Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

“It isn’t about you. Just show up every day to check in with her.”

She had, he thought, one of the world’s great laughs. The kind of laugh where a person didn’t feel that he was being laughed at. The kind of laugh that was an invitation: I cordially invite you to join in this matter that I find amusing.

Retrospectively, he realized that he had made a grave miscalculation when he had ended the friendship with Sadie. His mistake had been in thinking the world would be filled with Sadie Greens, people like her. It was not.

There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.

Other people’s parents are often a delight.

Sam knew that Sadie knew that he loved her. Sadie knew that Sam loved her in the same way she knew that Sam had not seen the Magic Eye.

Computers are great for experimentation, but they’re bad for deep thinking.”

She was pretty all the time, but she was beautiful in love.

Ant shrugged. “What’s better than work?” He paused. “What’s worse than work?”

“People play games for the characters, not for the tech.

these sources were particularly helpful to my thinking about and understanding of 1990s- and 2000s-era game culture and designers: Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made, by Jason Schreier; Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, by David Kushner; Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (specifically the section on Sierra On-Line), by Steven Levy; A Mind Forever Voyaging: A History of Storytelling in Video Games, by Dylan Holmes; Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, by Tom Bissell; All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture, by Harold Goldberg; and the documentaries Indie Game: The Movie, directed by James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot, and GTFO, directed by Shannon Sun-Higginson. I read Indie Games by Bounthavy Suvilay after I finished writing, and it’s a beautiful book for those looking to see how artful games can be. Despite its meme status, the phrase “You have died of dysentery” never appears in the 1985 version of The Oregon Trail, which is the one Sam and Sadie would have played and the one I played as a child. What they (and I) would have seen in the 1980s is “You have dysentery” and then, assuming they did not recover from dysentery, “You have died.” This, and other facts about The Oregon Trail, can be found in You Have Died of Dysentery: The Creation of the Oregon Trail—the Iconic Educational Game of the 1980s, by R. Philip Bouchard,