Video Games, Novels, and the Art of Story Telling: Gabrielle Zevin’s Guest Post on Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Hardcover
$21.99
$28.00
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)
Hardcover
$21.99
$28.00
Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before. Taking place over 30 years, this dazzling and intricately imagined novel by Gabrielle Zevin examines the nature of identity, disability, failure, and above all, our need to connect. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is one of our most anticipated books of the summer and we can’t wait for you to read it. For more, you can also tune into the Poured Over podcast as we discuss Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow with Gabrielle Zevin. Here, we find out from Gabrielle Zevin about video games, storytelling, and escapism.
Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before. Taking place over 30 years, this dazzling and intricately imagined novel by Gabrielle Zevin examines the nature of identity, disability, failure, and above all, our need to connect. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is one of our most anticipated books of the summer and we can’t wait for you to read it. For more, you can also tune into the Poured Over podcast as we discuss Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow with Gabrielle Zevin. Here, we find out from Gabrielle Zevin about video games, storytelling, and escapism.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is about storytelling, the lies we tell about ourselves, the difficulty of expressing love, the heartbreaking brevity of human lives, the struggle to connect, and video games. Or at least that’s what I’ve taken to saying over the last couple of months. I find my book hard to describe, so I leave it a bit vague: Yes, yes, it’s about all the big things! Trust me.
That said, the “video games” part does trip some people up. People, you see, have feelings about video games. They love them; they hate them. They think games are only for young people, and that Gamers, capital G gamers, connote a certain kind of person. But what I want to say to those people is that the first generation who played video games as children are now in their forties and fifties — the term is “geriatric gamer”! — and that even people who think they don’t game, game. Social media platforms are often game-based technologies. (Hearts on Instagram, are a rewards system, like coins in Super Mario. Discuss.) But the most important thing to know about video games is that, at their heart, video games are another form of storytelling.
The primal scene for Sam and Sadie, the main characters of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow occurs in a children’s hospital gaming room. Sam has been in a life-altering car accident, and he hasn’t spoken to anyone for weeks. Sadie is the neglected younger sibling of a sister with childhood leukemia. As children, Sam and Sadie come from different worlds — Sam is working class and lives on the east side of LA; Sadie is rich and lives on the west. And yet, through video games, these two thorny, bright people can connect. The book follows them for thirty years, and throughout their lives, they will play games for different reasons: to escape their bodies, to escape mortality, to inhabit (or create) a world that is fairer than the one they live in. Sometimes, they play when life becomes too much too bear. A game, like a novel, is a place where one might escape one’s trouble for a while.
There are other ways games are like novels, too. Video games have worlds, characters, and genres. They have narratives. (These narratives are sometimes upwards of sixty hours, and as intricate as a Russian novel.) Video games build on and speak to each other. They sometimes have morals. They might teach a player about history, art, farming, Greek mythology, urban planning, architecture, etc., etc. The references a video game is making is sometimes other video games, but as often as not, video game references are literary as well. I had to invent several games for my characters to create in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — the references for these games are a mix of game references and literary references. For example, Sadie’s game, EmilyBlaster, is based on the work of Emily Dickinson. Ichigo draws from Homer.
Some of you might have read my previous novel, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, which is about the way we use stories to connect with others and to make sense of our lives. I could use the same words to describe Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. For example, the title of the book derives from Macbeth’s act five soliloquy, which is one of the bleakest soliloquies in all of Shakespeare. Strangely, Marx, the character who invokes it in my novel, finds great hope in it—the idea that every day we are alive is a chance to start again—and also, a metaphor for video games with their infinite restarts and chances at redemption.
“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.”
In the end, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a book about games, but it’s really just a book about life—how very fleeting it is, and how rare it is to connect with a person, in play, or anywhere else.
Further Reading For People Who Love Video Games:
Fiction:
The Nix by Nathan Hill – A great novel overall, but it also has some incredibly memorable writing about MMORPGs.
Tell the Machine Goodnight by Katie Williams – A book that’s optimistic about technology and how people might use it to connect.
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu – Insightful about the way technology changes the experience of being human.
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern – Erin Morgenstern is a gamer, and I feel like Erin Morgenstern’s books often have a ludic and immersive quality to them.
Exhalation by Ted Chiang – Love this collection, but “The Life Cycle of Software Objects” kills me.
Non-Fiction:
The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green – A terrific read for how we make sense of life in the digital age. I also love that John Green takes on a subject that is near and dear to my heart, MarioKart.
Masters of Doom by David Kushner – An excellent and fast-paced account of the two boy geniuses who created the video game, Doom, in the 1990s. It’s non-fiction, but it reads like fiction.
Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs and Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson – two books about the difficulty of being a genius and a person.