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Gamelife: A Memoir, by Michael W. Clune
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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.
- Sales Rank: #326795 in Books
- Published on: 2015-09-15
- Released on: 2015-09-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.46" h x .85" w x 5.52" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 224 pages
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
“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
"I never played the games Clune devotes most of his attention to, but his voice makes their obsolete rituals come alive: Sometimes he sounds like a thriller writer, sometimes an art critic, sometimes a poet." ―Christian Lorentzen, Vulture
"In the end, video games were formative for Clune simply because he played them, and he loved them, and he hasn’t forgotten the thrills that accompanied and even agitated his intellectual awakening. Arguably, it is his talent as a writer that gives his games their significance and sets them meaningfully into the sweep of his personal history." ―Simon Parkin, The New Yorker Page-Turner
"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
“Clune’s memoirs will take over your brain, too, but in the opposite way: they will make you more human, by doubling down on your capacity for empathy, as the best literature tends to do. They will leech compassion from your center and radiate it out though your pores, where you will worry others will see it and stare. These are books you should read if you’re interested in being alive on earth. White or male or no, drug addict or no, gamer or no.” ―Ian Bogost, Los Angeles Times Review of Books
“There’s no one who writes quite like [Michael Clune]. . . .Gamelife is a spectacular accomplishment.” ―The New Republic
"Ultimately, however, the games serve as the framework with which he explores his childhood, not the other way around. The result is an unexpectedly aching exploration of growing up." ―Trevor Levin, The Harvard Crimson
"Clune’s work is an immersive tale of obsession from the virtual frontline." ―The Australian
“Many of the issues that [Gamelife] raises--the plight of the boy at the dawn of the Internet, trying to process suburbia, divorce, and alienation from would-be friends--have wider resonance. Clune never treats games as an escape but rather an entry into a heightened reality, an education, a creative stimulus, and a portal for self-discovery . . . [a] provocative book.” ―Kirkus Review
“[Gamelife] is an extremely well-written retrospective . . . [Clune] succeeds in not only sharing poignant memories but also confronting the rose-tinted glasses we tend to wear when discussing the past.” ―Lewis Parsons, Library Journal
“Along with his spot-on re-creations of childhood and adolescent conversations, Clune's wry observations about growing up in the 1970s and 1980s amid the burgeoning microcomputer revolution make his gamer memoir a standout.” ―Carl Hays, Booklist
“I highly enjoyed Gamelife-a beautiful, delightful, surreal, moving, intellectually shocking, vivid, and thrilling book about numbers and death, magic and despair, dimensions and middle school.” ―Tao Lin, author of Taipei
“I steal language and ideas from Michael W. Clune.” ―Ben Lerner, author of 10:04
“[Gamelife] feels definitive and memorable . . . Clune reminds us that we’re in a more important era than we realize, that these games are not for nerds but for explorers, that they’re not about beating the undefeated but besting yourself, seeing yourself in rhetorical fables, in binary operations with moralistic consequences. It’s Shakespearean in the same way that chess is philosophical.” ―Ben Siegel, The Buffalo News
“Michael W. Clune's Gamelife captures the wonder of being a child more durably than even the games he writes about. Gamelife is a book about the way games used to be: when demons were nothing more than a vaguely threatening cluster of blocks, and a dystopian future could play out in text alone. Inspired by the book, I downloaded an Apple IIc emulator and loaded up The Bard's Tale for the first time in twenty-five years . . . but it wasn't quite the same. I can replay and reenact by reinstalling-but I could only relive by reading this book.” ―Christian Rudder, founder of OkCupid and author of Dataclysm
“Michael W. Clune has written a brilliant and fiercely moving memoir that goes beyond mere nostalgia for the simpler days of MS-DOS. This is a book about human imagination and the ways in which it's nourished; it's about the metaphysics of role-playing, the poetics of 2-D space. Gamelife is a portrait of the artist as a young gamer, and like its predecessor, White Out, the book's ultimate power comes from its author's ability to render the mundane both terrifying and ecstatic through the kaleidoscopic filter of subjective experience.” ―Adam Wilson, author of Flatscreen and What’s Important Is Feeling
“In Gamelife, as in White Out, Clune combines banality, fear, and beauty in a way that is both original and disturbingly familiar. His memoirs read like the very best fiction.” ―Rae Armantrout, author of Just Saying
About the Author
Michael W. Clune is a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of the memoir White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin and of two scholarly books, American Literature in the Free Market and Writing Against Time.
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
"I need to be somewhere else."
By Rich Stoehr
There were many moments with a certain d�j� vu feeling as I read 'Gamelife,' but this sentence was the one that got me - the need and the desire to escape into a world created in the digital guts of a Commodore 64 sounded all too familiar. That was the one that told me that someone else got me. In many ways, with a few different games and a couple different twists, this could have been my story - and, I suspect, that of many who grew up in the same time and with the same influences.
'Gamelife' is a memoir of Michael Clune, a 1980's child, told through the lens of the computer games he played along the way. From Infocom's text-based adventure Suspended to the infamously-intricate role-playing game Might and Magic II, Clune hits on some true milestone games here, and how they interact with his life resonates through each page.
Do you remember? The knee-jerk fear of Satanism that could easily make your parents take away your copy of Bard's Tale II because it has some runes on the cover? The itch to go back into the pixelated corridors of Beyond Castle Wolfenstein to bomb Hitler again, and again, and again? The primitive renderings of stars and blocky moving shapes that somehow becomes the whole wide universe on the screen of Elite? The innate understanding of the free-market system (perhaps a little too free) that was revealed in Pirates!? And through all of it, the staccato rhythm of control: WAD [space], WAD [space], WAD [space].
I remember - even though some of the games were different, I remember. For me, it was Star Raiders rather than Elite, and it was the original Bard's Tale that sucked me in, rather than its sequel. Even so, in the words of Michael Clune's 'Gamelife,' I remember.
And even more resonant, even more familiar, are the events of Clune's life, interleaved with and built upon his explorations of computer games. Along the way, friends appear and fade, schools change, puberty rears its head, families move, parents fight, and siblings squabble. And somehow, from the first tentative explorations of Suspended to the blue-sky revelations of Might and Magic II, it all fits. Clune's understanding of life, and learning, and creativity was not stifled by his love of computer games - rather, these things grew from it. His instinct of knowing when to stop playing, his sense of history, his urge to build upon the worlds growing in his imagination - all stemmed from the games he played.
Why do we play these games, people wonder. Why do we shut ourselves in a room and lose ourselves in these digital worlds? Part of me never knows how to answer this question, but Michael Clune does. In 'Gamelife' he answers them with a clear voice and a unique perspective.
We play these games because it's how we learn and how we grow. And we play them because, sometimes, for a while, we need to be somewhere else.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
An immersive tale of obsession from the virtual frontline.
By Andrew McMillen
Michael W. Clune’s second memoir, 'Gamelife', explores his life between the ages of seven and 13 as he discovers computer games and swiftly becomes consumed by them. This is a fascinating book to contrast with 'Death by Video Game' by British author Simon Parkin, as Clune’s work is an immersive tale of obsession from the virtual frontline.
The narrow focus of this title seems to be quite a departure from Clune’s first memoir, 'White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin' (2013), which I have not yet read. It’s a curious stylistic decision for this middle-aged author to return to his childhood love of computers and text-based games — especially after writing about his experiences with the adult realm of illicit drugs — but it works very well.
I assume that significant creative licence has been taken with the reconstructed dialogue and scenes that Clune sets out across seven lengthy chapters — how many adults can reliably recall specific details of their early existence? — yet once this narrative conceit is accepted, 'Gamelife' is an engaging and enjoyable read. The author addresses this matter head-on early in the piece, when he writes of manually copying commands from a game manual line by line:
"No one remembers the first time they saw their mother. No one remembers the moment they first recognized that the thing in the mirror is me. But the generation of humans who were approximately seven years old when PC games first became widely available, we remember the first time we did something methodical."
The details are where this story sings, and Clune has a fine eye for the awkwardness of growing up as an unathletic child who frequently experiences social isolation. His sense of humour shines through, too: during a middle school basketball game, he writes of fantasising about taking a shot and “missing the basket by so much that the ball simply disappeared”. Later, he observes that 13 is “an awkward age. At 11 you want candy. At 15 you want beer. At 13 you want stolen candy.”
At the heart of the narrative are computer games, around which the young Clune’s life revolves. When he has access to them, he is thrilled by the seemingly infinite possibilities and challenges they offer his still-developing mind; when they are taken away from him, usually by his overbearingly religious mother he and dreams up schemes to obtain them.
The story takes a sharp, brief turn into Clune’s adult life around the halfway point, where he draws a line between an early experience with the primitive Nazi shooter Beyond Castle Wolfenstein in 1987 and his decision to invest months in playing its sequel, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, in late 2001, ostensibly while studying for a PhD. He then recounts the tale of becoming consumed by another World War II shooter, Call of Duty, in 2004, despite the warnings of his friends and professors.
“They did manage to plant an irrational fear that computer games were sucking my life dry instead of nourishing it,” he writes. “Deadening my brain instead of illuminating it. Burying facts under fiction. Life under fantasy.” Clune argues otherwise, of course; 'Gamelife' is itself an impassioned argument that playing games improved his life rather than ruining it. (He notes, however, that soon after he returned to the virtual battlefield in 2004, his girlfriend left him.)
A clear thinker and a skilled writer, Clune has thought deeply about why we play games, and he has come up with some worthy answers. “They teach us about the big things in a way nothing else can,” he writes. “They teach us about death, about character, about fate, about action and identity.” To his credit, the author shows rather than tells, and to pull these pithy quotes out of context does him something of a disservice.
Clune is concerned with much more than simply reminiscing about the part games played in his young life, however. Much of the narrative drive comes from his attempts to find and define his identity as a boy, and some of the most compelling scenes are those that describe his attempts to win and maintain friendships with a fickle collection of similarly aged boys who rarely want anything to do with games.
Set in the 1980s, the simplistic titles Clune first played — Suspended, Elite and Pirates! among them — have long since been superseded by immersive, graphics-intensive worlds, yet the details that he wrings out of his young memory are rich and illustrative.
Review first published in The Weekend Australian, October 3 2015: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/death-by-video-game-gamelife-dwell-on-virtual-obsessions/story-fn9n8gph-1227552513870
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Surprisingly Thought Provoking Story
By John Crowley
This book is extremely well written in such a way that it expounds and comments upon some of the most basic questions we face in our lives, including realism vs. utility and the aspects of life worth living for. A great, intellectually stimulating read!
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