The slightly ungainly title of Michael Clune’s new book, Gamelife, gives an indication of what an unusual cross-breed it is: at once an affecting memoir of a lonely midwestern childhood in the 1980s and an argumentative essay on how video games work and what they can mean. It is brief and passionate, driven by the conviction that its subject matter is both essential and too often overlooked. “When it comes to probing questions about their intimate life as computer-game players,” he writes near the end, in what amounts to a kind of backdoor manifesto, “most people don’t have much to say…. Society has convinced them that computer games are a trivial pastime and there’s no reason to think about them.”
[...] Clune’s book shows just how intense and intimate an engagement with video games can be. The book’s structure equates the passage of time with the passage from game to game—seven chapters cover both seven games and seven years of his life, fromSuspended (1983), a text-only adventure Clune plays as a seven-year-old, to Might and Magic II (1988), a fantasy role-playing game with 3-D graphics in which he takes refuge at thirteen, during the final months of middle school. [...]
Much of the book moves in counterpoint, alternating in short subchapters between exterior and interior, life and game, letting the two halves of Clune’s experience jostle against each other in unexpected ways. He writes of his first encounter with the 1983 game Ultima III: Exodus, a fantasy role-playing game in which the player controls several characters through an elaborate, complexly simulated fictional world (such games, descended from Dungeons and Dragons, tend to feature a lot of conversations, and a lot of numbers).
In Ultima III, the player’s “character was represented by a small blinking humanoid figure at the center” of “a flat map…a thing of unthinkable complexity…swiss-cheesed with dungeons and castles and cities.” The game leads eleven-year-old Clune to a kind of pixelated Zen state. “The map-based computer role-playing game is a spiritual device for separating action from ego,” Clune explains. “Freeing movement from the narrow prison of character.” He wanders his neighborhood for hours as darkness falls, lost in a reverie of the whole world as an immense, fantastical “map scroll[ing] beneath” his feet, terribly late for dinner, before getting picked up by the cops and brought back to his irate mother.
[...] It is 1989, and Clune is a few weeks from graduating from middle school. He has been suddenly and mysteriously ostracized by all his friends and classmates, has become almost literally “invisible,” someone “the others won’t look at.” He spends his free time pondering his isolation and playing Might and Magic II, a game of exploration, puzzle-solving, and combat set in a fantasy world. It is “full of the usual unicorns, goblins, and demons”—typical in fantasy games—but there is one aspect of it that is “genuinely new. It showed a 3-D view of the world.” Though other games “had attempted something similar,” only “Might and Magic II, with its sophisticated modeling of perspective and shading effects…incorporated an element of reality.”
Thirteen-year-old Clune is entranced, and disconcerted. “This 3-D,” he thinks, “it has something, something…effervescent.” (“I’d heard the word on a commercial for a new soda,” he interjects as an adult.) And then he realizes what it is: “Anywhere you went…you could always see the sky.” The sky in Might and Magic II is bright blue, with just the right scattering of puffy white clouds, and the game’s “weirdly low walls” meant that the sky is never blocked from view. As Clune observes, such a clean, lulling sky was “easy for even the relatively primitive graphics of late-eighties computer games to represent” because “the sky, as everyone knows, is the least realistic element of the real world.” From the Vikings, who “believed it to be the blue skull of a giant,” to medieval Christians, who “saw it as the veil of heaven,” to a miserable teenager spending his days alone, “it has always been easy for humans to believe the most fantastical things about the sky. To look up at the sky in the middle of a busy street is to be somewhere else.”