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Other People’s Sandboxes: A Guest Post by The Memory Wall Author Lev AC Rosen
We all tell ourselves stories. From as early as we can understand narrative, we’re doing it. Just look at any kid with their stuffed animals, or imaginary friends. We give each plush hippo a personality, send it on adventures we can’t have, let it do things we can’t do, or deal with things we can’t deal with. As we grow, stuffed animals evolve into action figures or dolls—characters pre-made for us, with their own issues, in their own worlds, and who we can express ourselves through. More and more sandboxes emerge as we grow: books we can write fanfiction about, comic books and movies to theorize about, and video games we can play.
In fact, it’s the idea of video games, and how we use them to tell ourselves stories, that inspired my book The Memory Wall. I’m referring to open-world video games here, where the player has choices as to what the character does, rather than old-school shooters or platformers. Many games today are huge, fully realized worlds created to play in—literally called sandbox games. Minecraft is perhaps the most extreme example of this, but slightly more narrative games like Fallout and Elder Scrolls do it, too.
In The Memory Wall, I wanted to write a story about someone playing a video game, and through that game, watching them tell themselves a story. Especially a young person, at the age when the world is changing from one filled with possibilities to one limited by the reality they’re being told so constantly they have to face. I wanted to explore what it would be like to watch a kid tell their own story through the game—to see them reflect on what would happen in the separate “real life” sections within the fantasy of the game, where they got to be their character—where they got to tell their own story to themselves. That’s still what this book is: It’s Nick, telling himself the story of who he wants to be—what he wants his story to be—as his real world falls apart, and how that story saves him.
Where Nick can’t cope with his mother’s early-onset Alzheimer’s, can’t prove she’s been misdiagnosed, like he knows she has, and can’t rescue her from the home she goes to live in, Severkin, his in-game avatar, can rescue anyone. Nick feels helpless, but Severkin is never helpless. Seeing that interaction play out, I thought, could show the value of stories—the value of playing in other people’s sandboxes. Nick can tell himself the story of Severkin because Severkin is in another sandbox, another world where Nick is Severkin, and Severkin is everything Nick tells himself he could be. Watching Severkin deal with literal demons shows us how Nick wants to deal with his more metaphorical ones, and how, in fact, the former can help with the latter. This becomes even more extreme when Nick becomes convinced that another character in the game is his mother, playing online from the home. Whether Nick can save her and himself through the game is the story he tells himself. Of course, reality does determine how things end for him—his game can’t literally save the world. But it can help him figure out his story in the world, and that’s what I wanted to show—Nick telling his story how he wants it, and how that story helps him come to terms with his real story. Because we all tell ourselves stories—and even if they don’t come true, they still help us figure out who we are.
The Memory Wall is on shelves September 13.