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I love hearing your ideas. That’s my favorite thing in the world.
What does love even mean when you can find it with so many people and things?”
She studied Sam’s moon face, which was so familiar to her. It was almost like looking at herself, but through a magical mirror that allowed her to see her whole life. When she looked at him, she saw Sam, but she also saw Ichigo and Alice and Freda and Marx and Dov and all the mistakes she had made, and all her secret shames and fears, and all the best things she had done, too.
There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living.
To return to the city of one’s birth always felt like retreat.
California was for beginnings.
Her skin had particles of glass on it, and she looked as if she were sparkling.
games, the thing that matters most is the order of things. The game has an algorithm, but the player also must create a play algorithm in order to win. There is an order to any victory. There is an optimal way to play any game. Sam, in the silent months after Anna’s death, would obsessively replay this scene in his head. If she doesn’t take the job on Press That Button! and if Anna can’t afford to buy the new car. If Anna buys the new car but drives directly home after dinner. If the first Anna Lee doesn’t jump from that building and if Anna never comes to Los Angeles. If Anna doesn’t stop
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the feeling that your body, when it was sick, was no longer your own.
Winning is accepting that there are some races a person cannot win.
Throughout his life, Sam had hated being told to “fight,” as if sickness were a character failing. Illness could not be defeated, no matter how hard you fought, and pain, once it had you in its grasp, was transformational.
He knew what he was experiencing was a basic error in programming, and he wished he could open up his brain and delete the bad code. Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.
The pain seemed to occupy spaces in his mind that had heretofore been untouched or reserved exclusively for imaginary endeavors.
You don’t want to meet someone like you too early in your life, or you won’t ever like anyone else.”
He was happiest when he did not have to think about his body—when he could forget that he had a body at all.
Sam felt like crying, but instead he started to laugh.
But Sam had always been so guarded—he was a boy, and also a windowless and doorless tower. She had never found his entrances.
There were so many people who could be your lover, but, if she was honest with herself, there were relatively few people who could move you creatively.
“How do you get over a failure?” “I think you mean a public failure. Because we all fail in private.
It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.”
She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn’t.)
A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.
Sadie had often reflected that sex and video games had a great deal in common. There were certain objectives that needed to be met. There were certain rules that shouldn’t be broken. There was a correct combination of movements—button mashes, joystick pivots, keystrokes, commands—that made the whole thing work or not work. There was a pleasure to knowing you had played the game correctly and a release that came when you reached the next level. To be good at sex was to be good at the game of sex.
She was pretty all the time, but she was beautiful in love.
Maybe the sex wouldn’t have been exceptional, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Because the other things they had were finer than sex. Because he loved Sadie. It was one of only a handful of things that he knew to be a constant about himself. The greatest pleasures of his life had been when he was by her side, playing or inventing.
The most successful people are also the most able to change their mindsets.
You may not ever have a romantic relationship with Sadie, but you two will be friends for the rest of your lives, and that is something of equal or greater value, if you choose to see it that way.”
“is that virtual worlds can be better than the actual world. They can be more moral, more just, more progressive, more empathetic, and more accommodating of difference.
To be alive was to accept that you were fundamentally alone.”
The work was the thing, she kept reminding herself. The work was the thing that lasted, but the work only lasted if people knew it existed.
Surrender to the air, enjoy the view.
Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?
“You wouldn’t be a wife. I’d be your husband,” you said.
When you figured out Sam’s dead mother’s name, you decided that it was fate, and from that day forward, Sam would be your brother. A name is destiny, if you think it is.
Video games don’t make people violent, but maybe they falsely give you the idea that you can be a hero.
The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.
You are a gaming person, which is to say you are the kind of person who believes that “game over” is a construction. The game is only over if you stop playing. There is always one more life. Even the most brutal death isn’t final.
You are flying more slowly than last time, because you don’t want to miss any of it.
Despite having almost died in a car accident, Sam relished these car trips.
There are no ghosts, but up here”—she gestured toward her head—“it’s a haunted house.”
and that their seemingly frivolous work is still worth doing in the face of a random, violent universe.
“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”
“A programmer is a diviner of possible outcomes, and a seer of unseen worlds.”
“And what is love, in the end?” Alabaster said. “Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?”
There is no purity to bearing pain alone.
To build a world for someone seems a romantic thing from where I stand.” Dov shook his head. “Sam Masur, that fucked-up, romantic kid.”
art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.
A good game designer knows that clinging to a few early ideas about a project can cut off the potential for the work.
The best you can wish for anyone, Sam decided, is a video game death. Which is to say, spectacular and brief.
“How are you?” Sadie said. “I’ve been better. I’ve decided…I prefer video game death, all things considered.” “Short, sweet, with the possibility of imminent resurrection,” Sadie said. “Video game characters never die.”
