Staff Pick
Michael Clune's mother accused him of using computer games to escape from reality. She wasn't wrong, but part of what's fascinating about Gamelife is where Clune escapes to and what he thinks about along the way. "I need to be somewhere else," he writes, and that is the gift and the curse computer games offer. Recommended By Mary Jo S., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
You have been awakened.
Floppy disk inserted, computer turned on, a whirring, and then this sentence, followed by a blinking cursor. So begins Suspended, the first computer game to obsess seven-year-old Michael, to worm into his head and change his sense of reality. Thirty years later he will write: "Computer games have taught me the things you can't learn from people."
Gamelife is the memoir of a childhood transformed by technology. Afternoons spent gazing at pixelated maps and mazes train Michael's eyes for the uncanny side of 1980s suburban Illinois. A game about pirates yields clues to the drama of cafeteria politics and locker-room hazing. And in the year of his parents' divorce, a spaceflight simulator opens a hole in reality.
In telling the story of his youth through seven computer games, Michael W. Clune captures the part of childhood we live alone.
Review
"Beyond the brilliant observations that seem to pop up on every page, the scenes of Clune’s childhood make for equally compelling reading, dramatically rendered as they are in rich novelistic prose... There are more funny scenes than seems possible in a book of 200 pages." Christopher Urban, The Millions
Review
“Clune’s book shows us just how intimate and intense the engagement with video games can be… The book moves in counterpoint, alternating in short subchapters between interior and exterior, life and game, letting the two halves of Clune’s experience jostle against each other in unexpected ways.” Gabriel Winslow-Yost, The New York Review of Books
Review
"Unconventionally plotted and oddly moving...Gamelife argues that our hidden inner world, 'the part of our lives that wasn't involved with people,' can save us in an outside world that doesn't always make us feel whole." Ethan Gilsdorf, The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Michael W. Clune is a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of a memoir titled White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin and of two scholarly books, American Literature in the Free Market and Writing Against Time.