"Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow"

[fiefoe]

I'm always a sucker for novels about collaborative creative endeavors (and computer games even more so), and as the protagnoists went to college around the same time as I, in the same state even, small wonder I found the first half of the book so captivating. Then melodrama crept in and I remembered that Gabrielle Zevin's previous "The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry" was pretty squishy and got worried -- luckily this one landed a lot better.

• Unless they were unreliable or clearly established as lunatics or scoundrels, characters in novels, movies, and games were meant to be taken at face value—the totality of what they did or what they said. But people—the ordinary, the decent and basically honest—couldn’t get through the day without that one indispensable bit of programming that allowed you to say one thing and mean, feel, even do, another.
• Sam looked at Sadie, and he thought, This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.
• She started walking toward the train, and Sam tried to figure out a way to make her stop. If this were a game, he could hit pause. He could restart, say different things, the right ones this time. He could search his inventory for the item that would make Sadie not leave...  Increasingly, all you needed was the desire to convert a person from a digital conjecture to the unruly flesh.
• His brain was treacherously negative.
• Sadie liked the phrase “an abundance of caution.” It reminded her of a murder of crows, a flock of seagulls, a pack of wolves. She imagined that “caution” was a creature of some kind—maybe, a cross between a Saint Bernard and an elephant.
• There was no one Sadie loved more than Alice, not her parents, not her grandmother. The world sans Alice was bleak, like a grainy photograph of Neil Armstrong on the moon,
• Although Sadie liked to be the player, there was a pleasure to watching someone who was a dexterous player—it was like watching a dance.
• “Dysentery.” Sadie didn’t feel like invoking cancer, the destroyer of natural conversation.
• have to break other parts of it to reset it,” Sam said. “They might have to cut it off. I can’t stand on it at all. I’ve already had three surgeries and it’s not even a foot. It’s a flesh bag, with bone chips in it.”
• Because lately, Sadie was almost always in trouble. It was impossible to be eleven, with a sick sister, and for people to find your conduct beyond reproach. She was always saying the wrong thing, or being too loud, or demanding too much (time, love, food), even though she had not demanded more than what had been freely given before.
• To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back
• “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.
  At the end of each visit, Sadie would stealthily present a timesheet to one of the nurses to sign. Most friendships cannot be quantified, but the form provided a log of the exact number of hours Sadie had spent being friends with Sam.
• But I can tell you that the people who give you charity are never your friends. It is not possible to receive charity from a friend.”.. Freda stroked Sadie’s hand. “Mine Sadie. This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.”
• Sadie didn’t know why she bothered. You would think women would want to stick together when there weren’t that many of them, but they never did. It was as if being a woman was a disease that you didn’t wish to catch.
• “I’ll tell you. The shooting mechanic has a lag. I can’t tell where the sights are aimed. And it doesn’t at all simulate the feeling of pulling back on a bow, as I’m sure you know. There’s no tension, and the heads-up display obscures more than it helps. It’s just a game with some pictures of a bow and a bullseye. It could be a game about anything, by anyone.
• Poetic fragments fell from the top of the screen and, using a quill that shot ink as it tracked along the bottom of the screen, the player had to shoot the fragments that added up to one of Emily Dickinson’s poems.
• You could make the bare number of parts required not to be detected by the Reich, or you could stop producing parts entirely. The player who did not ask questions, the Good German, would blithely get the highest score possible, but in the end, they’d find out what their factory was doing.
• “So, she knows about me?” Sadie asked. <> “Not in so many words, but she knows about the possibility of someone like you,” Dov said. “Don’t worry. There’s nothing shady about it.” ... Maybe she had been like the player in Solution. Maybe she hadn’t asked the right or enough questions because she hadn’t wanted to know the answers.
• But then, he called out one more time, “SADIE MIRANDA GREEN, YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY!”
  Sam could be ignored, but the childish shared reference could not be. It was an invitation to play.
• And cool girls definitely didn’t ask their lovers if they were planning to see their supposedly estranged wives over winter break... And to go from having no friends to having Dov as your friend was an intense experience. He was like a bright, warm light over everything in her life. She felt lit up, turned on. There was no one better to talk to about games.
• And so she’d be cool, because that’s what mistresses were. 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.
• Alice, like their grandmother, had a strong distaste for life’s inevitable gray areas.
• so he knew those four letters possessed profound, magical properties. “Cunt” could make a person disappear from your life forever, and he decided that indeed, this was what he wanted: to forget he had ever met Sadie Green and that he had ever been so pathetic and cretinous as to imagine she was his friend.
• She decided to send him an email, which she revised extensively. In the end, the revisions did not lead to a sparkling result: Hi Dov, Started playing Chrono Trigger. Some interesting elements there.
• She had forgotten she was wearing a dress, and now she felt sorry for the Sadie she had been an hour ago who had decided to objectify herself by wearing a dress.
• You’re a builder of worlds, and if you’re a builder of worlds, your feelings are not as important as what your gamers are feeling. You must imagine them at all times. There is no artist more empathetic than the game designer.” Sadie the gamer found this scene sexist and strange. At the same time, Sadie the world builder accepted that the game was made by one of the most creative minds in gaming.
• he ran his hand up and down her body, in an appraising way, like a farmer inspecting land he was about to sell. “I am going to miss you,” he said. “I am going to miss this.”
• Sam didn’t think it smelled like money, because money was dirty. It smelled rich and clean, like a hardcover from a bookstore, like Sadie herself.
• “Let her know you’re there. And if you can manage it, bring her a cookie, a book, a movie to watch. Friendship,” Marx said, “is kind of like having a Tamagotchi.”
• It was Marx who suggested the Glass Flowers. Sam had asked Marx for the most interesting place at Harvard... They were the answer to a problem: How do you preserve the impossible to preserve? Or, in other words, how do you stop time and death? ... What, after all, is a video game’s subtextual preoccupation if not the erasure of mortality?
• what struck her even more were the models the Blaschkas had made of decomposing fruits, their bruises and discolorations, in medias res, preserved for eternity.
• 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. And it is possible that, without Sam (or someone like him) pushing her through this period, Sadie might not have become the game designer she became.
• Other people’s parents are often a delight.
• The Great Wave is arguably the most famous Japanese artwork in the world, and in the 1990s, it was absolutely an MIT student housing staple, only slightly less ubiquitous than those Magic Eye prints that always left Sam so cold. The Great Wave depicts an enormous wave that dwarfs the other elements in the frame, three fishing boats and a mountain. The style is clean and graphic, befitting the fact that it was designed to be carved into a cherrywood block and infinitely reproduced.
• mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures... I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don’t exist in it... And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.
• It was the summer of the Olympics, the first Summer Olympics to be held in the United States in fifty years. The mood was hopeful and manic. Los Angeles, especially when taken from a distance, was not a beautiful city, but she could will herself to be beautiful, if only for two weeks. Beauty, after all, is almost always a matter of angles and resolve.
• With the child’s design squared away, Sadie was perfecting the child’s movements. She wanted the walk to feel buoyant and slightly out of control, like a baby duck trailing after its mother. In the design document that she and Sam had written: “The child’s body moves the way a body can move before it has felt or even encountered the idea of pain.” Oh, the ambitions of design documents!
• That said, Marx could not set foot in Harvard Square without running into an ex, and usually, that person was happy to see him. <> If Marx at twenty-two had a problem, it was that he was attracted to too many things and people.
• But the real weaknesses of Sadie’s engine did not become apparent until she was forced to make the storm.
  What is a storm? Sadie thought. It is water, and it is light, and it is wind. And it is how these three elements act on the surfaces they touch. How hard can that be?
• There is no purity in art. The process of how you arrive at something doesn’t matter at all.
• Marx hated him immediately: the leather pants, the tight black T-shirt, the heavy silver jewelry, the immaculate goatee, the eyebrows permanently in the shape of circumflexes, the topknot. “The poor man’s Chris Cornell,” Marx whispered, referencing the lead singer of the grunge band Soundgarden... It was, he felt, an aggressively male cologne, a roofie of a cologne.
• Zoe was a genius, Marx promised. As Sam would often tease him, “Marx never met a genius he didn’t want to sleep with.”
• she kept having to describe him. Enormous coat, badly cut curly hair, glasses, limp. A collection of flaws and infirmities. She was glad Sam didn’t have to hear her.
• 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.
• The freight must be proportioned to the groove.
• when he had woken up in the hospital with that broken ankle, he could remember thinking that the best thing about games is that they could be fairer than life. A good game, like Ichigo, was hard, but fair. The “unfair game” was life itself.
• Aaron Opus looked like he did all his shopping at the barn-sized western wear stores that dotted the road from the Austin airport...  “Real men wear at least three different kinds of dead animals.”
• Sadie felt a swelling of love and of worry for him—what was the difference in the end? It was never worth worrying about someone you didn’t love. And it wasn’t love if you didn’t worry.
• no one had ever looked more like a game-show host than this man. He was tanned and buttery, like a quality handbag; his hair had the color and rigidity of onyx; his teeth were enormous white rectangles. He gave the impression of being handsome without actually being handsome, and she could not begin to guess his age.
• In games, the thing that matters most is the order of things. The game has an algorithm, but the player also must create a play algorithm in order to win. There is an order to any victory. There is an optimal way to play any game. Sam, in the silent months after Anna’s death, would obsessively replay this scene in his head.
• If it was true, it was absolutely a betrayal. Sam had wanted what he wanted, and he hadn’t cared what it would mean for Sadie. He had wanted Ulysses, in the same way he had wanted the deal with Opus, in the same way he didn’t truly care if Ichigo was a boy, in the same way he let everyone in the world believe Ichigo was his game, in the same way he had renewed their friendship for the sole purpose of making a game in the first place.
• She never spoke of anything but work with him, and at work, they were, literally, in two separate worlds. They had a staff of twenty working on Both Sides, and days could pass without them needing to speak.
• She pulled her head to her knees, her head buried under the habit of her hair. “Everyone thinks Ichigo is about you, but it’s really about me.” “What do you mean?” “Ichigo is about a boy who has been lost at sea, but it’s also about a mother who has lost her child.
• And in the end, she had decided she preferred being his creative partner to being his lover. There were so many people who could be your lover, but, if she was honest with herself, there were relatively few people who could move you creatively.
• What a funny turn of phrase, she thought. Licking your wounds would only make them worse, no? The mouth was filled with so much bacteria. But Sadie knew it was easy to get addicted to the taste of your own carnage.
• he gave her a silk scarf with a reproduction of Cherry Blossoms at Night, by Katsushika Ōi, on it. The painting depicts a woman composing a poem on a slate in the foreground. The titular cherry blossoms are in the background, all but a few of them in deep shadow. Despite the title, the cherry blossoms are not the subject; it is a painting about the creative process—its solitude and the ways in which an artist, particularly a female one, is expected to disappear. The woman’s slate appears to be blank. “I know Hokusai is an inspiration for you,” Watanabe-san said. “This is by Hokusai’s daughter.
• It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through.
• Unfair called the reboot of Both Sides: The Mapleworld Experience, or Mapleworld for short. Although they had been able to employ many of the graphics, environments, sounds, and character designs of Mapletown, the work to transform it into an MMORPG had been more extensive than Sadie had thought. Sadie’s metaphor was that it was like buying a house you liked in a bidding war, and then moving that house to a different country by boat, and then once you got the house to the other country, deciding that you liked the materials the house was made from but not, in fact, the house itself, and then building an entirely new house after painstakingly disassembling the old house piece by piece.
• Because he loved Sadie. It was one of only a handful of things that he knew to be a constant about himself. The greatest pleasures of his life had been when he was by her side, playing or inventing. And how could she not feel that as well?
• Anyone who had truly looked at Tuesday could not have possibly seen a coyote. But the woman had not truly looked, and the injustice of this hit him. Why was it acceptable for apparently well-meaning people to see the world in such a general way? ..  then she said, annoyed, “You get that this is a story about you, right? That’s why you lost your mind at a dog park. You’re Tuesday. You’re the incredibly special dog that no one can classify.”
• “Despite everything that transpired at Unfair Games on December 4th, 2005, and despite evidence to the contrary, it is not an inevitability that we should be our worst selves behind the mask of an avatar. What I believe to my very core,” he concluded, “is that virtual worlds can be better than the actual world. They can be more moral, more just, more progressive, more empathetic, and more accommodating of difference.
• whenever she allowed herself to think of him as the kid from the hospital, her heart could not help but soften for him. It was easy to dislike the man; it was harder to dislike the little boy who existed just below the surface of the man.
• They flew to San Francisco on Tuesday morning. By the time they arrived at City Hall, the line stretched around the perimeter of the building and only grew longer as the day progressed. Despite the cold, damp weather, there was a low-key music festival vibe—not like Coachella, more like Newport Jazz—mixed with the giddy bureaucratic tension of a day in traffic court.
• and finally, the Master of the Revels, the man in charge of revels (and censorship) for the queen of England. Master of the Revels was part interactive mystery drama, part action-adventure game. Sadie had painstakingly re-created Elizabethan England, and in addition to murder and mystery, the game had a great deal of sex.
• Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?
• You have no weapons. You have lived an easy life that has required no defenses of any kind. Your privilege probably makes you reckless.
• You showed her what you had worked out on your laptop. “Our theoretical baby can’t be called Spreadsheet1.xls,” she commented. She retitled the spreadsheet “Green Watanabe Summer 2006 Game.”
• The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.
• He had needed a starting data point in order to calculate the total number of days of their friendship. Once he settled on the night they rehearsed Marx’s death, he determined the number to be 4,873 days, give or take. Sam normally took comfort in numbers, but he was disturbed by how paltry this particular number was, considering the presence Marx had maintained in his life. ... _Four thousand eight hundred seventy-three, Sam thought, the dollars in a seventeen-year-old’s bank account when he’s flush, twice the number of passengers on the Titanic, the population of a town where everyone knows each other, the inflation-adjusted cost of a laptop in 1990, the weight of a teenage elephant, six months or so more than the number of days I knew my mother.
• “Yes, in my mind, she did. I knew your mother so well I could play her part. The same with my own mother and my grandmother and my childhood best friend, Euna, who drowned in the lake by her cousin’s house. There are no ghosts, but up here”—she gestured toward her head—“it’s a haunted house.”
• By opening night, though, Marx had made peace with the decision. As he said to Sam, “If I’ve done the work in the scenes before I die, if I’ve made a real impression, they’ll feel me in the scenes I’m not in anyway.”
• “What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”
• she was moved to write a poem.
  In certain seasons, /We may be nourished by /The idea of the carrot /More than the carrot itself.
• “It is an imperfect trade, Dr. Daedalus,” Emily apologized. “I fear I’ve burdened you with an unequal portion of the work.”
  “There are no perfect trades,” Dr. Daedalus countered.
• “There is a pleasure to the joining of property as well, otherwise why would we all keep doing it? ‘Pleasure’ might be too strong a word. If not a pleasure, let us say an interest. It develops the plot.”
• “The algorithm.” Alabaster’s eyes darted around the room, as if they were being spied on, and then they lowered their voice. “You know, the unseen force, al-Khwarizmi, that guides all of our lives.”
• “And what is love, in the end?” Alabaster said. “Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?”
• emilybmarxx: You were trying to trap me?
  daedalus84: No, it wasn’t like that. After Marx’s death, I wanted to make things that reminded me of the old days, of you. I hoped you might join Pioneers, but I didn’t know if you ever would. And when I figured out that you were Emily B. Marks, I had to be your friend. You seemed so lonely. Living by yourself at the far reaches of Friendship.
• One of Sam’s innovations in Pioneers was the way a gamer could leave it. Sam hadn’t liked the way a gamer, even someone who’d inhabited Mapleworld for years, could just vanish...  When Sam built Pioneers, he expanded the category of Ceremonies to include Divorces, Wills, and Funerals.
• I am resentful of her constant deceit—she knows very well what she has done—but I shall always remember those evenings playing Go with great affection. When I came here, I was as drained of hearts as I have ever been, and the tedium of Friendship and the kindness of its non-strangers gave me life.
• At a certain age—in Sadie’s case, thirty-four—there comes a time when life largely consists of having meals with old friends who are passing through town.
• “So, Sam builds an MMORPG to lure one gamer? Brilliant. Crazy, but brilliant.”
  “No, he claimed he built the game because it reminded him of the games we played together when we were young.”
  “Farming and resource games are perennials.”
• “Thirty-four.”“You’re old enough to stop being so young. Only the young have such high standards.
• How to explain to Destiny that the thing that made her work leap forward in 1996 was that she had been a dervish of selfishness, resentment, and insecurity? Sadie had willed herself to be great: art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.
• The thing I find profoundly hopeful when I’m feeling despair is to imagine people playing, to believe that no matter how bad the world gets, there will always be players.”
• When the cabinet arrived in Cambridge, the machine was still functioning, but the high scores were wiped. Memory on those early machines could be volatile, even when they were supposedly non-volatile. The backup battery, if it had ever one, probably died long ago.
  When Dong Hyun’s machine loaded the now empty high scores screen, Sadie could still faintly see S.A.M. The score had stood so long, it had burned into the monitor.
• if you were one of my students, you’d be wearing your pain like a badge of honor. This generation doesn’t hide anything from anyone. My class talks a lot about their traumas. And how their traumas inform their games. They, honest to God, think their traumas are the most interesting thing about them. I sound like I’m making fun, and I am a little, but I don’t mean to be. They’re so different from us, really. Their standards are higher; they call bullshit on so much of the sexism and racism that I, at least, just lived with. But that’s also made them kind of, well, humorless... “If their traumas are the most interesting things about them, how do they get over any of it?” Sam asked.
  “I don’t think they do. Or maybe they don’t have to, I don’t know.”
• We wouldn’t have made Ichigo Japanese, because we would have worried about the fact that we weren’t Japanese. And I think, because of the internet, we would have been overwhelmed by how many people were trying to do the exact same things we were. We had so much freedom—creatively, technically. No one was watching us, and we weren’t even watching ourselves.