around across generations of employees, legacies that “just work” and should not be prodded with a stick for any reason. So I can believe that, until now, no one has really been motivated to disturb Simon’s engine. Barely. (I’m sceptical that the engine was so amazing and ahead of its time that it has remained competitive for so long.)

But when an intentional bug buried by Simon in WAFFLE happens more frequently prior to the launch of Realms VII, Russell and crew need to find out how to fix it … by playing all the previous Black Arts games. Because they can’t just go in and tweak the engine, oh no. They have to fix the problem in the game! This is just so monumentally stupid and the kind of thing that only happens in bad hacker movies. It’s the kind of self-indulgent nonsense that sounds much cooler than it really is.

As Russell delves further into the history of Black Arts (because, remember, despite knowing these people in high school and now being the lead game designer, he has no experience with any of their games after he drifted away from them), he discovers that the bug stems from Simon’s latent daddy issues, amplified by the break in Simon’s friendship with Darren. Simon was bitter and decided to cause Y2K, or something like that. Once again, the actual over-arching plot is flimsier than any excuses game designers give for boobplate armour. And I’m pretty sure Grossman knows this, mind you—he writes games; he knows how plots like this work.

And so You reveals itself as a combination of schlocky homage to paper-thin storytelling in the name of glamourous gameplay and a breathless exploration of the nineties gaming zeitgeist. Grossman deliberately goes over the top with aspects of the plot, aiming for melodrama where drama would have been sufficient, because that’s what games (and the atmosphere around games) were like in the nineties. In this respect, I’m not sure then if You is poorly written so much as written well, but in a way that does nothing for me.

Grossman does a better job at capturing the sentiments of ex–computer nerd Russell. I wasn’t old enough back then to be part of the gaming world and understand the ambivalence felt towards the companies, like Electronic Arts and Activision, that were simultaneously propelling game design to glorious new heights and stomping upon the hacker ethos that had spurred the field in the first place. A lot of what Russell experiences in this book feels like an accurate reflection of what many game designers and gamers who had been around in the 1980s probably felt in the 1990s as technology took off and game design started to “get away” from them. When Russell visits E3, he has an epiphany that the event is not about game design; it’s marketing towards retailers. Gaming went big in a big way while he was away from the keyboard, and he’s just now understanding how corporatized it has become.

To this end, You reflects a lot of the ambivalence (or outright bitterness) we gamers feel in the present day. Grossman capitalizes on some of the nostalgia for the “good old days” when gaming was a more underground experience: 5-inch floppy disks, printing out code and then entering it into another computer by hand, all the little tricks required to fool a player into thinking they are seeing something the computer can’t actually generate. And I can’t really pretend to understand or feel this bitterness myself, only a wistful yearning for such understanding—but I can recognize it and sympathize with it, thanks in part to things like this.

So Grossman has created a story that is not particularly well-structured or well-defined, and whether that is an intentional bit of satire or just poor writing, it doesn’t work for me. Yet he has, through intention or accident, stumbled upon a key requirement in fiction, which is that it doesn’t necessarily need to be factually true, but should be emotionally true. Here, he succeeds. You is confusing as hell at times, and I admit I skimmed through maybe the last twenty pages because they were rambling and pointless. (Seriously, just skip the Coda. There is no need for it.) But it tugs on some heartstrings on a single, visceral level, which raises it in my esteem just a little bit.

There are so many ways in which this novel could be better. I enjoyed but couldn’t quite extol Soon I Will Be Invincible , and I’m inclined to be less charitable here. Grossman’s handling of character has not improved—no one in You, Russell included, has much in the way of depth, and I didn’t care about them at all. Knowing now that he has these connections to game design makes his approach to storytelling in both novels make a little more sense, but I still can’t praise either work’s story.

In the end, I don’t think you’d miss much if you skip You. If you want a better book about life in software development, read Coupland’s Microserfs and jPod.

[Nayad Monroe · Rating 2 out of 5]

I went into reading this book with high hopes, because I thought a novel about making video games, with a mystery involved, would be interesting. But...

The first problem is that whoever wrote the jacket copy made false promises. The main character, Russell, gets a job with old high school friends at their company, Black Arts Games. The book's description says, "But mostly he needs to know what happened to Simon, his strangest and most gifted friend, who died under mysterious circumstances soon after Black Arts' breakout hit." This is a lie. Russell reminisces about things they all did together back in their high school days, but hardly gives a thought to the circumstances of Simon's death. The false expectation set up there IS NOT THE AUTHOR'S FAULT, but there are plenty of things that ARE the author's fault, and he is not helped by the way the cover sets readers up for disappointment.

To start with the positive, as far as I can tell Grossman gets everything right when he describes the video game industry in the late 1990s; I've known many people in that field since the early 1990s, and I was tickled to see mentions of a couple of people I met long ago, John Carmack and John Romero. But describing an industry accurately does not necessarily make an interesting story. Russell is a very low-energy main character, who sort of drifts into his job as a game designer without really caring about games, and then he gets an undeserved promotion to lead game designer when a bunch of the company's employees leave. He does develop some motivation and job satisfaction along the way, but then the book wanders into long, long, long descriptions of him playing through the whole backlist of the company's games, and having conversations with the games' characters that could be interpreted as either imaginary or magical.

The most interesting thing about the book is the hunt for a mysterious "bug" that goes through all of the games, occasionally causing the appearance of a devastating weapon that wreaks havoc and does things it should not be able to do. However, I found it difficult to stay interested through the looooooooong sections of game summary. There's hardly any dialogue in the entire book, and few scenes with conflict, tension, or action that's shown directly. Russell spends a lot of time pondering the nature of games and wondering whether it's okay to like his job rather than preferring to work in a more conventional profession, such as being a lawyer (he's a law school dropout), but he never seems to fully engage with his life and move forward.

And another thing! There are many places in the book where Russell describes things that he wasn't present for, such as events in Simon's life, so he shouldn't know about them. They could possibly be interpreted as vivid imaginings, but they're not presented that way. They're told as if they're facts and Russell is an omniscient narrator. That bothered me every time it happened. I was not as bothered by the shifts between Russell's first-person story and the sections of second-person "you" describing the player in a video game, but the third-person omniscient sections took it too far.

The book was just barely engaging enough to keep me reading all the way to the end, but it took a lot of work to get through the second half, and I kind of wish that I hadn't.

[Mike Etzkorn · Rating 5 out of 5]

You surprised me.

I don't mean that it surprised me in that it was better or worse than I expected; I loved Soon I Will Be Invincible and the buzz around the book gave me the impression that it would be a good read. Austin Grossman's You surprised me because it didn't take the easy roads, the handy exits, the convenient turns that you would expect. It asked hard questions of its characters, and I like to think that the protagonist Russell, faced with an ugly truth about the sort of man he had been, grew in the end.

Maybe that growth is an illusion, maybe it's wishful thinking. Maybe I see a little bit of myself in Russell and maybe I felt ashamed for him. Sometimes I was disgusted with him. I don't think I would ever say that I admire with him as a character, but I learned to empathize with him. After everything that happened, I would have sat down with him, cracked open a beer, and played a little Black Karts Racing.

This was an exceptional book. This was a book that I will keep on my shelf and take down every once in a while. This is the kind of book I would like to write one day. I am angry that Austin Grossman wrote it first. I imagine he'll be heartbroken to hear that. I started reading it one night after work and I didn't stop until I had finished. I knew, two thirds of the way through the book, that I would not stop until I had finished.

Read this book. I will read it again, and I will recommend it to my friends, and hopefully you and I can talk about it when you've finished.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was a huge fan of Austin Grossman's first novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, and have been jittering around waiting for some sort of followup in the 4 years since -- so all I can say is finally, and that he doesn't disappoint with this. What he did for superheroes then, he does for video games now.

Basic premise: the main character, Russell, is a former nerd who tried to abandon his geeky origins, only to end up a general failure at life -- he then comes trudging back to his high school friends' video game company for a job. He explores the history of the company's franchise and each game they've ever made across the evolution of the medium, at the same time as he re-examines his childhood, his shared past with his 3 old friends. The whole group stands in for the 4 recurring fictional heroes who are the protagonists of the company's games: there is always a warrior, a thief, a wizard, a princess. It's a recognisable staid formula that you've seen across, say, Final Fantasy, each guise shucking off its new skin but its bones are the same. A similar point has been made for and about the Bioshock series. There is always a common thread.

And You grabs that thread and runs with it. It's a book about nostalgia, imagination, escapism, friendship, and about an entire medium. It's the floundering for the meaning of being an 'adult' when you're in your 20s, which I can wholly identify with.

It's a touching, poignant, heartfelt examination of the video gaming industry, and why games are important and how they manage to carve a space out in our hearts and imaginations. I might be gushing a bit, and I know that a lot of people did not like this at all -- but I devoured it in 3 days and loved it.

It's a little unusual. The perspective swings back and forth, between real life, flashback, hallucination, and occasionally slips into second-person (which is only to be expected, y'all, it is literally the name of the book). It's a quest for meaning. It's a coming-of-age for the modern day (again: literally. the book is mapped out into separate great Ages, like the Greek myth of the Five Ages of Man). I've had a lot of conversations with a friend recently about the prolonged adolescence of some of our generation -- arrested development, if you will -- and this fits in perfectly with that, too.

There are some plot holes, yes, mostly to do with Russell's bizarre lack of experience & subsequent meteoric rise in the company, some inconsistencies re: his experience with E3. But now that I think about it, it's strangely parallel to the format of an RPG, and which You even points out: no matter what's happened before, despite hundreds of hours of questing adventure, the next game always sees you reset to level 1. Stats flattened, a newbie all over again, having to re-learn everything from scratch. More than a few franchises have had to struggle with that question, of how do you take an all-powerful character from the previous game and strip them of all their skills? So I honestly think Russell, with his conspicuous lack of skill, is a stand-in for that foundering protagonist: he has to start from zero and work his way up, in tandem with the reader. (It's also probably a learning curve for anyone reading who might not know all that much about coding/gaming.)

Either way, You is a love letter to gaming. A little schmaltzy, perhaps, but it hit me right in the feels. The cover is Sword & Sworcery. Black Arts' various games reminded me of Dwarf Fortress, Final Fantasy, The Elder Scrolls, Dragon Age, Mario Kart, Tony Hawk, Golden Eye, Metal Gear Solid, Reunion, Starcraft, Mass Effect -- all with an even better AI, an astonishingly unreal adaptive engine that I wish were real. I found myself regularly, desperately wishing that these games actually existed so I could play them. (Which really just means I should go back and dig out my DA:O save and finally finish the game.)

I got a little verklempt at various points, especially during the... well, the last paragraph. I could have done without the coda, however; that one was rambly and wholly unnecessary. The book was perfectly complete right before then. Similar feelings as to the Harry Potter epilogue, I guess?

Anyway, because I'm a hack, I'm going to crib a paragraph from another review that nails it far better than I could:

It is, when one gets right down to it, a coming-of-age story, but even here it is not the typical one we are used to seeing. Mr. Grossman seems to have honed in on something that has become a fairly significant trend in our culture, that being the idea of coming-of-age without ever really growing up. I am lucky enough to have a son who has been able to live out his dream, working as an editor for Marvel Comics in NYC (he edits Deadpool and works on a few of the other X-titles), and the characters in "You" resonated with me pretty strongly. My son and his friends never seemed to leave that age where they are searching for something magic, something we yearn for as children but are inevitably forced to give up when we reach adulthood, and the burdens of responsibility crush our childish fantasies. "You" is about a new segment of our society who refuse to see it that way. They refuse to let go of their dreams, and instead find a way to live them, or at least to continue striving toward them.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Austin Grossman’s You has drawn some comparisons to Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One from many venues but is a very different beast in many respects. While both lean on the nostalgia factor of readers You trades the frenetic action and bright palate for a more subdued story that occasionally stumbles but manages on the whole to be an engaging and entertaining read. Where Ready Player One is an open love letter to the 80s, You is a paen to a lost age an exploration on how the heart of an industry has changed over the long years.


You opens with Russell interviewing for a job at video game studio Black Arts Games after having spent years in a different (or rather several different) career paths. He has an in having gone to high school with the studio’s creators and having had a hand in the prototype version of the studio’s first major success Realms of Gold. Black Arts has recently lost their visionary programmer, Simon, to a freak accident. As a major change in company leadership shakes the company Russell finds himself delving into the past releases of the studio in a hopes to better understand both his own past and the legacy Simon has left behind in the code he has written.

It should be noted that Austin Grossman, as described in author biography, was at one time a video game designer and writer who worked on Deus Ex, System Shock, and Ultima Underworld II. These facts place Grossman’s own involvement in the game industry roughly close to the same period during which the novel is set. I have no way of speaking towards whether or not Grossman accurately represents video game development (a complaint I’ve seen in several other reviews) and truth be told I think that is irrelevant to the text of the novel itself. While the story might involve the development of a game You is a novel about the games industry, about growing up, and about the loss of innocence.

Throughout the novel Russell plays through the games released by Black Arts in chronological order while simultaneously relating personal historical information from his own life, and the lives of his friends. It is a story of growth and change on a personal level as well as a story of change on an industry level. As the characters in Russell’s life move into adulthood the loss of innocence, or one could say purity, is reflected in the changing nature of the games developed by Black Arts. In the novel as major financial backers step in there is a radical shift in the way the game is developed as the people holding the money don’t really understand the thing they are investing in. Grossman carefully contrasts the expensive cars and tastes of “Rock Star” developers, the bombastic and over-the-top ridiculousness of E3 with the desire for fun, for bringing friends together, for bragging rights, for telling a personal story that marked the early days of the character’s lives.

You is a retrospective coming-of-age story for the video game industry and a novel about reconnecting to the things that mattered to us in our youth. It’s a novel about remembering why we love the things we love even if they no longer resemble the thing they were. While average readers might take issue with its somewhat rambling nature or lack of a conventional cohesive plot (this isn’t a novel I’d hand to my Mom and expect her to understand) there is a certain charm to the novel’s eccentricities, bugs that work as features, that speak to a particular audience of gamers. You looks back at the golden days of youth, both of its characters and the industry in which they work, and its strong sense of nostalgia keeps away any potential indictment or finger pointing with regards to how the industry has changed over the years. You isn’t a novel that seeks to cast blame but rather one that asks to remember why we first picked up a controller, or dropped a coin in an arcade machine, all those years ago.

[Michael Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

You is a coming-of-age book, described from the eyes of a boy in his thirties. However, this book is much more about the gaming industry: how games are produced, designed, developed, demoed, and advertised to millions. Overall, it was long and childish, but well-documented and interesting. Your choice, but there's also Ready Player One, Microserfs (but not other Douglas Coupland books), Gamers at Work, Reality is Broken, and Richard Bartle.

I don't think this book is about its story. This is why, spoiler alert, I can tell you that the story focuses on how the main protagonist learns about being a lead game designer and product manager---the big creative boss in charge with producing a game---for the company created by his high-school best-friends. In the process, he remembers everything, discovers himself, and falls once again inlove with his ... well, the girl he fancied throughout high-school. He also saves the company in the process.

The characters are also not something to be concerned about. They're mostly stick figures with gamer profiles: OCD, ADHD, you name it. But they can code and play.

The part about the gaming industry is good, but very long. Tens of pages about debugging are enough to make this reader cringe. Perhaps the highlight of this story element is the E3 demo, where the entire gaming world gathers to see the finished games of the entire industry; the context is well and realistically described, and the demo scene is memorable.

To conclude: FTW! and yawn. 'Nuff said.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very readable, but I'm not the target audience. If you are in your thirties or forties and spent a whole lot more time than I did playing video games, I'm pretty sure this will speak to you. I did play a fair number of games, but I got frustrated and didn't finish them. I liked puzzles but not fighting. (My sister, on the other hand, played through Bard's Tale on our Apple IIGS without any regard to plot. She battled and battled until her character was so powerful she could just look at a horde of wraiths and they would shrivel up and hand her their belongings. This book might be for her.)
I do remember every milestone referenced: the text-based games, the pixellated figures that came after, and every breathless "those graphics are so real!" that was outdone by something else the next year. Grossman does an excellent job of capturing that excitement. The insights into how games work were compelling, since I've really never peeked behind the curtain.
The plot itself was clever and self-referential and full of meta-game details. The "You" of the title is the you of video games, both you-the-player and you-the-character, as narrated by a game. The third layer here is you-the-reader. Russell is our player character. He is thrown into a new situation, as anyone is when they start a game. He's forced to learn the rules by interacting with those around him and with his environment. (That's the only explanation for why a guy who had no experience in the industry would be promoted above those who had been with the company for a while.) There are occasional cut-scenes and flashbacks, and puzzles within games, and artifacts to seek out as he runs through the levels and life.
So yes, clever and fun, and compelling enough that I didn't put it down. But ultimately it felt like it was speaking to somebody just over my shoulder, not to me.

[Stefan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the end, I’m going to sum it up this way: You is a good novel, but its subject matter, and the way it approaches its subject matter, may turn it from “good” to “great” or even “life-changing” for you. Conversely, those aspects may also flip it into the “bad” or even “unreadable” columns for you.

Personally, I loved it. I have a list of friends who will probably get annoyed at my vigorous recommendations to read it. With some of them, I’ll keep sending those recommendations their way until they give in and love it like I did. However, I also have a list of people who I would never recommend this book too, because I know full well that it would not touch them the way it touched me. It’s that kind of book.

Read the entire review on my site Far Beyond Reality!

[Mark Hebwood · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a shame. I soooo wanted to like this, and for a while I even did.

I was never part of the gaming community, and I have never played an RPG on-line. But I wasted a lot of my life away playing Doom, Dark Forces, Tomb Raider, Dragon Age and countless other video games. I also regularly spent up to three hours in the arcade after school (p 12), just like Russell, the protagonist in Austin's story. And I remember loving every minute!

So I expected to like this. I expected this to speak to me. I expected that the story would welcome me in as a fellow-member of a bunch of people who were anti-establishment, who lived by rules that did not apply to the 9to5-set, who were trailblazers, and who invented the future by farting around.

And for a while, I thought that Austin delivered what I craved for. Early on, Russell reflects that he was dimly aware that [he and his friends] were the first people, ever, to be doing these things, and that they were feeling something [adults] never had... (p 12).

Cool! Exactly what I needed! Reading this, I would be able to pretend that my mis-spent youth in the arcades of my home town was actually an expression of brilliance, and of rebellion.

You are sitting in an armchair in a sparsely furnished room. You look around. LOOK. You see (1) a broken television set (2) a sofa with a tartan pattern (3) a table. INVENTORY. *A book with the word "You" on the cover* SELECT. READ. You spend the next hour reading. You gather information about Russell, the protagonist. Russell is a sad loser. Disappointed, you put the book down. INVENTORY. PLACE.

Russell is no more a rebellious genius than I am. In fact, he is a total loser. And this is not because he does not know where he fits in. It is not even because he seems to be at best average at everything he does. It is because he is kidding himself. When he was part of the geeks, he longed to be accepted by the bourgeois set. When he was studying for a position with established society, he wanted to be part of the geeks. I think it is this emotional dishonesty that I disliked most about Russell. And once you lose respect for the protagonist in a novel, there really is no way back.

But at least I wanted to finish it. So I soldiered on and found that the constant switch between first, second, and third person point of view did not really work. Also, Austin's melancholic tone of voice did not really hit the mark - his characters were not even thirty yet, and hardly had a tragic past to reflect on, much though Austin would like us to believe they did.

Pacing was painfully, and inappropriately, slow. Then, just when it was speeding up, and the novel briefly morphed into the page-turner I would have wanted it to be, Austin had to go ahead and destroy the credibility of Lisa, my favourite character. Just for the record, if you set mass to near-zero for one instant in the programming, acceleration may go to near-infinite, but not velocity! The maximum speed limit is still c, you just get there very very fast indeed. Of course, starships in the game are said to be able to travel faster-than-light, but if that is the case, the solution to a conundrum will not arrive by contemplating Newton's second law of motion.

In the end, quite a disappointing read. Like I said, what a shame.

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

Russell was a nerd in high school but he seems to have left that part of his life behind. That is until he is employed by a games company called Black Arts. This company was the brainchild of two visionary game designers who once were Russell’s closest friends. Reunited with his former nerd crew, Russell soon finds himself in a race to save his job and the Black Arts legacy.

This book rang my nerd bells and I was excited to read this one; Austin Grossman has been working in the video gaming industry since the early 1990’s. A video game designer at Looking Glass Studios, he has contributed in the wiring and design of many games including System Shock, Deus Ex and Tomb Raider: Legend. I still consider myself a nerd, not so much a gamer anymore but I still enjoy playing my X-Box every now and then, so You seemed like a book for me.

Unfortunately there are parts of this book that worked really well but then the characters felt so underdeveloped and the plot nonsensical. This was recommended to me as something similar to Ready Player One which feels a little inaccurate. Ready Player One was almost like a love letter to the 1980’s and really played on the reader’s nostalgia. While You does try be nostalgic it only really works if you were a hard-core gamer in the 1980’s and 1990’s; there are games I recognised but there were also a lot I’ve never heard of or never played.

I’m not sure if You is meant to be a coming of age story of both Russell and the video gaming industry or if Grossman was going for the Hollywood hacker style plot. I felt at times that someone should have started yelling ‘Hack the planet’. Either way I don’t think the plot was developed enough and became lost in the geek talk. Then you have the characters, they seem to be completely underdeveloped. I never got a sense of any of the characters and that did feel like a letdown.

There are some interesting insights into gaming culture and the video game industry. So much so that if Austin Grossman abandoned the little plot he had and removed the characters, this would have made for a great non-fiction book. I’d be interested in getting insights into the gaming industry, especially in the 1990’s and 2000’s when I was a huge gamer. Maybe a memoir, or something similar to You but as non-fiction, would have been a better way to go; you’ll still get to talk about the industry and you can still gain that nostalgia Grossman was clearly after.

It’s hard to decide if I like You or not; there are some interesting elements but as far as plot and character development, it really fell short. You have to be a gamer or interested in gaming to really enjoy any parts of this novel. This really did limit him; at least with Ready Player One it mentioned music, movies and books from the 1980’s to help include the non-gamers. I’ve already said it but I really would have enjoyed this book more if it was non-fiction.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2013/...

[Kaila · Rating 2 out of 5]

So, I haven't read Ready Player One, which just about everybody seems to compare this to. Austin Grossman has a really interesting Wikipedia page, where I learned he has been involved in such industry gems as Deus Ex, Thief: Deadly Shadows, and Dishonored. He's also been involved in the amazingly bad Jurassic Park: Trespasser (highly recommend the Let's Play) and the game that killed the Tomb Raider franchise, Tomb Raider: Legend. AND it told me that not only does he share a last name with Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians, but they are twins! WOAH!

The point is, Austin Grossman has a lot of experience in the actual video game industry, and he has a twin who has written one well-received and one not as-well-received book.

This book was just BORING. I didn't care about any of the people, and I really didn't care about the fake history of a fake video game company. It started with an ASCII game and went on up, describing the play and the story and where the characters were in their lives. Then it described a Civilization 1-esque game. Then it described the next few games in the franchise. Then it described the first person shooter. Then it described the space colonization game. And then, finally, thankfully, there were no more fake games to describe.

So, so boring.

Also, even though he was a "writer and game designer" on multiple video games, I'm not actually sure he knows the limits of what video games are capable of. For example, he's trying to cross a moat, so he cuts down a tree and makes a bridge. There is no game I know of that is capable of this (especially in 1998) unless the programmers SPECIFICALLY wanted you to do that. Or maybe Minecraft, where you can repurpose the wood however you like. That is a small example I realize, but is a microcosm of how games are talked about for the entire novel. Most of the things I was rolling my eyes at were totally anachronistic for how video games actually work.

[Zac · Rating 2 out of 5]

+ 2 well done sequences that were very engaging.(E3 and a video game tournament)
+ Some interesting ideas and use of structure(jumping back in time in conjunction with the present narrative)
+ Page turner in the good way when at its best(Probably around 40-60% through)

- About 80% through had lost all steam. There are parts where the author is just popping off pages and pages of history of a video game that does not exist. I was doing the Kindle equivalent of fast forwarding through these sequences(page turner in the bad way)
- Drags ass at times. Going on a date with a video game character yawnnnnnnnn
- Did not care much for the characters. There were some parts where they were engaging but for the most part ehhh. I know that a major theme was sort of plugging YOU into the role at times, but didnt really work for me.

This book was a page turner at its best, and a total bore at its worst. Would not really recommend.

[Nickolas · Rating 2 out of 5]

REVIEW SUMMARY: Provides an interesting look behind the scenes of video game development, not such a strong story.

MY RATING: 2 stars

SYNOPSIS: After years of drifting through post-college life Russell joins Black Arts, a video game developer founded by friends of his from high school. He is unexpectedly thrust into a leadership role and forced to solve the mystery behind a bug that could ruin the new game and have more far-reaching consequences besides...

PROS: Written by someone with experience in the field, gives a sense of appreciation for things largely taken for granted in video games.

CONS: Nostalgia is expected to carry much of the book, very little conflict, uninteresting and shallow characters, confusing format and perspective shifts.

BOTTOM LINE: There is probably enough decent material here to fill a movie, definitely not enough to float a 400 page novel. There's too much nostalgia and not enough substance.

You get a package in the mail from SF Signal. You rip it open, it's Christmas in May! Inside is a hardbound copy of Austin Grossman's latest novel, a fictional look inside the world of professional game makers. You're excited to begin reading it. You haven't read Austin's Soon I Will Be Invincible but it sits on your overflowing shelf. You've seen some great review for Austin's latest, comparing it to Ernest Clines's Ready Player One and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. You have read (and loved) The Magicians and The Magician King, books written by Austin's brother Lev Grossman. You are anxious to begin and so you curl up on the hideous burnt orange couch in the living room and start reading.

From early on you develop a personal connection with the book. The story is set in 1998 with flashbacks to the 80's, and you were too young to actually own any of the nostalgia being hurled at you. Your generation cut its teeth on gaming consoles like the Play Station and the Nintendo 64. You've never even touched a Commodore 64, let alone played a game stored on a floppy disk. Still - you understand where Russell, the narrator, is coming from. In recent years your interest in video games has flagged considerably. The X-Box 360 spends more time running Netflix Instant Queue than generating gamescapes. It wasn't always this way and so the rose-tinted glasses come on and you share in the magic of first discovery.

Russell reminds you of the tension that comes with starting a job way over your head, the wandering that comes with post-adolescence, the desire to escape from tedium and build a world with endless possibilities. Russell isn't the most compelling of protagonists but that's okay (at first) because maybe, just maybe, he's meant as a stand in - one of those voiceless heroes that game developers love to use because it "allows players to pour themselves into the mold." For a time you are mesmerized by the dedication it takes to build a game. You always knew it had to be extensive work, you watched G4 frequently and you still visit IGN and Kotaku for gamer news, but you never imagined the sheer level of mind-numbing commitment. You begin to develop an appreciation for all the tiny details you never even considered as Russell simultaneously plays every Black Arts game and works to design his own addition the line. You marvel at the early technology and the things it could accomplish. You are absorbed by the section of the novel set at a computer camp for kids. It is easily the best part of the novel.

But things begin to drag from there. You are confused by the perspective switches, from Russell's first person to the video game's second person. You understand the purpose behind them but it breaks up the flow. Much about the novel seems designed specifically to break the flow. The formatting is also awkward, switching perspectives at the drop of a hat, for long or short periods of time, occasionally italicized but more often not. Russell explains things about Darren and Simon, the original Black Arts founders, that it seems unlikely that he would know. You read about Russell designing games, and Russell playing games, and Russell playing games (but from your perspective), and you read Russell's flashbacks and his encounters with the four video game archetypes in the real (fictional) world. These last bits bother you the most perhaps, because they seem superfluous. You suppose this is where some reviewers got the Fight Club angle and that bothers you as well.

Surely the novel makes for an interesting look behind the scenes of video game development but should you want to read that you could always pick up a nonfiction book. The games of Black Arts are somewhat interesting enough and you can see Austin Grossman's own experience with real world game writing present in each. The games themselves are pretty archetypal, and if the book succeeds at anything it is making you want to put down the novel and play the real world equivalents. When you read a novel you expect some sort of conflict, but what conflict is there to be found here? There's a mystery bug that is wreaking havoc in the game world, in all of the Black Arts game worlds. Russell decides that the only way to solve the mystery is to play each Black Arts game from start to finish, in chronological order. If there's a logic behind this it is purely narrative. So essentially, you're reading about a guy playing a game, wondering why you don't go play a game yourself.

The mystery of the game bug has limited real (fictional) world consequences. There's a chance that the bug could send Black Arts out of business or cause Y2K or some such, but no weight is ever given to the crisis and so the stakes never rise beyond "beating the game" essentially. The mystery (if it can really be called a mystery) is eventually solved and the conclusion is anticlimactic to the extreme. There is no fanfare to herald the solution, nor any excitement over the release of the new game. There is no development from any of the characters, nor in the form of their relationships. The book just sort of ends and you are just happy you can now write the review and start something new.

You know that there are those who will enjoy the book. You suspect that these will be hardcore gamers or, more likely, those with rose-tinted lenses. You are disappointed, but at least the novel didn't devolve into a terrorist laden techno-thriller like Neal Stephenson's REAMDE.

[Ryandake · Rating 4 out of 5]

a fun and idiosyncratic ride through the videogame world.

let me say upfront that i think non-gamers will probably find this dull as dust. but if you've found yourself clutching your controller (or hammering your keypad) at 2am when you really should be doing something else, this book might be for you.

the author writes with a clear fan-boy love of videogames, of their development history, of the stories they sort-of tell. he takes us on a ride through the lives of four game developers who've known each other since high school, in 1983-ish when games were a nascent form and could be developed in your friend's basement on a floppy-reading, monoform computer.

so, these four lives; plus their other four lives in that strange intersection between self and game character. in fact, the author spends rather more time here, at the intersection, than he does with the meat humans or the digital humans, and that's really what makes this book interesting. real reality and digital reality fade seamlessly into one another. it's not like mages are suddenly catching cabs in Boston; that would be stupid, and actually Grossman is better than that. rather, the two realities meet on an emotional plane. it's a neat trick, well done.

the book rather flags a bit toward the end; the boss battle culminates in a whimper rather than a bang.

so, not perfect, but really interesting. how would you make the ultimate game? really rather a more nuanced question than one might at first expect.

[Matt McRoberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a hard one to rate. 4 seems too much, but 3 seems too little. 3.5 sounds about right, but since i can't rate with half stars i gave it a 4 (because I liked it enough to round up).

The story was interesting to read, but the author tended to go off on nostalgic tangents (a lot toward the beginning of the book) and sometimes would stop in the story to describe computer game stuff not really relevant to the story itself though i guess it was just giving some background information on what was going on.

YOU is more for people who were big on older computer games and video games from the 80s and 90s. There is a lot in this book that will be very nostalgic for them. I enjoyed reading this story, but it wasn't quite what I normally would read. Had I not read his previous novel (Soon I Will Be Invincible) and liked it so much I probably would have never read this novel.

Overall a good read. Definitely not for everyone, but still worth at least giving a try if you have the time.

[Cheryl Hall · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, I've finally finished.

I'm been staggering through this for over a month now and only my reluctance to give up on books made me finish it.

I should have liked this book as I'm interested in video games but sadly I couldn't.

I didn't out right hate You or else I would have given it one star, there were a few lines that made me smile or chuckle and I appreciated some references to gaming, however it was still a chore to read.

In my opinion, Ready Player One is a superior choice in the same genre.

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really, really wanted to love this book. Like, I sat and stared lovingly at it for an embarassing amount of time, letting my hopes and dreams and fears wash over it in imaginary caresses. I mean, just look at that cover. It's a cover that just begs for you to love it. In fact, I partially blame that cover for what came next (the rest of the blame goes to Austin Grossman and his publisher). Ever since I read Ready Player One last year, my desire for what I'm going to call 'nerd fiction' has increased exponentially. I've scoured the internet looking for recommendations, but there just isn't that much out there.* I feel like I've got most of those that do exist already on my to-read shelf.

*This is where you chime in and tell me how wrong I am, that there are lots and lots of nerdy books out there, and you will give me their names.

This is precisely why I was so excited by the publication of Austin Grossman's second novel, You, a book about gaming and gamers and stories and finding yourself and computers and technology and the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, etc (his first, Soon I Will Be Invincible, is also on my list, although I'm a lot less excited for it now than I was a week ago). Not that I had high expectations or anything.



You is supposedly the story of Russell*, a burned out 28 year old Ivy League graduate who has to go begging at his old high school friends' doors for a job when he putters out in law school and finds himself without any other prospects. Russell ends up lead designer at Black Arts Entertainment, a company started by two of those friends, Darren and Simon. Simon is dead (mysteriously) and soon after Russell is hired, Darren jumps ship to start his own company, out from the sinking ship that is apparently Black Arts. Black Arts is in trouble because its not so secret weapon was Simon's brain, and Simon's brain, along with the rest of Simon, is no longer available. Russell is convinced that Simon left some genius piece of programming behind, but no one can find it, so he starts a personal quest to pay through the entirety of Black Arts' back catalogue. The novel is mostly a mix of Russell's workplace interactions, his game playthroughs, some flashbacks to high school, and some truly bizarre dreams that Grossman writes as if they are really happening (one involves Russell going on a date with a video game character, others involve characters giving him life advice). Parallel to Russell's "quest", the novel tracks the development of Black Arts new videogame, from inception to release. Will Russell uncover Simon's secret? How did Simon die? Will the new videogame be a success and save the company from going under?

*To illustrate just how memorable this guy was, I had to go look up his name just now, and I only finished the book five days ago.

Unfortunately, we don't really get good answers (or answers at all in one case) for any of those questions. The most satisfying resolution of those I just mentioned comes from uncovering the secret that's been hiding in the code of all Black Arts' videogames, but that's not saying much about it. While there was some resolution there, there wasn't much, and it was mostly anti-climactic. We never find out how and why Simon died. We never find out if the game was a success. I don't necessarily think those questions needed to be answered in the story Grossman was trying to tell, but the way he wrote, I expected them to be answered so when they weren't, it just made me angry.

But frustrating plot resolution was only one of the problems I had with this book. To begin with, trying to figure out what this book is really about is like trying to unravel George R.R. Martin's Meerenese knot. Is it about Russell? Is it about videogames? Is it about friendship? Is it about stories? I think the answer is most likely that last one, but I'll never be completely sure. Judging by the paragraph I'm about to quote below, it's really the story of how so many people can lose themselves in fictional worlds, and because that's a fascinating subject to me, I probably granted this book a lot more leeway than it deserves. Just as a warning, these are the last two paragraphs in the main text of the book (there's an epilogue as well, but it's mostly frustrating and pointless):

"But there is only so much you can do about it. Your character is always going to be you; you can never ever quite erase that sliver of you-awareness. In the whole mechanized game world, you are a unique object, like a moving hole that's full of emotion and agency and experience and memory unlike anything else in this made-up universe.

You can't not be around it; it's you, even though 'you' might be the last person you want to be around. But when the game, the second-person engine, starts again, it tells you about yourself, and maybe this time you will get it to tell you the thing you've been waiting to hear, the mighty storytelling hack that puts it all together. You're lost in a forest, surrounded by mist-shrouded mountains. You're in command of a thousand gleaming starships in a conflict spanning the galaxy. You and the machine, like Scheherezade and her king mixed up together in one, trying over and over to tell yourself your own story, and get it right."

Look, those two paragraphs right there speak to me. They're great. The writing, the ideas, the emotion. But that's all this book had. The characters had no plot arc, no backstory, no frontstory. It was always about the game, and that titular 'YOU' playing through the games, like Grossman was trying to put us as the reader into a 'YOU' as well by making Russell as empty as possible, his very own second person engine wandering through his novel like it was a game instead of a story, which is an interesting idea, but I don't think it worked. Ideas do not make novels, as great as they can be to think about. Ideas can be in novels, but they shouldn't be the main point. Characters should be the point. Story should be the point. And for a book about the power of stories, you'd think Grossman would know that.

You'll notice despite all that complaining I did up there, I'm giving the book three stars. There was stuff I enjoyed about the book. It was fascinating to see the making-of process for video games, and the history of the company was really interesting as well. Watching as Simon, Darren, Lisa, etc. built this thing from scratch, and how games have evolved in the years since was probably my favorite part of the book. Grossman's prose is also really lovely in parts. I'm giving this book more credit than it deserves because I really liked the ideas it was playing with, and several bits of it resonated with me a lot on a personal level, but if I'm being honest, for most people this would probably be a two star book. For a lot of the reasons I mention above (technical jargon, mostly) it's also really, really inaccessible and will only appeal to people who either a) Play videogames, 2) Design videogames, or 3) and this is the subset I belong to, understand videogames and most of the ephemera surrounding their creation and utilization, and for whom the idea of escaping into imaginative worlds, regardless of medium, is an obsession. If you don't fit into one of those categories, this book will frustrate the hell out of you. Hell, I do fit into one of those categories, and it frustrated the hell out of me anyway.

[Hannah · Rating 1 out of 5]

I feel obligated to recommend other books that are more intriguing reads.

For the video game developing aspect (irl):
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by Jason Schreier
Press Reset by Jason Schreier

For the video game/ real life overlap (in fiction):
Off to be the Wizard by Scott Meyer
(It’s a series too!)
I hate to recommend it but as you’ve seen it in other reviews - Ready Player One by Ernest Cline


I wish I hadn’t stuck it out with this read, I just really wanted to know more. But every single thing mentioned in the book blurb is never mentioned again in the book. Nothing makes sense. It jumps between realities with no warning, time jumps also take place. There is no depth to any character, everyone is a stereotype. There is no mystery with Simon’s death, hell it’s never even mentioned after the first chapter. I feel like I was lied to. This book feels like a scam.

[Nicholas Karpuk · Rating 3 out of 5]

From the other reviews I've read, I've noticed that a lot of people instantly compare this book to Ready Player One, which is a bit knee-jerk in my opinion. They're really only similar in a few ways:

1. Both are very deeply associated with video games.

2. Both involve a quest for a secret easter-egg-type object. (One basically gives the finder a fortune, the other use a super-malicious game bug.)

3. Both with bore/annoy/confuse you if you don't care about video games at least a little.

The similarities end with the actual experience. Whereas Ready Player One is a flat-out adventure full of silly fun, You seems to have more literary ambitions, which is less fun.

To reemphasize what I said above, if you don't care about how games are made, or care about video games themselves, as some reviewers found out, you're going to hate this books. It's straight into the guts of gaming from a guy who's actually worked on them.

The narrative comes in several flavors, which I will order by preference (I'm also in a list-making mood.)

1. The protagonists present day entry into the world of game design. I really enjoyed seeing this process brought to life. Most things that talk about game design only talk about it in the most abstract terms. It truly seems like one of the weirdest jobs you can have in entertainment.

2. Flashbacks. Lots and lots of flashbacks. There's no real characterization of the four main players in the present-day that isn't straight up told to you, so the flashbacks provide our main window into their characters. The descriptions and sympathy he has for the characters make these bits decent, but I kept wanting to get back to the present day.

3. Descriptions of different games that Black Arts had made over the years. This varied wildly for me. It seemed rather self-indulgent, the writer pouring out his dream-games over the history of the industry. Some, like the High-Fantasy skateboarding game, are hilarious commentaries on the sell-out variations of games, while others, like the spy thriller, seem like the sort of games I wished had existed. At best, these give a glimpse of why people are passionate about games, showing the windows of imagination that the game's verisimilitude opens up in the minds of a player. Though when it fails, its more of a masturbatory description of landscapes. It's a mixed bag.

4. The protagonist interacting with the characters from the video games. I could barely control my contempt for these sections, which didn't really add much to the narrative and felt like fanfiction within its own fiction.

The last bullet point is partially a problem because the main character is one of the least interesting and least likable characters in the story. He was a nerd as a kid who basically tries to run from his nerdy past to be normal (I tried this for a few years after high school. Just because you throw out your anime VHS tapes doesn't mean you become cool, just as an FYI.) He gets called out more than once for crawling back to the nerdy friends from his past when he needs a job. Even though he absorbs huge swaths of nerdy data over the course of the book, I still had the feeling that he held himself apart from the neckbeards he worked with.

The childhood friends actually had more interesting characters, and by the end I found myself wishing the story had been more about Simon or Lisa, the brilliant barely-functional side characters. I get that the main character often serves as a cipher, but this guy was just grating.

Still a book worth reading, but you definitely have to come into it already interested in the subject matter.

[John B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

The novel You taps into the nostalgia of vintage computer games to drive an engaging and thought provoking story of an ultimate game engine, how stories shape our lives, and the actions that bring value into our lives.

The (main) cast of characters:

Darren - "was cool because he was tall and bitter and had learned how to smoke and was confident."

Simon - eccentric genius on par with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs -(whatever that means...) It helps that he was killed in a "ridiculous accident" and he takes on mythic proportions as time passes. Simon was cool "because when he was thinking really really hard the air around him seemed to warp inward, as though there were a black hole behind his eyes."

Don - had three jobs: 1) pitch games to publishers 2) stay on schedule 3) keep everyone happy. Managing Darren was a key part of his role.

Lisa - dark, inward, wry. Tiny, but known to wear XXXL Iron Maiden T-shirts to work. A math prodigy

Russell - his is the quest to save the universe. Why? because he is the teller of stories and he is the player. The other four were the characters. Does this mean he lived his life through the experiences of others?

Matt - the reader's guide through the Black Arts realm. He helps piece the various games, histories, and artifacts together. He wasn't an original member of the high school team, but he did serve an important function in the story.

The stage:
A small game development company forms the setting. The hunt for a 'bug' becomes the heart of a mystery that takes the reader through a concise timeline of computer game development. Along the way we learn about the characters and what motivates people to press forward.

A few months ago I read The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. In that book, the game of Adventure is used as a metaphor for exploring and finding the treasure in the world of computer engineering. In You, the game of Adventure is a metaphor for living life.

"It was logical. Everything you do in games are things you want to do in a computer anyway. Manipulate data, change it, look at it. Early text adventures were almost the same thing as command line interfaces with directory structures." This was how a few nerdy young people were going to build a new world and make a difference. They wanted to be the hero.

The dynamics among the four heroes and the four classmates is interesting to watch as it develops and changes over the years. Just like WAFFLE, this story has depth and goes in some amazing directions. There are some great humor elements in this story that have kept me smiling, and thinking, many days after I have set the book down.

[Shaun · Rating 4 out of 5]

You by Austin Grossman:

This book is so ridiculously niche, it could never have been published before now. We live in a world of the ridiculously niche, where something as specific as "Frat dudes who love My Little Pony" have their own conventions and documentaries. You by Austin Grossman is my Brony.

You is very vaguely a science fiction book about video games. It's not really science fiction at all, just fictionalized. It follows a failed law student , Russell, returning to his home town to beg for a job at the video game design firm founded by his friends from high school. What follows is a fairly silly, but engaging, account of the state of video games and game design in the eighties and nineties. If you are not both a fan of gaming and the weird process of making one, You is not for you. On the other hand, for the guy who thought for years that he would be a game developer when he "grew up", You is the perfect novel. I ate this book up. Black Arts, the fictional (barely) company at the center of this novel makes computer role playing games (and other sundry titles to tie in). The games progress and an in-game artifact starts crossing borders into other games and causing havok. There is some vague science-fictiony elements in that characters from the games visit the protagonist. These are described in such ethereal detail, however, that it is clearly Russell dealing with issues by retreating into his own head.

At the core, however, is this story of abandonment. Of the person who loves all of these things and turns his back on them because he thinks he needs to be "normal" only to come back to it all when his "normal" life crumbles. It's a harsh lesson to learn, but an important one. Grossman tries his best to make Russell both wretched and loveable, succeeding halfway at both. The most pointed time I found, as mentioned in several other reviews was this line:

"And so, you know, bye-bye nerds. And that's what you did. And now you're back a decade later saying, 'Hi nerds, where's my job?' "

I loved this book. I loved it so much, I sat in a restaurant with my dinner cooling to finish it. You is absolutely no literary giant. It will never be regarded as a must read on the level of Erikson or Pratchett or Danielewski. It's fluff, and it is terribly niche fluff, but it grabbed me by the heart and wouldn't let me go. If you have ever dreamed of making the Ultimate Video Game, read You. If you are just a gamer, though, you'll likely be bored.

[Chris Salzman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Any book that can drop a reference to Elric in it with a straight face--in one of the most touching scenes in the book no less--deserves all sorts of praise.

I've been making some small video games in my spare time with a few friends over the past 2-3 months. To say that I identified with the main character is an understatement. There were conversations and thoughts that I'd have earlier in the week that would then get played out in the book a few days later. Or vice versa. In particular a discussion on rigid body physics mirrored a bug I'd fought with for a few hours a week or so back. It was surreal.

I would have liked it if all it'd been was a deep dive into what it's like working on a video game. But interspersed amongst all the talk of game objects and scripting events are these gorgeously written flashbacks to growing up as a geek. I found it to be incredibly bittersweet. It reminded me of the untold hours my friends and I would spend not playing video games, but debating them. Hours upon hours of rehashing plot points, or arguing about who was the best character in Final Fantasy 6 (of course it said 3 on our carts, but you better believe we all knew that it 6th one in Japan...and did you know in Japan that...) "Did you find...?" and "But what about...?" The heady conversations of youth. The ones where you spend all day thinking about something new to add to the conversation, to keep it going for one more day. Spending just a bit more time in that universe.

This is one of those books that I think I'll carry more of a sense memory of than a list of plot points. It made me think about some things from my past that I hadn't in a while. Not that they were repressed, just had gone unexamined. It made me miss the good times from some old friendships.

It's good, it's definitely not for everyone, but it's good.

As a last note: I hear that this got lumped in with Ready Player One when it came out. It's unfortunate timing since I thing both are strong for different reasons.

RP1, at its best, is pure candy. Every page is meant to make you say "whooooooaaa!!!" It's a super cool book that I want to see made into a movie.

You, at its best, is literary fiction. It says a lot about what it means to be a geek. The tension between escapism and reality and how we navigate that as children and adults.

[Claudia Gray · Rating 3 out of 5]

My expectations were probably overly high, as SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE is one of my absolute favorites. That novel is a superhero adventure that deals deeply with the mythology of comic books, the way the industry has changed over time, etc. Now, I read and enjoy comics but am nothing like an expert -- yet I was totally swept up in SIWBI. The story functioned as such a great superhero adventure in its own right that the meta element was unnecessary (though deeply enjoyable).

However, with YOU, I think readers have to be much more deeply engaged in the world (in this case, video games) in order to fully relate to the story. Again, I have played video games from Pong to now, but would not call myself a gamer. And there were long sections of this book that I sensed you had to be a gamer to really enjoy.

(Though I actually liked a lot of the talk about game development, etc., because I felt like these things were explained in an engaging way.)

None of the characters were very sympathetic. Now, characters don't have to be likable as long as they're interesting, but they weren't all that interesting, either -- their interests and concerns were fairly mundane, and I never had any sense that something significant was at stake here for any of them.

The book came alive any time Russell began to imagine interacting with the video game characters themselves. There, more of Grossman's wit had a chance to shine through, and I enjoyed the contrast of their over-the-top talents and backstories with the average world they were attempting to inhabit. But this element is a fairly small piece of the whole.

Again - my expectations were probably too high, and I am not in the book's core audience.

[Wombat · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has me torn.
The first 2/3 of it is fantastic, but the ending seems a let down.

The beginning of the book is a strange mix of pseudo-history of computer games, mixed with a fictional game designer protagonist remembering his childhood growing up with other computer game geeks, mixed with a RPG-saga of 4 archetypes (warrior, thief, mage, princess).

Some of this is scarily spot on (as someone working in the computer-games industry) while other parts are wildly off. I loved how the protagonist and his three friends merged into the 4 RPG archetype characters and how the series of games was actually a single, long, not quite sense-making epic. I loved the way the author seemed to get the mindset where the fictional world behind exists in your mind's eye rather than the pixels.

The letdown was the silly quest for mourneblade through the fictional games. It honestly seemed a bit tacked on - and the ending didn't match the feeling that had been built up by the first half of the book. I was thinking this was a 5 star book until it descended into the 'quest for the hidden bug' farce of the ending.

But I still liked the book, and would heartily recommend it to anyone who is in their 30's and plays computer games :)