“To make a game is to imagine the person playing it.”
To write a book is to imagine the person reading it.
The Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) was created in 1994. The same year that Final Fantasy 3 was released in America.
I don’t know if Final Fantasy 3 was rated at all when it first came out. Later it was rated “teen” for Fantasy violence and partial nudity, but mostly the culture warriors ignored it because Congress and reactionary types were busy having conniptions over Mortal Kombat, which came out 2 years earlier.
No one really cared about the pixelated woman throwing herself off a cliff, no one except those of us who’d grown attached to her over the course of the most ambitious game we’d ever played in our young lives, a game that had only moments earlier delivered another devastating loss that no amount of reverting from save points could ever fix.
“Play” and “game” were no longer the right words for what Final Fantasy 3 became at that point. Immersion. Experience. Art. Whatever the word, it was personal. Likewise, one does not merely read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, one perseveres until the last heart is spent.
I’d been told only two things about this novel before I began reading it. One, it’s good, and two, it’s about a couple of game designers. I’m glad I didn’t know anything else about it, so consider stopping here and reading this book, because I am telling you that you need to read this book, but I am not going to make a very compelling case. I am not going to tell you that it’s going to be puppies and rainbows.
No, this book is the pain at the heart of Braid as you yearn so desperately to turn back time and repair damage inflicted in a moment of anger or pride or weakness only to realize that some things can’t be undone. This book is listening to the radio in The Outer Wilds as it goes silent one voice at a time.
To step away from video game comparisons, this book is what you might get if you made the Facebook movie with likeable characters and replaced the soundtrack with Meg Myers’s Take me to the Disco album.
All such comparisons are flawed. This book is about escaping into other worlds and things that cannot or should not be escaped. It’s about second lives and last lives. Stupid decisions made by smart people, because no matter how smart they may be, no matter how closed off they make themselves, they’re still connected to other fragile, needy, imperfect people.
It’s about the self-inflicted pain of holding grudges and keeping your secret self hidden, but also the pain of revealing that secret self and having that trust betrayed by people you love.
There’s friendship and hope and love, but not in a “Happily Ever After” sort of way, but something more believable and more real and therefore more meaningful.
It sank fish hooks in my heart and it tweaked the tension on those lines and it promised to do worse and it delivered on that promise.
Writing is easy, just introduce characters your readers are going to care about and then make them do horrible things to each other. The secret that elevates that already challenging formula, is to also keep hope alive.
Begin by reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow as one begins playing a game. Keep reading. Persevere until the words disappear. There is no book. There is no you. Complete immersion. Come out the other side inseparable from this story, permanently altered by it, carrying it with you forever.
You don’t need to be a gamer to read this book. You don’t need to be 18+. In fact, there should be no restrictions on who experiences it or any other great work of art. This book deserves to be read. You deserve to read it… which after you do read it will feel a little bit more like an insult, but that is not how I intend it.
Haste Writing 