Early Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, one of the trio of main characters gives a fictional interview to a very real video game publisher. The troubled but passionate Samson Mazur tells the interviewer, “There is no act more intimate than play, even sex.” This is an explosive statement, but a perfect one in the context of a novel that cherishes the act of the play and keeps it sacred. In some ways, this is a thesis statement for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow itself: the novel opens your heart, and shows you what it really is.
Video games are rarely treated in the literature as a site of emotion, but in Zevin’s work they are the same landscape in which they play the full spectrum of relationships, sorrow and love. The world of video games is a surprisingly uncommon place for modern commercial or literary romance, despite the fact that they have long evolved from a children’s toy or a technological curiosity into a form of entertainment that is so mainstream that be ordinary.
In the award-winning Stephen Sexton collection of poetry, If All the World and Love Were Young, the structure is a direct reflection of the narrative and the physical journey through the Super Nintendo System classic, Super Mario World . Each piece in the job is named after, and directly in conversation with, a level in the game. The emotional core of the work is that it is an elegy for his mother: as we read the poems, we are immediately in the strange and pixelated world of the game, in Yoshi Island, in Donut Plains: but with Crucially, we are also in Sexton’s childhood, in front of his television, in his landscape. The discussion of video game terms such as “infinite lives” becomes richer and deeper when we take that language and put it back into our own navigation of loss. This requires readers to allow a technical term of video games to become poetic, transfer meaning and develop depth.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow also engages in this dissonance: in video games, death is simply part of games. When you die, start again. As the metaphors go, this very standard mechanism of video games becomes a profound confrontation.
Video games are much smaller than books, and we are just at the beginning of what can be done. Asked what she thought about where video games and literature relate to each other as a medium, Zevin said, “Video games are incredibly young. form – of course, much smaller than books, and we are only at the beginning of what can be done ”.
She’s right: the relative novelty of video games compared to romance is what really separates them, making their intersections more special, and rare. The first video games came out in the 1950s, long before the black and white home consoles that brought Pong into the living rooms in the 1970s. From that compelling single screen to the psychedelic, low-key touch of Candy Crush, or the rolling, emotional landscapes of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, or the delicate artistry and literary merit of Disco Elysium, video games must be an extraordinary distance both technologically and artistically in the 50 years from Pong. In contrast, the first Greek and Latin texts that can be considered prose novels date from the first century. Fifty years is a dot, a pixel, compared to the story of the book.
It may be that video games have much more in common with cinema, when it comes to their growth as an art form: about 50 years after the birth of the moving image in 1895, in 1941, the hearings were met with Citizen Kane. As of 2017, the Hollywood Reporter noted that the video game industry has been earning nearly three times as much as the movie industry.
We now see video games intersecting with television and film more regularly, but still, literature and poetry are on the other side of pity. Writers who raise this, like Zevin and Sexton, are drawing an important path. Ernest Cline’s willing, popular but highly divisive One Player certainly made progress in this gap in 2011, but Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow takes a more humane and elegant path through the gaming culture of the computer than the rather literal and dated feeling of Cline’s book. Tomorrow is a job about people playing games for a living, and making games for a living: not using the language of video games as a dressing set. Rather, the world of video games and video game development is just the landscape in which life plays out. This job doesn’t punish you for not knowing who Solid Snake is, or you’ve never played a farming simulator. Tomorrow is about love, above all, and if you lose a reference, you don’t feel it.
Waterstones head of fiction Bea Carvalho notes Tomorrow’s approach: it will surely encourage many readers to dust off the old consoles. But Zevin’s talent is such that pre-fandom is by no means a prerequisite, as she uses the art form as a prism through which she understands the political and technological scenario of the era and to explore identity, grief, mental health, success and failure, among many. other topics. “
The works of Sexton, Zevin and Cline are by no means the only books on video games, or the only works of art in which video games are central to the emotional arc. Alan Butler’s On Exactitude in Science, exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2017, presented Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi in a cinematic diction with his own reflective work: a framework recreation with a framework of the Reggio’s original shot inside the world of Grand Theft Auto 5. Back in 1979, long before Charlie Brooker’s Bandersnatch brought interactive history into modern homes via Netflix, Lynn’s installation Lorna Hershman Leeson invited viewers to participate in an interactive narrative using a remote control system, a television and a laser disc to choose their path. through a gruesome story about agoraphobia.
In nonfiction, Boss Fight Books have been publishing thin, considered volumes of personal essays and close-up studies of games since 2013, and perhaps are on their way to becoming the device’s Rough Trade Books. Each Boss Fight Book focuses closely on a single video game, and the author’s perspective on it, as well as the work’s history, from Earthbound to Goldeneye, reads closely not only the game but often the The writer’s life touched the game, too.
Video games have been crumbling at the edges of other art forms for almost as long as they have existed, and seeing them become the heart of novels like Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is Hope. Play is an intimate experience, as is the experience of reading literature and witnessing art – and this intimacy is what can unite them, and bring them closer together. Their past may be misaligned, but their tomorrow is full of promise.
