Why put off until Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, what you could read and be transformed by today? Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is at once a remarkable novel by Gabrielle Zevin and her love letter to the creative process. Only rather than being about music, like Daisy Jones & the Six, about the bohemian art life broadly, like Rent, or about writing itself, like most of 20th century literature, T3 is a book about people engaged in making and playing video games.
Some of the games are fictional, some are real–Mario Bros. plays an important role in the protagonists’ first meeting–but the characters and their relationships have the immersive quality of great games and other artistic media alike. They feel real to the reader, their actions ring true, their choices land with consequence. Developers Sam and Sadie, their producer Marx, and the rest of Zevin’s cast have much for us to learn along with them about life and art, and their story convincingly makes the case that games are integral to both in today’s interconnected yet desperately lonely world.
Even if we’re not normally inclined to judge a book by its cover, T3‘s is beautiful, trippy, and playful. It makes a great gift or book club selection, the marketing insists. Think of the Instas. True to the story’s contents, the title is both bright and ominous, and the art lets us know there will be many references to art old and new, east and west. The text is Shakespeare’s, but the font leaps out as from a neon marquee or hologram, while the image in the background is an almost pixelated detail of the famous Hokusai print The Great Wave. Mt. Fuji is just out of the frame, but we can see in the bottom corner the tail end of a boat about to face that wave’s force. In a way, the cover along with T3’s epigraph, an Emily Dickinson poem, “That Love is all there is,” says it all. Taking her line from one of the final speeches in Macbeth–the same speech from which Faulkner takes the title of The Sound and the Fury–it’s clear that Gabrielle Zevin is placing herself in some illustrious company. Like her main characters Sam and Sadie, who debate the place of games as commercial products and works of art as they collaborate and compete for sales and accolades, she has books to sell but also some bigger fish to fry.
To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back–I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love. (21)
Again, the story is doing a number of things on a number of levels, and the reader can take or leave that invitation to enter fully into T3‘s intricate intellectual play. On one level, it is the story of Sam and Sadie’s friendship and work struggles, their wins and losses. On another, it is a display of storytelling prowess and poetic imagery embedded in Zevin’s lively prose. The perspective shifts between characters, times, and frames of reality, imitating the fluid movement of gameplay while remaining focused on the beating heart of all fiction, the relationships between people. Amidst all this, though, there are also little epigrams and Easter eggs scattered throughout the book. For the student of game studies, or for anyone interested in seeing the world sub specie ludi (under the aspect of games) with or without academic jargon shadowing their thoughts, T3 has much to offer. Endless resonances with other literary works and authors, but also art, films, music, and video games, of course, both imaginary and real, reverberate across the pages. Readers will never run out of things to talk about or ways to connect the story of T3 to their own experiences, memories, and hopes of playing and designing games.
And yet very often, as in this case with the image of the dog rolling on its back, such musings on play and games are inseparable from the story of T3. On a second read, I noticed that this passage foreshadows one of the characters adopting a stray dog as part of coping with their own losses and traumas. Never purely academic or purely sentimental, events and language alike serve Zevin’s core themes of love, knowledge, hope, and vulnerability. So even if readers come in purely to be entertained, to enjoy the fiction and the writing, they’ll be invited to see play and games with fresh eyes. If, on the other hand, we pick up the book mainly to learn something about games’ imaginative potential, we’ll be left reflecting on much more holistic concerns like race, sex, class, and violence, and reckoning with our human frailties right there with Sam, Sadie, Macbeth, and Emily. The story of T3 is perfectly capable of carrying readers through without the language of play and examples of games making much of an impact, but that in itself effectively clinches the point that the creation of video games can occupy a place analogous to the crafting of any other work of art. It can be a passion or obsession with the best of them. T3 attests that games can be generative of and sustaining to our most important relationships, drawing us closer both to people we love and to the lofty goals of creative pursuits.
The novel is not without its flaws. For some readers, those sudden shifts in writing style and swerves in character arcs might not feel convincing. Reveals and twists of the plot might fall flat, or the evocation of game development might seem idealized. Dialogue might stretch credulity due to anachronisms. Affairs between students and professors might feel gross, and the main characters themselves wear us out with the contrivances of their on-again, off-again friendship. All this came up in discussions with other readers.
Since the book’s release, Zevin has been the subject of some controversy. Just like Sadie, who makes a Holocaust-inspired game for her seminar, the author has come under duress for her (invented) game Solution–not, as it was in the story, because of the content, but because she does not give sufficient attribution to her apparent real-world source for the idea, Brenda Romero’s Train. To my mind, the author’s inclusion of some of her sources in the book’s acknowledgements seems gratuitous, and chiding her for leaving one out, when she clearly left a great many unmentioned, seems somewhat arbitrary. If anything, Zevin appears to have assumed that Train, like most of what she put in the story, would be obvious enough with a reference. To explicitly credit Romero’s husband, of Doom fame, and not Romero herself, though, especially given the story’s interest in diverse voices in the industry, seems to be the sticking point.
Nevertheless, I find the book fascinating, well worth reading and rereading. I’m frankly jealous of Gabrielle Zevin’s accomplishment here, and I’m not even remotely responsible for inspiring any of the work that went into it, just happy to bask in the glow of her success secondhand, teaching my extension courses, fiddling with my essays and spelunking down rabbit holes. But I’d be lying if I pretended that I only ever want to study and discuss books and video games. Like many readers who have grown up in a world like the one she describes, my aspiration is to someday write a book like this, to make games like the ones she describes (if only in the form of imaginary games for my characters in-story). If I study them so closely, it’s partly to work up to, partly to defer the effort of trying to write my own.
I hope more books like T3 will be written and read widely, further establishing games in the mainstream of popular culture and among the ranks of classic art, and that the story of Sam and Sadie will lend encouragement to those writers and readers and players out there of all backgrounds and abilities waiting for their big break.
PIXEL PERFECT
Recommended
Wesley Schantz coordinates the Video Game Academy, writes about books and video games, and teaches in Spokane, WA.
