Gamelife

Title: Gamelife
Author: Michael W Clune
Memoir: 1699469
ISBN: 9780374536381
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2016
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Edition: Reprint
Number of Pages: 224
Section: Biography & Autobiography | Memoirs
Condition Note: New from the publisher
Publisher Description:

In telling the story of his youth through seven computer games, critically acclaimed author Michael W. Clune (White Out) captures the part of childhood we live alone.

You have been awakened.

Floppy disk inserted, computer turned on, a whirring, and then this sentence, followed by a blinking cursor. So begins Suspended, the first computer game to obsess seven-year-old Michael, to worm into his head and change his sense of reality. Thirty years later he will write: "Computer games have taught me the things you can't learn from people."

Gamelife is the memoir of a childhood transformed by technology. Afternoons spent gazing at pixelated maps and mazes train Michael's eyes for the uncanny side of 1980s suburban Illinois. A game about pirates yields clues to the drama of cafeteria politics and locker-room hazing. And in the year of his parents' divorce, a spaceflight simulator opens a hole in reality.