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“Come on, Sadie. There’ll always be another class. How many times can you look at something and know that everyone around you is seeing the same thing or at the very least that their brains and eyes are responding to the same phenomenon? How much proof do you ever have that we’re all in the same world?”
His mind cycled through the ways a person could find a person in 1995.
“You’re incredibly gifted, Sam. But it is worth noting that to be good at something is not quite the same as loving it.”
Alice was moody in the way of thirteen-year-olds, but she was also moody in the way of people who might be dying of cancer.
Without looking over at her, he said, “You want to play the rest of this life?” Sadie shook her head. “No. You’re doing really well. I can wait until you’re dead.”
Sam would later tell people that these mazes were his first attempts at writing games. “A maze,” he would say, “is a video game distilled to its purest form.” Maybe so, but this was revisionist and self-aggrandizing. The mazes were for Sadie. To design a game is to imagine the person who will eventually play it.
“Guys,” Dov said. “You know I’ve served in the army, right? Guns are so fucking romantic to you Americans, because you don’t know what it is to be at war and to be constantly under siege. It’s truly pathetic.”
Everyone’s work is basic and uninteresting at twenty.
Sam could be ignored, but the childish shared reference could not be. It was an invitation to play. She turned.
Mistress, Sadie thought. Sadie laughed a bit to herself, thinking this was what it was like to play someone else’s game: to have the illusion of choice, without actual choice.
“Always remember, mine Sadie: life is very long, unless it is not.” Sadie knew this to be a tautology, but it also happened to be true.
In those days, a person might not be able to check her email when she was away from school.
Interesting narrative voice here. Who is speaking and referring to "those days"?
Sam fully got what she was trying to do, but he also believed that she would have to do more if she were to make games that people loved, not just games that people admired.
“Her parents can buy her anything she wants. Why would she want some dumb thing I drew on the back of an envelope?” Sam said. “I suppose,” Dong Hyun said, “because her parents can buy her anything she wants.”
“Why do you keep coming?” she asked. “Because,” he said. Click on this word, he thought, and you will find links to everything it means. Because you are my oldest friend. Because once, when I was at my lowest, you saved me. Because I might have died without you or ended up in a children’s psychiatric hospital. Because I owe you. Because, selfishly, I see a future where we make fantastic games together, if you can manage to get out of bed. “Because,” he repeated.
“Promise me, we won’t ever do this again,” Sadie said. “Promise me, that no matter what happens, no matter what dumb thing we supposedly perpetrate on each other, we won’t ever go six years without talking to each other. Promise me you’ll always forgive me, and I promise I’ll always forgive you.” These, of course, are the kinds of vows young people feel comfortable making when they have no idea what life has in store for them.
How do you preserve the impossible to preserve? Or, in other words, how do you stop time and death? Could there have been a more propitious place to begin the company that would become Unfair Games? What, after all, is a video game’s subtextual preoccupation if not the erasure of mortality?
The glass flowers are legitimately amazing.
As Sadie described it, in a 2011 interview with the Descendants of Lovelace blog:
Still curious about the narrative voice here
“Sadie, when you tell this story, say I asked you at the glass flower exhibit. Don’t say it was closed.” The myth, the narrative, whatever you want to call it, was always of supreme importance to Sam. So, I guess, by even telling this story, I’m betraying him.
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.
Channeling Ira Glass
For Sam, greatness meant popular. For Sadie, art.
“Sometimes, I would be in so much pain. The only thing that kept me from wanting to die was the fact that I could leave my body and be in a body that worked perfectly for a while—better than perfectly, actually—with a set of problems that were not my own.” “You couldn’t land at the top of a pole, but Mario could.” “Exactly. I could save the princess, even when I could barely get out of bed. So, I do want to be rich and famous. I am, as you know, a bottomless pit of ambition and need. But I also want to make something sweet. Something kids like us would have wanted to play to forget their
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Until Harvard, he had not realized that in America—and not just in its college theaters—there were only so many roles an Asian could play.
Other people’s parents are often a delight.
mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures. kotaku: That’s an oversimplification of the issue. mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you? I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race
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That summer, Sam’s greatest spiritual experience was with the Donkey Kong machine in his grandparents’ pizza place.
“And this is the truth of any game—it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It’s the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.”
Game = stage play = life?
Like most twenty-year-olds, Sadie had never built a complicated graphics and physics engine before,
Sam’s grandfather had two core beliefs: (1) all things were knowable by anyone, and (2) anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken. Sam believed these things as well.
There is no purity in art. The process of how you arrive at something doesn’t matter at all. The game is going to be completely original because we made it.
“No matter what happens, thank you for making me do this. I love you, Sam. You don’t have to say you love me, too. I know that kind of thing makes you terribly uncomfortable.”
“That love is all there is; is all we know of love. It is enough; the freight should be proportioned to the groove.”
And yet, somewhere deep inside himself, he felt a recognition and then a reckoning: this was death, and he would die, and his mother would die, and everyone you ever met and ever loved would die, and maybe it would happen when you or they were old, but maybe not. To know this was unbearable: it was a fact too large for a nine-year-old avatar to contain.
“Hi,” Anna said. “Hi,” Sam said, without looking at her. “You can watch if you want. I’m going to play until the end of this life.” “That’s a good philosophy,”
For Ms. Pac-Man, Anna thought, life was cheap and filled with second chances.
He wanted to be Ichigo. He wanted to surf, and ski, and parasail, and fly, and scale mountains and buildings. He wanted to die a million deaths like Ichigo, and no matter what damage was inflicted on his body during the day, he’d wake up tomorrow, new and whole. He wanted Ichigo’s life, a lifetime of endless, immaculate tomorrows, free of mistakes and the evidence of having lived.
He put his head in the crook of her shoulder; the freight was in proportion to the groove.
“I thought you were worried I was going to die,” Sam said. “No. You’ll never die. And if you ever died, I’d just start the game again,” Sadie said. “Sam’s dead. Put another quarter in the machine.”
Odds of Sam dying by the end of the book: high
He craned his neck so that he could rest his head in the groove of her shoulder, and then he closed his eyes.
She let herself think Sam was her friend, but Sam was no one’s friend.
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.
Sam’s doctor said to him, “The good news is that the pain is in your head.” But I am in my head, Sam thought.
Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.
Sam did not believe his body could feel anything but pain, and so he did not desire pleasure in the same way that other people seemed to. Sam was happiest when his body was feeling nothing. He was happiest when he did not have to think about his body—when he could forget that he had a body at all.
The restart prompt of Myre Landing comes up: Ready for a new tomorrow, Paladin?
“Sadie, why didn’t you ever say?” “Because we never say anything real to each other. We play games, and we talk about games, and we talk about making games, and we don’t know each other at all.”
Sadie knew it was easy to get addicted to the taste of your own carnage.
It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.”
Ah, but Sadie Green was a gamer! In a game, if a sign warns you not to open a certain door, you will definitely open that door. If it doesn’t work out, you can always go back to the save point and start again.
