I read this podcast transcript a while back, where Jasmine Sun and Mills Baker “make the case for the novel”. In that section, they articulate a unique property of novels: by letting the reader inhabit a character's mind, the novel can foster empathy like no other medium. That section stuck with me because it put words to what I love about novels. I had felt this empathy for characters while reading novels but never recognized the connection to the medium.
Each medium has its own superpowers. Films, games, songs, novels; they all give artists expressive power along different avenues. Focusing on these affordances helps explain how audiences experience different creative works and has clarified how I interpret my own experiences.
I especially like the term affordance when discussing novels because it also encodes the agency that authors have. Novels can give a reader unparalleled insight into a character's inner world, but not all of them do. I've read my fair share of books following characters that stay opaque; it feels like they have arbitrary quirks instead of emergent traits.
Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed novels with opaque characters because those novels did other things well; beautiful prose, riveting narratives, and highly-considered world-building have made me a fan of one book or another. My favorites though, they lay bare a character's mind, showing me the emotions and experiences that drive their actions; they make interesting characters legible.
The first time I finished Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, I thought that I loved it for “normal” reasons. I liked the narrative and felt it was compulsively readable. But months later, I was still thinking about this novel and its characters. I loved getting to know Sadie and Sam by seeing their unfiltered thoughts and living their formative experiences. In the end, I came to understand these characters and why they live their lives the way they do; I couldn't help but love them, flaws and virtues together.
Building this deep understanding of the characters and their backgrounds elevated the narrative as well. Many events of the story felt like they were a natural consequence of these characters coming in contact, not just some contrived sequence. To me, this novel's core is how it explores the texture of friendship and partnership; it felt like the plot simply emerged from this exploration.
Over the years, Sam and Sadie share a complex and dynamic relationship, and the book pulls it off like few others do. They hold grudges, they don't communicate, they cross lines. But I'm not frustrated. I just understand.
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Many descriptions of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow say it's about video games. And sure, that's true in a shallow sense; the main characters spend their adult lives working on video games. However, I think that's the least important part of the description.
In his review of the novel, Tom Bissell wrote about “the unadorned realities of game-making” that are omitted; my read is that the parts that are more like running a business (producing, QA, marketing, and engineering come to mind) wouldn't elevate the novel and are rightfully cut. The novel focuses instead on the people that pour their souls into their work, the people that will games into existence.
I like framing the novel with this idea that the things we create are the most powerful expressions of our interiority, and I think that the novel illustrates this truth about creative outputs. I was moved by the way the designers' inner worlds came out in both their creative processes and their finished games.
To me, this novel could have been a love letter to any form of creative expression; if it was about filmmaking or writing instead, I bet it would hit just as hard. In some sense, it's a love letter to the act of creative expression. John Green puts it best when he says that “it's about art and how we make it and that just incredibly deep complex love that is shared between artistic collaborators.”
I don't believe that a love for video games is required to get something meaningful from this novel. At the same time, my love for this novel was evoked in part by how it reframed games for me. It could have been a love letter to any form of creative expression, but it's specifically a love letter to games.
Sam would later tell people that these mazes were his first attempts at writing games. “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.
As Dov was fond of saying to her, “You aren't just a gamer when you play anymore. 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.”
"...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 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. And if they can be, shouldn't they be?”
Reading lines like these broke down the “entertainment product” box I had implicitly placed games in; it nudged me to reflect on how meaningful a game could be to both its players and creators. It showed me another dimension of games that immediately resonated, one that inspired me to aim higher in games and life.
The games industry is a notoriously difficult sector to work in. In my experience, the people that manage to make a living developing games could have had very lucrative careers elsewhere. Their choice to work in a volatile, competitive, and comparatively under-compensated industry is a labor of love. Once I knew to look for it, I found this care and compromise incredibly moving.
Nowadays, I have a complicated relationship with games. I loved my internship working on an in-production game, but I work in a different industry now. I read and write and think about the expressive power of games, but I only play casually. I'm hopeful about returning to games, but sometimes I wonder, do I love them enough?
I'm not sure what my future holds anymore. But even if I never touch games again, the empathy, hope, beauty, and meaning I now see in game development will stay with me. I'll be searching for this meaning and empathy in everything I do. How could I settle for less?
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