Games People Play

Two young gamers, Sadie and Sam, begin a friendship passing the time during a hospital stay. The friendship develops into a creative relationship and a gaming company.
Along the way the relationship she became strained as the friends begin to play mind games with each other.
I enjoyed the writing, it was a fast read.
The story had insights into relationships, grief, disability as well as the creative process.
Unfortunately I am not a gamer, so the endless description of games bored me. ( )

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is a story of friendship and video games. Initially, the story had a slow start, and it took long enough to get to the point. I am myself a video game lover, and it was fascinating to read the technical details of developing a video game. Apart from that, the story focuses on love and friendship. I chose the book as a part of the #52booksin52weeks challenge.

Somewhere, I felt myself dragging myself along with the story. The characters were also not interesting. Although I have heard so much about the book, maybe it was not for me. I would give the book 3 stars. ( )

Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book I borrowed this on ebook from my library.

Thoughts: Previous to reading this I had also read Zevin's "The Storied Life of A.J.Fikry" which I liked. I had been wanting to read this book for some time. It was an intriguing read and bounces back and forth a lot between characters and time. I ended up enjoying it but also felt like it was a bit slow at parts and wandered off track occasionally.

This is the story of Sam and Sadie, two long time friends who end up meeting again in college and making a video game together. When the game is a huge success, they end up starting their own company together. However, as they face personal disasters and questionable life decisions, they constantly struggle to keep the company together without their creative differences pulling it apart. They both undergo tragedy and pain (in other words this thing we call life) and deal with it in very different ways.

I really enjoyed this look at the gaming industry through time. Sadie and Sam are just slightly older than I am and it was fun to relive my gaming history while they lived through it. Looking at how the industry has changed was both fascinating and nostalgic for me.

Although this is set in a backdrop of the video game industry, this book is really about two amazing people trying to keep their lives together through loss, depression, and tragedy. Sadie struggles a lot with being accepted in the gaming industry as a woman. I did like seeing the contrast and change from when she went to college to when she was teaching college. I could definitely relate to this being a woman and in engineering. Although things haven't changed fast enough in some of the more male dominated industries, they definitely have changed even from when I got my college degree in engineering in the late 90's.

I found both Sadie and Sam to be incredibly frustrating at times; they are both selfish and think they are superior to each other in different ways. However, they both have a unique working style and when they collaborate on work they can make something amazing together. I did think the question of them having a romance was visited too often throughout, Zevin kept trying to drive the point home that they could be excellent co-workers and supportive friends (in their own way) without being lovers. However, it was like she kept second guessing herself. It seemed a bit confused, like even the author here didn't know what she wanted to happen.

The book closes fairly unfinished feeling, however, that is true of these life story kind books and I think it was appropriate for this book as well.

My Summary (4/5): Overall I liked this and am glad I read it. It was a nostalgic look at growing up with video games. I liked some of the extra insight into the industry as well. Sam and Sadie are fascinating, if frustrating, characters to read about. The story also feels a bit unfinished. I have enjoyed both of Zevin's books that I have read and will continue to check out future books by her. They have intriguing characters and always provide some food for thought. ( )

Sam and Sadie became fast friends when he was in the hospital recovering from a bad break of his foot and Sadie's sister, Alice, was a cancer patient. They bonded over games, but fell apart after Sam learned Sadie had been tracking her hours as volunteerism for her bat mitzvah. Years later, with both in college on the East Coast, a chance meeting leads to collaboration, and they decide to make a video game together.

Spanning 20 or so years and ostensibly about friendship, it's also about gaming and how stories are easier than real life and people. Sam and Sadie's friendship is a strained one, with plenty of misunderstandings, and assumptions, and I had a tough time understanding why they kept reuniting. Except, well, the story itself becomes a sort of video game, with the stops in their friendship but the redo of an extra life, so to speak. I'm a little younger than the two protagonists, but enough of the games were familiar to me that I could appreciate the references, and did enjoy the behind-the-scenes look at what goes in to making a video game. It's a well-crafted story and one I'd enjoy talking about with other readers. ( )

I'll try to alternate my positive and negative comments, because I don't want to give the impression that either should necessarily be given more weight, because as of yet I'm not sure myself how I would weigh them...

But first and foremost: it's a novel about a STEM field. Always a YAY. Not only that, but it's in large part about a WOMAN in STEM. A woman programmer, no less. Hallelujah!

Next: it was too long. It didn't help that I read it on Kindle where you don't get a physical sense of how much more you have to read. I kept feeling, "SURELY it ends here, right?" And it never did. There were so many spots where she could have ended it well.

Great characters. Semi-SPOILER in this paragraph. Marx was such an absolute doll. Too much so? Perhaps he should have been given a rough edge or two. But some people really are dolls. The way his life ended was very moving.

OTOH, Sadie. Sadie was such an absolute (expletive) to Sam! After they moved to California and she decided for some reason he wasn't really her friend? Where did this even come from? It was awful, her always giving him this crap, "Oh you just want to take credit," "Oh you just don't think I can do it do you," when he so obviously, OBVIOUSLY wasn't like that. And finally her, "Just leave me alone" ultimatum - even when he started playing a public game with her? When she finds out it's him, "OH I told you to leave me alone!" I mean Jeez, he's just playing a game with you. She was just a plain and total (expletive).

Sam was the main character and he felt just a little incoherent at times. Awkward, yet a master showman at conferences? But then, some people really are incoherent. I'll take this kind of strange complexity over one-dimensional characters any day.

Semi-spoiler again: I didn't really like the pregnancy and baby plot development, because I never do; but at least they didn't make the kid a main character with a bratty personality that I was supposed to find adorable. But peeve: When these obviously brilliant STEM-focused women in novels, women who obviously have the kinds of brains that are attuned to details and planning, discover, Wow! They're suddenly pregnant! How did THAT happen? Oh well! It was the same in the abominable LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY. You just accept this plot development, that the woman let herself get pregnant, and what's annoying is the story DOESN'T EVEN GO INTO which method of birth control she was using failed and how this actually happened. They just treat it like, ha ha of course these things happen! I'm not saying they don't happen, I'm a walking-around accident myself, but I am saying that intelligent grown-ups like these characters are painted to be take STEPS to make sure as much as possible that they don't happen, and the novel should at least in passing talk about what steps failed and how they screwed up, and they don't even mention it. We know this baby wasn't planned because she and Marx consider abortion; so tell me how the plans went awry.

I guess my final comment is: I can't see Magic Eye pictures either. I was a little annoyed that at the end, Sam finally saw a Magic Eye picture just by virtue of Sadie on the phone with him saying "My 4-year-old can see them so I'm going to stay on the phone with you until you do!" Yeah, it doesn't work that way. Some of us cannot see them. I read in the end notes that the author didn't used to be able to see them either, but now she can. I guess someone got on the phone with her and berated her into seeing them too, because vision works that way.

I want to end as I began, by reiterating that I really do love books about women in STEM. Thank you! ( )