(2022-11-18) Hon S13e20 What It Is Like To Be A Certain Kind Of Person

Dan Hone: s13e20: What It Is Like To Be A Certain Kind Of Person. (On Gabrielle Zevin‘s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.) When I was around 16 years old (which is strange, in my head I remember being younger), Microserfs, by Douglas Coupland, was published in the UK. Microserfs is one of my comfort books, alongside The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which, I’m afraid to admit, makes me a stereotype

I wanted to be them. I wanted to be those nerds who lived with those computers and had a network in their house and I ate that shit up

The thing about Microserfs

is that it took seriously the experience and interior life of what I suspect was at the time a relatively small number of people: people who had grown up with the personal computer revolution

were of that particular mix of introverted/problem-solving/world-creating personality and temperament to look at a computer and see: what worlds we could create with this.

There is a part of Zevin’s novel where the protagonists reflect on whether they were born at just the right time.

The thing that has absolutely wrecked me about Zevin’s novel is how much she has captured what it was like to grow up while the videogame industry grew up, what it was like to grow up in with a creative medium that was defining itself

And they say some people wonder, ineffectually, into the fucking void, whether videogames are art. Of course they were fucking art, he says

They were made by people trying to express something about the world and themselves whether they knew it or not and they communicated to their audience

Zevin’s is a novel where "ludonarrative dissonance" is casually tossed in, no heavy-handed explanation

Zevin is 45, I see, and that doesn’t surprise me at all, in some ways it makes me pleased and relieved that there is someone in my cohort who writes so achingly, beautifully and heartbreakingly well to describe, in a little way, what it is like to be me.

Three years ago I said that in the next few years, someone would write the High Fidelity of videogames, and by that I meant someone would write something that captures the zeitgeist of growing up with videogames not as a solitary pursuit but as something that’s a shared connection with an entire generation

Sam, Sadie and Marx are three particular people and they’re not, I don’t know, your stereotypical literary fiction people, whoever those people might be. At least, it doesn’t feel that way. These are people who explain their experience in the world in a way informed by the language of videogames in a way that I don’t know previous generations might have been able.

Were other people able to see life so easily through the lens of a game, was it so accessible to see life as a series of choices and that if this time, just this one time you could go back and reload and try again?

Why not make a world you could play with that you could pour your imagination in to. And what if you could share that feeling both of participation and creation with your friends.

There is no single player game, just in the same way that there is no single player and no single person. A single person, isolated, alone, is the most unimaginable torture and punishment we could inflict as a society.

I am talking about the play that we made with computers and the play that we made with each other.

When I read that Iain M. Banks played Civilization that was a connection that I had in a way I never thought I’d experienced when people talk about music together because I was right there with him at 3am in the morning

I would like to think that this isn’t just oh weren’t those days good but what would I know. All I know is that someone else wrote the story and more than any other time in my life, I read these characters and saw and felt so much.

Of course videogames are art. They always were.