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Gamelife: A Memoir
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 "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.
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 "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.
224 pages, Paperback
First published September 15, 2015
20 people are currently reading
998 people want to read
About the author
Michael W. Clune
8 books41 followersMichael Clune is the critically acclaimed author of the memoirs Gamelife and White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin. His academic books include A Defense of Judgment, Writing Against Time, and American Literature and the Free Market. Clune’s work has appeared in venues ranging from Harper’s Magazine, Salon, and Granta to Behavioral and Brain Sciences, PMLA, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His work has been recognized by fellowships and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, and others. He is currently the Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University and lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
Also writes as Michael Clune .
Also writes as Michael Clune .
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 85 reviews
November 11, 2016
If you are thirty-four and still playing a number of video games, then Gamelife: A Memoir might slow you down for a bit. To this I can personally attest: Overwatch agents went uncalled; Geralt of Rivia paused in his search for Ciri; Tokyo’s struggle fell silent in the shadow of Mikado.
If you are thirty-four and do not play computer games, Gamelife might help you understand what you, unaided, cannot. Your kids are heading to the Mulberry Street Public Library to play MineCraft after school, begging you for a Nintendo Switch, draining your iPhone battery to hatch a Pokemon egg; Why?
If your life doesn’t intersect with games, you have no cause to read Gamelife. There would be no connection to what you see on the page if you were to even bother.
No. I do not believe that. There are a thousand things I am not. There are a hundred books I have read that contain experiences far removed from my own. These books have given me glimpses of what it means to be someone else. To live a different life.
I do not know what it would be to read Gamelife without also having lived a life of meaningful games. Childhood is long, we have all shed potential lives that didn’t quite fit. Games fit me. The life I settled on, the one that Gamelife rips into the open air, is Secret of Mana; The way it felt to pull the rusty sword out of the stump, to be exiled from your village, to find the seeds, to revive the Mana tree. It was not the first game I loved, but it was the first game that no one else at school talked about or cared about. The first game that was just mine.
Gamelife puts you back there, if there exists as a place for you to return. Who can say what unsummoned memory might pierce you if Secret of Mana was instead filled with football practices or piano lessons? Game memories flood back not as diversion or waste but as hobby, habit, real experience. Your limited time on earth was spent non-frivolously, seeing and touching and being other than you.
Here is my request—read the following long excerpt. I won’t have so much to say after—no closing puns or clever tie-ins—so there isn’t much to gain by skimming it or jumping to its end. Simply read the whole thing and think about it for a minute or two or three:
It does not matter. Not yet, not until you read Gamelife. Then it will. Matter. Strike you. Both.
It should. It might. It must.
If you are thirty-four and do not play computer games, Gamelife might help you understand what you, unaided, cannot. Your kids are heading to the Mulberry Street Public Library to play MineCraft after school, begging you for a Nintendo Switch, draining your iPhone battery to hatch a Pokemon egg; Why?
If your life doesn’t intersect with games, you have no cause to read Gamelife. There would be no connection to what you see on the page if you were to even bother.
No. I do not believe that. There are a thousand things I am not. There are a hundred books I have read that contain experiences far removed from my own. These books have given me glimpses of what it means to be someone else. To live a different life.
I do not know what it would be to read Gamelife without also having lived a life of meaningful games. Childhood is long, we have all shed potential lives that didn’t quite fit. Games fit me. The life I settled on, the one that Gamelife rips into the open air, is Secret of Mana; The way it felt to pull the rusty sword out of the stump, to be exiled from your village, to find the seeds, to revive the Mana tree. It was not the first game I loved, but it was the first game that no one else at school talked about or cared about. The first game that was just mine.
Gamelife puts you back there, if there exists as a place for you to return. Who can say what unsummoned memory might pierce you if Secret of Mana was instead filled with football practices or piano lessons? Game memories flood back not as diversion or waste but as hobby, habit, real experience. Your limited time on earth was spent non-frivolously, seeing and touching and being other than you.
Here is my request—read the following long excerpt. I won’t have so much to say after—no closing puns or clever tie-ins—so there isn’t much to gain by skimming it or jumping to its end. Simply read the whole thing and think about it for a minute or two or three:
It’s not always easy to know when you’re ready for a new game. It’s like changing a habit. Let me explain. Most of what computer games do they do through habit. Computer games know that something that happens only once doesn’t mean much to humans. Once-in-a-lifetime events tend to bounce off us. We’re pretty hardened against rare occurrences. Blame evolution. If we changed our whole setup in response to every single new stimulus that came along, we’re never have gotten out of the swamps. Something that happens ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times. That kind of thing gets through to us. That kind of thing matters. Something that happens ten-thousand times? It penetrates our innermost layer. It becomes part of us.Do you see yourself there, reflection patina-warped but real? Does it mean anything to you, does WAD [space] strike your very core?
And that’s how computer games work. Everything that happens in a computer game happens ten thousand times. Because computer games mimic habit, they get through to us. They teach us about the big things in a way nothing else can. They teach us about death, about character, about fate, about action and identity. They turn insights into habits. The habits bore through our defenses. Computer games reach us.
And conversely. If an insight can’t be made into a computer game, it can’t reach us. It’s not for us. It’s not real. It’s not true. A lot of smart people have spent the past quarter century trying to turn any and every idea into a computer game. So there’s a good chance that all possible true ideas are already contained in the history of computer games. That the history of computer games is also a philosophical encyclopedia containing every important truth available to our species.
That’s my opinion, anyway. You think I wrote a book about computer games for fun? If I want fun, I’ll play a computer game.
But the same thing that makes WAD [space] such an effective pirate ship for exploring the seas of truth also makes it hard to know when you need a new computer game. I mean, the game has gotten into you. It’s just what you do. You don’t think about whether or not you want to do it. You do it. So it can be hard to know when a game has worn itself out in you.
Sometimes, of course, you’ll just get bored. The habit will no longer put you in touch with life-giving fun, with soul-sustaining truth. It’ll run dry. It’ll start to feel like Nintendo. Like unpaid work. When that happens, it’s obvious. Time for a new game.
Sometimes, though, it’s not so obvious. Sometimes you have to listen deep down into yourself. Listen. You’re not bored. The game is still fun. It’s still pretty fun. But if you listen deep down into yourself, down into the depths where WAD [space] is busy rearranging your senses...Wait. There’s something wrong.
What is it? It’s hard to put your finger on. Okay. Play like a doctor. Something feels wrong. What does it feel like, exactly?
I know what it feels like for me. But maybe it feels different for other players. I’ve done a little research.
Q. What makes you decide to stop playing a certain game?
A. I don’t know. I just get bored.
Q. But do you ever decide to stop playing a game when you’re not bored with it?
A. Sometimes, I guess. Sure. Sometimes.
Q. What makes you decide to stop?
A. I don’t know. I just get, I don’t know. I get tired of it?
Q. Tired of it. But not bored?
A. I guess.
Q. What does that feel like?
A. I don’t know! Jesus, Mike. It’s just a game, okay?
When it comes to probing questions about their intimate life as computer-game players, most people don’t have much to say. They’ve never thought about it. Or they’ve repressed it. Or they’ve forgotten. Or they’re embarrassed. Society has convinced them that computer games are a trivial pastime and there’s no reason to think about them. So when I talk about the feeling that let’s me know I’ve played a game too long, I can only speak for myself. Here goes.
It does not matter. Not yet, not until you read Gamelife. Then it will. Matter. Strike you. Both.
It should. It might. It must.
March 27, 2017
First the good. the author's descriptions of games that were very formative to me were certainly the highlights of the book. the rest of the book was a mishmash vignettes. but the main character was unlikable and inconsistent, as were those that surrounded him. Maybe that was the author's point. but it was so inconsistent that didn't care. Add to this, asides of faux-deep philosophy on the nature of 3D versus 2D, and other insipid thought bubbles. it's marketed as a memoir. I do believe the author played and love these games. I'm also sure that a few of the vignettes were inspired by real life situations. But by the end of the novel, I felt like I I had read someone's very first attempt at writing a book, poorly edited and throwing it on Amazon for a quick buck. it turns out that this was written by an English professor and it is his fourth book. so, I guess now I just have to seem this was just all pretentious bullshit. the fact that I finished it says more to my need of wanting to read about games that were formative to my growing up, otherwise I wouldn't have finished this at all. This is the first book in a long time that I could call a hateread. (one star, with an extra thrown in for the game choices.)
November 4, 2015
Oh, this had so much promise! Chapter One was exquisite, with gamelife and reallife paralleled so beautifully. The dialogue was elliptical, the turns of phrase sharp, the questions astute:
Chapter One circles around an early video game, Suspended, that is entirely language based. Maybe the difference for later chapters is that Suspended is a much more interesting game to read about than the others that Clune describes, though I did enjoy some of his later analysis. Plus, in Chapter One the most important secondary character is Cousin James, whose mother's insanity ties into the game, too, which heightens the significance of both reallife and gamelife as the narrator tries to unpack meaning in both. Unfortunately after Chapter One, the magic disappears, the quality of writing wanes, and the observations become more forced. I grew up on computer games, too, but much of what Clune wrote didn't resonate with me and read like vaguely half-baked aphorisms and false dichotomies ("If the sky is the principle of reality in the computer game, isn't it also the principle of unreality in our world?"). Alas.
ETA: But this game version of the book is pretty cool (mostly because, I must say, it resembles Suspended Ha!)
"That night I imagined myself lying on my bed. Then I took away my hands. Okay, I thought, now I can't feel the bedsheet. But I'm still a person. Then I took away my mouth. I can't talk now, I'm still a person. Then I imagined my ears closing in on themselves like flowers at night. No sounds, but I'm still a person. I took away my eyes. Now I couldn't see myself lying there. I couldn't feel myself in the bed. I couldn't hear anything. I'm a person, I thought. I am a person who can die one trillion times."
Chapter One circles around an early video game, Suspended, that is entirely language based. Maybe the difference for later chapters is that Suspended is a much more interesting game to read about than the others that Clune describes, though I did enjoy some of his later analysis. Plus, in Chapter One the most important secondary character is Cousin James, whose mother's insanity ties into the game, too, which heightens the significance of both reallife and gamelife as the narrator tries to unpack meaning in both. Unfortunately after Chapter One, the magic disappears, the quality of writing wanes, and the observations become more forced. I grew up on computer games, too, but much of what Clune wrote didn't resonate with me and read like vaguely half-baked aphorisms and false dichotomies ("If the sky is the principle of reality in the computer game, isn't it also the principle of unreality in our world?"). Alas.
ETA: But this game version of the book is pretty cool (mostly because, I must say, it resembles Suspended Ha!)
September 30, 2017
Over the past 15 years, “nerd culture” has become pretty popular. People are able to make livings by streaming video games, even the biggest normies have their own theories on how Game of Thrones will end (to be honest, I hope the white walkers win), and there are more superhero movies than most people know what to do with. For better or worse, nerd culture has kind of just become...culture, and more and more people are willing to embrace their inner nerd. That is what Michael W. Clune is cashing in on here, and based on its description, Gamelife seemed pretty appealing: an examination of games, primarily “computer” games from the 80s, and the cross section they shared with the more tumultuous moments of the Clune’s early life. And at it’s best it does this pretty well. Clune makes a handful of interesting observations about how games contrast with and relate to real life (my favorite bit was when he dove into the question of what 490 points of damage would look like), but for every solid example, there are at least twenty vaguely pretentious and off base observations where Clune waxes poetic about a depth that doesn’t really exist.
What is most frustrating about this memoir is that while it seemingly boasts itself as a celebration of nerd culture, it doesn’t really have a good understanding of what it is. Admittedly, I grew up a decade after Clune, and it is safe to say that his nostalgia is not my nostalgia, placing me far from the target demographic for this work. However, there are a handful of things he talks about that I am very familiar with, and it seems like there is always something slightly off about those topics, which makes me question the credibility of a lot of the stuff he says in the book. So, please bear with me as I push up my glasses and “well actually” this memoir for a minute.
Clune spends a fair bit of time talking about Dungeons and Dragons, and he makes statements as if he is knowledgeable on the topic, but based on his description of D&D, it is clear that he hasn’t ever really played. I’m sure he has sat down at a table with the books, rolled some dice, and talked in a funny voice for a minute (he mentions an instance of this in the memoir), but it really seems like he never got past the surface level. He starts off the memoir by showing a clear interest and desire to play the game, but he winds up demonizing it in the same ways that people have been doing...well, since D&D came out. He goes on a tirade about how when playing with friends, the relationships friends have with each other eventually fade away and are lost forever as players become enraptured with the fantasy world. It pretty much implies that playing Dungeons and Dragons with friends will eventually lead to those friendships ending because players will no longer care or be interested in the people they started playing the game with. Really?! I have been running D&D with friends for a long while (amazingly we are all still friends), and while I'd like to think I have created a pretty engaging and immersive setting for them to adventure around in, they’ve never been so lost that they forget who they (or the people around them) are, because, like, they are normal people and their brains are powerful enough to distinguish the difference between fantasy and reality. Also, the idea of losing track of the reasons you're friends with somebody because of the game is so far from any experience I have had with D&D. Honestly, I find myself admiring the friends I play D&D with in new and exciting ways every time we play. I have witnessed creativity and empathy that I don’t think I would have seen without the pretense of the game.
Clunes’ view of people who play D&D is essentially the same as the general public’s view for the past 30 years (which has actually been changing recently because, somehow, D&D is now cool): a bunch anti-social mouthbreathers who only serve to irritate each other. In an attempt to celebrate computer games inspired by D&D, Clune undersells and misunderstands their source material. He uses things that sound close to being right, and they probably do seem right to someone who hasn’t played, but for those who have, it is kinda goofy. Like, he mentions rolling a 17 and failing to cast a fireball spell and then rolling a 3 and casting it successfully, but the fireball spell doesn’t need a roll to be cast in 1st Edition D&D (or any edition of D&D); when a player says they cast it, it is just cast. Even if it did need a roll to be cast, higher rolls always lead to success and lower rolls lead to failure, so his description is backwards (and yes, in case you were wondering, I do hate myself for writing these last few sentences). My point is that stuff like this only shows a surface level understanding and it begs the question of why he wouldn’t do research on, ya know, how it actually works. Clune does this same thing in a later section when talking about the first Call of Duty title, wherein he describes the objective of the final mission of the game: kill Hitler. But that’s not the final mission; it’s not even an actual mission in the game. Later on he also makes digs at Nintendo for only having games about plumbers, despite the fact that the NES had a ton of titles in the same vein as his beloved computer roleplaying games. Yes, these are all nitpicks, but they add up to show that Clune either did not do his research or he shifted reality to better fit his narrative. And, like, sure. I get that, but it makes this memoir seem watered down. It is the kiddy pool of nerd culture, the Big Bang Theory of memoirs. Shallow and a blurry reflection of what nerds are actually like.
Maybe he nails it with the games he actually grew up playing. I don’t really know because I have little to no experience with them. This book may really work for people who adored these games in the 80s, but from my perspective, the entire book comes off as a guy who enjoyed video games a fair bit as a kid, and whether or not he is an expert on the games that he spent countless hours playing, he writes as if he is an expert on all games.
He’s not.
The book is not awful. It has a handful of sweet and sad stories that reflect childhood in all of its messy light, but the majority of connections he makes between his interesting life and games are tenuous at best. He aims to find existential meaning in every game from his childhood, but the fact of the matter is that it’s just not that deep, bro.
What is most frustrating about this memoir is that while it seemingly boasts itself as a celebration of nerd culture, it doesn’t really have a good understanding of what it is. Admittedly, I grew up a decade after Clune, and it is safe to say that his nostalgia is not my nostalgia, placing me far from the target demographic for this work. However, there are a handful of things he talks about that I am very familiar with, and it seems like there is always something slightly off about those topics, which makes me question the credibility of a lot of the stuff he says in the book. So, please bear with me as I push up my glasses and “well actually” this memoir for a minute.
Clune spends a fair bit of time talking about Dungeons and Dragons, and he makes statements as if he is knowledgeable on the topic, but based on his description of D&D, it is clear that he hasn’t ever really played. I’m sure he has sat down at a table with the books, rolled some dice, and talked in a funny voice for a minute (he mentions an instance of this in the memoir), but it really seems like he never got past the surface level. He starts off the memoir by showing a clear interest and desire to play the game, but he winds up demonizing it in the same ways that people have been doing...well, since D&D came out. He goes on a tirade about how when playing with friends, the relationships friends have with each other eventually fade away and are lost forever as players become enraptured with the fantasy world. It pretty much implies that playing Dungeons and Dragons with friends will eventually lead to those friendships ending because players will no longer care or be interested in the people they started playing the game with. Really?! I have been running D&D with friends for a long while (amazingly we are all still friends), and while I'd like to think I have created a pretty engaging and immersive setting for them to adventure around in, they’ve never been so lost that they forget who they (or the people around them) are, because, like, they are normal people and their brains are powerful enough to distinguish the difference between fantasy and reality. Also, the idea of losing track of the reasons you're friends with somebody because of the game is so far from any experience I have had with D&D. Honestly, I find myself admiring the friends I play D&D with in new and exciting ways every time we play. I have witnessed creativity and empathy that I don’t think I would have seen without the pretense of the game.
Clunes’ view of people who play D&D is essentially the same as the general public’s view for the past 30 years (which has actually been changing recently because, somehow, D&D is now cool): a bunch anti-social mouthbreathers who only serve to irritate each other. In an attempt to celebrate computer games inspired by D&D, Clune undersells and misunderstands their source material. He uses things that sound close to being right, and they probably do seem right to someone who hasn’t played, but for those who have, it is kinda goofy. Like, he mentions rolling a 17 and failing to cast a fireball spell and then rolling a 3 and casting it successfully, but the fireball spell doesn’t need a roll to be cast in 1st Edition D&D (or any edition of D&D); when a player says they cast it, it is just cast. Even if it did need a roll to be cast, higher rolls always lead to success and lower rolls lead to failure, so his description is backwards (and yes, in case you were wondering, I do hate myself for writing these last few sentences). My point is that stuff like this only shows a surface level understanding and it begs the question of why he wouldn’t do research on, ya know, how it actually works. Clune does this same thing in a later section when talking about the first Call of Duty title, wherein he describes the objective of the final mission of the game: kill Hitler. But that’s not the final mission; it’s not even an actual mission in the game. Later on he also makes digs at Nintendo for only having games about plumbers, despite the fact that the NES had a ton of titles in the same vein as his beloved computer roleplaying games. Yes, these are all nitpicks, but they add up to show that Clune either did not do his research or he shifted reality to better fit his narrative. And, like, sure. I get that, but it makes this memoir seem watered down. It is the kiddy pool of nerd culture, the Big Bang Theory of memoirs. Shallow and a blurry reflection of what nerds are actually like.
Maybe he nails it with the games he actually grew up playing. I don’t really know because I have little to no experience with them. This book may really work for people who adored these games in the 80s, but from my perspective, the entire book comes off as a guy who enjoyed video games a fair bit as a kid, and whether or not he is an expert on the games that he spent countless hours playing, he writes as if he is an expert on all games.
He’s not.
The book is not awful. It has a handful of sweet and sad stories that reflect childhood in all of its messy light, but the majority of connections he makes between his interesting life and games are tenuous at best. He aims to find existential meaning in every game from his childhood, but the fact of the matter is that it’s just not that deep, bro.
December 28, 2015
I definitely grew up with videogames. My father had an Intellivision, and I must have played hours of Night Stalker when I was much too young to figure it out. I grew up in a Nintendo family, and, while I still play games today, they're not nearly as important to the day to day as they once were.
Gamelife is a memoir, for sure, but surrounding a number of games during Clune's childhood and the situations that defined them. His experiences with Wolfenstein, with The Bard's Tale, with some of his less-than-savory ways of procuring the games, it's one of those books that would read well as fiction if it wasn't clearly real.
It's a real nostalgia trip, even though he was a little ahead of me time-wise. His memories of these games reminded me of summers with Quake or the really bizarre day job I did at age 13 that allowed me to buy Diablo later that night. Definitely worth reading if video games are a major part of your life or were a part of your childhood, but it's a fun read regardless as a different slice of 1970s/1980s life.
Gamelife is a memoir, for sure, but surrounding a number of games during Clune's childhood and the situations that defined them. His experiences with Wolfenstein, with The Bard's Tale, with some of his less-than-savory ways of procuring the games, it's one of those books that would read well as fiction if it wasn't clearly real.
It's a real nostalgia trip, even though he was a little ahead of me time-wise. His memories of these games reminded me of summers with Quake or the really bizarre day job I did at age 13 that allowed me to buy Diablo later that night. Definitely worth reading if video games are a major part of your life or were a part of your childhood, but it's a fun read regardless as a different slice of 1970s/1980s life.
September 20, 2015
Here's the NPR All Things Considered interview with Clune about his book: http://www.npr.org/2015/09/13/4392334...
0:44 to 1:21 has Ultima III music in the background. :)
0:44 to 1:21 has Ultima III music in the background. :)
June 10, 2017
I became an instant fan of Michael W. Clune when I read his sensational first memoir, WHITE OUT, which is dark and intense and, at times, very funny, despite its subject: heroin addiction.
I wouldn't have bet that I'd love Clune's second memoir, GAMELIFE, as much, but I do. It's about his obsession with video games in the 1980s, but it's about way more than that: family, bullying, middle school, death, the universe, what's real and not real. Clune is a fantastic storyteller with a unique voice—and a very funny one (his disdain for Nintendo and Super Mario is hilarious). I said this after I read WHITE OUT and I'll say it again here: Clune is the closest, at the sentence level, to Denis Johnson. He knocks you off your chair with descriptions and metaphors that can only emerge from within a true artist who sees the world slightly askew, i.e. truly.
Other than Atari, which Clune would certainly consider child's play, I didn't get much into video games in the 1980s. I don't get them—at all. I'm not interested in them—at all. And yet I couldn't have been more interested in this wonderful book.
If you really want a great reading experience, read both of Clune's memoirs back to back: WHITE OUT and then GAMELIFE. One is about heroin addiction, the other about video games and middle school, but together they make a single memoir; it's especially interesting to read GAMELIFE already knowing the turn Clune's life will eventually take (his eventual drug addiction is referenced in GAMELIFE only a few times, subtle winks to readers of WHITE OUT).
Clune is officially one of my favorite writers, period.
I wouldn't have bet that I'd love Clune's second memoir, GAMELIFE, as much, but I do. It's about his obsession with video games in the 1980s, but it's about way more than that: family, bullying, middle school, death, the universe, what's real and not real. Clune is a fantastic storyteller with a unique voice—and a very funny one (his disdain for Nintendo and Super Mario is hilarious). I said this after I read WHITE OUT and I'll say it again here: Clune is the closest, at the sentence level, to Denis Johnson. He knocks you off your chair with descriptions and metaphors that can only emerge from within a true artist who sees the world slightly askew, i.e. truly.
Other than Atari, which Clune would certainly consider child's play, I didn't get much into video games in the 1980s. I don't get them—at all. I'm not interested in them—at all. And yet I couldn't have been more interested in this wonderful book.
If you really want a great reading experience, read both of Clune's memoirs back to back: WHITE OUT and then GAMELIFE. One is about heroin addiction, the other about video games and middle school, but together they make a single memoir; it's especially interesting to read GAMELIFE already knowing the turn Clune's life will eventually take (his eventual drug addiction is referenced in GAMELIFE only a few times, subtle winks to readers of WHITE OUT).
Clune is officially one of my favorite writers, period.
April 28, 2023
Clune's writing is powerful and evocative, and it was enough to earn this otherwise annoying book a second star. I dislike memoirs in which the narrative voice is constantly making grand delusional statements about How The World Works -- just because Clune thinks that everyone hates the people they play D&D with does not, in fact, make it so. Still, the writing carried me on, and I kept reading, waiting to see what Clune was doing; surely the very off-kilter 'I' of his text was Clune-the-writer intentionally portraying Clune-the-character as blinkered and blinded. I was not demanding resolution or an epiphany, but I wanted some sign that the author had more vision than the person he was writing, that the child of the 80s had changed in becoming the man who wrote about him.
And then I came to this:
With that breaking of the wall, that assertion that the 'I' of the book is meant to align with the 'I' of the writer, I realised what had been bothering me for the entire book -- Clune really does believe that the experience of being a white middle-class man is the sum total of human knowledge, history and experience. It can't be possible, Clune thinks, that anyone has any truth that isn't already in the corpus of computer games created by mostly-white mostly-American men. There are no experiences that are unlike his; nothing matters except for the things he already knows. And it goes further than that; throughout the entire book the other people in it are just actors upon a stage, characters who interfere with the 'I' or refuse to understand him or withhold the affection he wants or infuriate him by not knowing what's inside his mind -- they are not actual people with their own lives, thoughts, dreams, feelings, they are just obstacles or props or tools. No wonder the 'I' of the text seems off-kilter -- he has absolutely no clue anyone else in the world really exists, or if he does know he doesn't care enough about it to put it into his writing. And this is annoying not just for ideological reasons but because it makes for a boring, navel-gazing, ultimately unsatisfying piece of work that does nothing to bring home Clune's supposed point. Computer games really are fascinating and fun, and they really can be wonderful, amazing tools for learning about ourselves, the world around us, and other people -- and Clune thinks (or says he thinks) this is what he is writing about, but the actual work he created suggests the opposite, that computer games provided him with a rationale to be That Guy who prides himself on his logic and rationality while being awful to everyone around him. I hope that is not who he is, but the book left such a bad taste in my mouth, I doubt I will read anything else by him.
And then I came to this:
A lot of smart people have spent the past quarter century trying to turn any and every idea into a computer game. So there’s a good chance that all possible true ideas are already contained in the history of computer games. That the history of computer games is also a philosophical encyclopedia containing every important truth available to our species.
That’s my opinion, anyway. You think I wrote a book about computer games for fun? If I want fun, I’ll play a computer game.
With that breaking of the wall, that assertion that the 'I' of the book is meant to align with the 'I' of the writer, I realised what had been bothering me for the entire book -- Clune really does believe that the experience of being a white middle-class man is the sum total of human knowledge, history and experience. It can't be possible, Clune thinks, that anyone has any truth that isn't already in the corpus of computer games created by mostly-white mostly-American men. There are no experiences that are unlike his; nothing matters except for the things he already knows. And it goes further than that; throughout the entire book the other people in it are just actors upon a stage, characters who interfere with the 'I' or refuse to understand him or withhold the affection he wants or infuriate him by not knowing what's inside his mind -- they are not actual people with their own lives, thoughts, dreams, feelings, they are just obstacles or props or tools. No wonder the 'I' of the text seems off-kilter -- he has absolutely no clue anyone else in the world really exists, or if he does know he doesn't care enough about it to put it into his writing. And this is annoying not just for ideological reasons but because it makes for a boring, navel-gazing, ultimately unsatisfying piece of work that does nothing to bring home Clune's supposed point. Computer games really are fascinating and fun, and they really can be wonderful, amazing tools for learning about ourselves, the world around us, and other people -- and Clune thinks (or says he thinks) this is what he is writing about, but the actual work he created suggests the opposite, that computer games provided him with a rationale to be That Guy who prides himself on his logic and rationality while being awful to everyone around him. I hope that is not who he is, but the book left such a bad taste in my mouth, I doubt I will read anything else by him.
August 22, 2015
"I need to be somewhere else."
There were many moments with a certain déjà vu feeling as I read Gamelife, but this sentence was the one that got me - the need and the desire to escape into a world created in the digital guts of a Commodore 64 sounded all too familiar. That was the one that told me that someone else got me. In many ways, with a few different games and a couple different twists, this could have been my story - and, I suspect, that of many who grew up in the same time and with the same influences.
Gamelife is a memoir of Michael Clune, a 1980's child, told through the lens of the computer games he played along the way. From Infocom's text-based adventure Suspended to the infamously-intricate role-playing game Might and Magic II, Clune hits on some true milestone games here, and how they interact with his life resonates through each page.
Do you remember? The knee-jerk fear of Satanism that could easily make your parents take away your copy of Bard's Tale II because it has some runes on the cover? The itch to go back into the pixelated corridors of Beyond Castle Wolfenstein to bomb Hitler again, and again, and again? The primitive renderings of stars and blocky moving shapes that somehow becomes the whole wide universe on the screen of Elite? The innate understanding of the free-market system (perhaps a little too free) that was revealed in Pirates!? And through all of it, the staccato rhythm of control: WAD [space], WAD [space], WAD [space].
I remember - even though some of the games were different, I remember. For me, it was Star Raiders rather than Elite, and it was the original Bard's Tale that sucked me in, rather than its sequel. Even so, in the words of Michael Clune's Gamelife, I remember.
And even more resonant, even more familiar, are the events of Clune's life, interleaved with and built upon his explorations of computer games. Along the way, friends appear and fade, schools change, puberty rears its head, families move, parents fight, and siblings squabble. And somehow, from the first tentative explorations of Suspended to the blue-sky revelations of Might and Magic II, it all fits. Clune's understanding of life, and learning, and creativity was not stifled by his love of computer games - rather, these things grew from it. His instinct of knowing when to stop playing, his sense of history, his urge to build upon the worlds growing in his imagination - all stemmed from the games he played.
Why do we play these games, people wonder. Why do we shut ourselves in a room and lose ourselves in these digital worlds? Part of me never knows how to answer this question, but Michael Clune does. In Gamelife he answers them with a clear voice and a unique perspective.
We play these games because it's how we learn and how we grow. And we play them because, sometimes, for a while, we need to be somewhere else.
There were many moments with a certain déjà vu feeling as I read Gamelife, but this sentence was the one that got me - the need and the desire to escape into a world created in the digital guts of a Commodore 64 sounded all too familiar. That was the one that told me that someone else got me. In many ways, with a few different games and a couple different twists, this could have been my story - and, I suspect, that of many who grew up in the same time and with the same influences.
Gamelife is a memoir of Michael Clune, a 1980's child, told through the lens of the computer games he played along the way. From Infocom's text-based adventure Suspended to the infamously-intricate role-playing game Might and Magic II, Clune hits on some true milestone games here, and how they interact with his life resonates through each page.
Do you remember? The knee-jerk fear of Satanism that could easily make your parents take away your copy of Bard's Tale II because it has some runes on the cover? The itch to go back into the pixelated corridors of Beyond Castle Wolfenstein to bomb Hitler again, and again, and again? The primitive renderings of stars and blocky moving shapes that somehow becomes the whole wide universe on the screen of Elite? The innate understanding of the free-market system (perhaps a little too free) that was revealed in Pirates!? And through all of it, the staccato rhythm of control: WAD [space], WAD [space], WAD [space].
I remember - even though some of the games were different, I remember. For me, it was Star Raiders rather than Elite, and it was the original Bard's Tale that sucked me in, rather than its sequel. Even so, in the words of Michael Clune's Gamelife, I remember.
And even more resonant, even more familiar, are the events of Clune's life, interleaved with and built upon his explorations of computer games. Along the way, friends appear and fade, schools change, puberty rears its head, families move, parents fight, and siblings squabble. And somehow, from the first tentative explorations of Suspended to the blue-sky revelations of Might and Magic II, it all fits. Clune's understanding of life, and learning, and creativity was not stifled by his love of computer games - rather, these things grew from it. His instinct of knowing when to stop playing, his sense of history, his urge to build upon the worlds growing in his imagination - all stemmed from the games he played.
Why do we play these games, people wonder. Why do we shut ourselves in a room and lose ourselves in these digital worlds? Part of me never knows how to answer this question, but Michael Clune does. In Gamelife he answers them with a clear voice and a unique perspective.
We play these games because it's how we learn and how we grow. And we play them because, sometimes, for a while, we need to be somewhere else.
October 3, 2016
Starts off well (the first chapter really shines) and contains some interesting observations about maps, 2D vs 3D, and child labor. Also a fairly quick read, and more interesting than my own memoir from ages 8 to 13 would probably be.
In each chapter, the author uses a video game experience to focus on a particular portion of his young life. This is very well done in the first chapter (Suspended) and less so later on. The cover (an allusion to text-based adventure games) is also quite catchy. In the Wolfenstein chapter, he jumps out of context and gives an approximation of his later years, which may or may not be chronicled in his first published memoir, White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin. This and the overall dark demeanor of his Catholic school upbringing is not easy to read.
A five star beginning and a two star finish.
In each chapter, the author uses a video game experience to focus on a particular portion of his young life. This is very well done in the first chapter (Suspended) and less so later on. The cover (an allusion to text-based adventure games) is also quite catchy. In the Wolfenstein chapter, he jumps out of context and gives an approximation of his later years, which may or may not be chronicled in his first published memoir, White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin. This and the overall dark demeanor of his Catholic school upbringing is not easy to read.
A five star beginning and a two star finish.
November 24, 2015
All those that played computer games in 80's and early 90's will relate to this book.
December 24, 2018
(click the image below to watch the video review)
Imagine a world without spoken language. No words. No thoughts expressed as a series of interpretable sounds. And instead, people communicated in the language of game logic.
A sunset wouldn't be beautiful. Rather, it would be a numerical advantage over a lesser sun position. The pride you feel when watching your son take his first step, that’s not pride anymore. That’s just a couple of digits increased on a mobility stat.
This is the world that Michael W. Clune inhabits in his memoir, Gamelife.
Watch the entire review by clicking the image above or following this link.
Imagine a world without spoken language. No words. No thoughts expressed as a series of interpretable sounds. And instead, people communicated in the language of game logic.
A sunset wouldn't be beautiful. Rather, it would be a numerical advantage over a lesser sun position. The pride you feel when watching your son take his first step, that’s not pride anymore. That’s just a couple of digits increased on a mobility stat.
This is the world that Michael W. Clune inhabits in his memoir, Gamelife.
Watch the entire review by clicking the image above or following this link.
October 6, 2015
Michael W. Clune’s second memoir, 'Gamelife', explores his life between the ages of seven and 13 as he discovers computer games and swiftly becomes consumed by them. This is a fascinating book to contrast with 'Death by Video Game' by British author Simon Parkin, as Clune’s work is an immersive tale of obsession from the virtual frontline.
The narrow focus of this title seems to be quite a departure from Clune’s first memoir, 'White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin' (2013), which I have not yet read. It’s a curious stylistic decision for this middle-aged author to return to his childhood love of computers and text-based games — especially after writing about his experiences with the adult realm of illicit drugs — but it works very well.
I assume that significant creative licence has been taken with the reconstructed dialogue and scenes that Clune sets out across seven lengthy chapters — how many adults can reliably recall specific details of their early existence? — yet once this narrative conceit is accepted, 'Gamelife' is an engaging and enjoyable read. The author addresses this matter head-on early in the piece, when he writes of manually copying commands from a game manual line by line:
No one remembers the first time they saw their mother. No one remembers the moment they first recognized that the thing in the mirror is me. But the generation of humans who were approximately seven years old when PC games first became widely available, we remember the first time we did something methodical.
The details are where this story sings, and Clune has a fine eye for the awkwardness of growing up as an unathletic child who frequently experiences social isolation. His sense of humour shines through, too: during a middle school basketball game, he writes of fantasising about taking a shot and “missing the basket by so much that the ball simply disappeared”. Later, he observes that 13 is “an awkward age. At 11 you want candy. At 15 you want beer. At 13 you want stolen candy.”
At the heart of the narrative are computer games, around which the young Clune’s life revolves. When he has access to them, he is thrilled by the seemingly infinite possibilities and challenges they offer his still-developing mind; when they are taken away from him, usually by his overbearingly religious mother he and dreams up schemes to obtain them.
The story takes a sharp, brief turn into Clune’s adult life around the halfway point, where he draws a line between an early experience with the primitive Nazi shooter Beyond Castle Wolfenstein in 1987 and his decision to invest months in playing its sequel, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, in late 2001, ostensibly while studying for a PhD. He then recounts the tale of becoming consumed by another World War II shooter, Call of Duty, in 2004, despite the warnings of his friends and professors.
“They did manage to plant an irrational fear that computer games were sucking my life dry instead of nourishing it,” he writes. “Deadening my brain instead of illuminating it. Burying facts under fiction. Life under fantasy.” Clune argues otherwise, of course; 'Gamelife' is itself an impassioned argument that playing games improved his life rather than ruining it. (He notes, however, that soon after he returned to the virtual battlefield in 2004, his girlfriend left him.)
A clear thinker and a skilled writer, Clune has thought deeply about why we play games, and he has come up with some worthy answers. “They teach us about the big things in a way nothing else can,” he writes. “They teach us about death, about character, about fate, about action and identity.”
To his credit, the author shows rather than tells, and to pull these pithy quotes out of context does him something of a disservice.
Clune is concerned with much more than simply reminiscing about the part games played in his young life, however. Much of the narrative drive comes from his attempts to find and define his identity as a boy, and some of the most compelling scenes are those that describe his attempts to win and maintain friendships with a fickle collection of similarly aged boys who rarely want anything to do with games.
Set in the 1980s, the simplistic titles Clune first played — Suspended, Elite and Pirates! among them — have long since been superseded by immersive, graphics-intensive worlds, yet the details that he wrings out of his young memory are rich and illustrative.
Review first published in The Weekend Australian, October 3 2015: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/...
The narrow focus of this title seems to be quite a departure from Clune’s first memoir, 'White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin' (2013), which I have not yet read. It’s a curious stylistic decision for this middle-aged author to return to his childhood love of computers and text-based games — especially after writing about his experiences with the adult realm of illicit drugs — but it works very well.
I assume that significant creative licence has been taken with the reconstructed dialogue and scenes that Clune sets out across seven lengthy chapters — how many adults can reliably recall specific details of their early existence? — yet once this narrative conceit is accepted, 'Gamelife' is an engaging and enjoyable read. The author addresses this matter head-on early in the piece, when he writes of manually copying commands from a game manual line by line:
No one remembers the first time they saw their mother. No one remembers the moment they first recognized that the thing in the mirror is me. But the generation of humans who were approximately seven years old when PC games first became widely available, we remember the first time we did something methodical.
The details are where this story sings, and Clune has a fine eye for the awkwardness of growing up as an unathletic child who frequently experiences social isolation. His sense of humour shines through, too: during a middle school basketball game, he writes of fantasising about taking a shot and “missing the basket by so much that the ball simply disappeared”. Later, he observes that 13 is “an awkward age. At 11 you want candy. At 15 you want beer. At 13 you want stolen candy.”
At the heart of the narrative are computer games, around which the young Clune’s life revolves. When he has access to them, he is thrilled by the seemingly infinite possibilities and challenges they offer his still-developing mind; when they are taken away from him, usually by his overbearingly religious mother he and dreams up schemes to obtain them.
The story takes a sharp, brief turn into Clune’s adult life around the halfway point, where he draws a line between an early experience with the primitive Nazi shooter Beyond Castle Wolfenstein in 1987 and his decision to invest months in playing its sequel, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, in late 2001, ostensibly while studying for a PhD. He then recounts the tale of becoming consumed by another World War II shooter, Call of Duty, in 2004, despite the warnings of his friends and professors.
“They did manage to plant an irrational fear that computer games were sucking my life dry instead of nourishing it,” he writes. “Deadening my brain instead of illuminating it. Burying facts under fiction. Life under fantasy.” Clune argues otherwise, of course; 'Gamelife' is itself an impassioned argument that playing games improved his life rather than ruining it. (He notes, however, that soon after he returned to the virtual battlefield in 2004, his girlfriend left him.)
A clear thinker and a skilled writer, Clune has thought deeply about why we play games, and he has come up with some worthy answers. “They teach us about the big things in a way nothing else can,” he writes. “They teach us about death, about character, about fate, about action and identity.”
To his credit, the author shows rather than tells, and to pull these pithy quotes out of context does him something of a disservice.
Clune is concerned with much more than simply reminiscing about the part games played in his young life, however. Much of the narrative drive comes from his attempts to find and define his identity as a boy, and some of the most compelling scenes are those that describe his attempts to win and maintain friendships with a fickle collection of similarly aged boys who rarely want anything to do with games.
Set in the 1980s, the simplistic titles Clune first played — Suspended, Elite and Pirates! among them — have long since been superseded by immersive, graphics-intensive worlds, yet the details that he wrings out of his young memory are rich and illustrative.
Review first published in The Weekend Australian, October 3 2015: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/...
October 21, 2015
Have you ever felt like you were reading about yourself in an alternate universe? Because I have. I’m certainly younger than Clune. Instead of Suspended, Elite, and Might and Magic II I had Spyro the Dragon, Pokemon: Silver and Battlefront II. Regardless, I haven’t ever resonated with a book as much as I did Gamelife. Michael Clune’s memoir about games, his childhood, and how they are really one and the same is a pyrotechnic display of language and distilled emotion. It’s extremely relevant to many adults and young adults like me who were raised with games as their primary companions, and have had to deal with criticisms of the medium as a waste of time.
What adult-who-was-a-game-gorged-kid can’t relate to that?
However, relatability is not what is great about this book. Clune marks segments of his life with the games he played during them. Instead of writing of games as the type of escapism that causes kids to miss out on the finer points of life, Clune writes about games as the type of escapism that makes life beautiful. In viewing his childhood through the filter of video games, the surreal parallels of fantasy, reality, and self-discovery are excitedly shown off to the reader and made deliciously palpable despite the sometimes bizarre language and imagery.
Being a fan of anything surreal as well as video game related, Gamelife was an absolute joy for me to read. But though there was a bountiful selection of segments that made me grow teary-eyed because of nostalgia for gaming or for emotions of my own childhood, some parts of the book didn’t quite hold up as well for me. I loved the subtle parallels between the tyrannical teachers and Clune’s mother. I didn’t quite love the way the parallels between gaming and reality were sometimes shoved down my throat. It was often done well, but on a few occasions, I could myself pulling back from the otherwise immersive story and thinking “okay, okay, I get it.” There’s also the fact that some of Clune’s observations and recollections about his experience – considering they were from a young age – were at times too detailed, too eerily appropriate, to the point of feeling uncannily like pure fiction. I will admit, I have read little to no memoirs prior to this, so it may just be my slight misunderstanding of how it works. I didn’t find it hard to suspend my disbelief, regardless.
As much as I want to say otherwise, I wouldn’t recommend Gamelife to everyone. Its surrealism and flowery narration that approaches stream of consciousness at times means memoir readers who are looking for something wholly grounded in the physical realm will be severely out of their element.
That being said, anyone who appreciates games as a medium should read this book. As should anyone who wants to understand how people can become so infatuated with and attached to them. Because, for some people, games have taught them more about life than living in it ever will.
“These were things that my parents’ generation never learned at all. Yet I experienced the primary feelings of an immortal before I experienced sexual feelings. It frightened my mother to death.”
What adult-who-was-a-game-gorged-kid can’t relate to that?
However, relatability is not what is great about this book. Clune marks segments of his life with the games he played during them. Instead of writing of games as the type of escapism that causes kids to miss out on the finer points of life, Clune writes about games as the type of escapism that makes life beautiful. In viewing his childhood through the filter of video games, the surreal parallels of fantasy, reality, and self-discovery are excitedly shown off to the reader and made deliciously palpable despite the sometimes bizarre language and imagery.
Being a fan of anything surreal as well as video game related, Gamelife was an absolute joy for me to read. But though there was a bountiful selection of segments that made me grow teary-eyed because of nostalgia for gaming or for emotions of my own childhood, some parts of the book didn’t quite hold up as well for me. I loved the subtle parallels between the tyrannical teachers and Clune’s mother. I didn’t quite love the way the parallels between gaming and reality were sometimes shoved down my throat. It was often done well, but on a few occasions, I could myself pulling back from the otherwise immersive story and thinking “okay, okay, I get it.” There’s also the fact that some of Clune’s observations and recollections about his experience – considering they were from a young age – were at times too detailed, too eerily appropriate, to the point of feeling uncannily like pure fiction. I will admit, I have read little to no memoirs prior to this, so it may just be my slight misunderstanding of how it works. I didn’t find it hard to suspend my disbelief, regardless.
As much as I want to say otherwise, I wouldn’t recommend Gamelife to everyone. Its surrealism and flowery narration that approaches stream of consciousness at times means memoir readers who are looking for something wholly grounded in the physical realm will be severely out of their element.
That being said, anyone who appreciates games as a medium should read this book. As should anyone who wants to understand how people can become so infatuated with and attached to them. Because, for some people, games have taught them more about life than living in it ever will.
November 12, 2016
brilliant. funny, sad and illuminating. probably the best book i ever read on growing up with the video games.
January 14, 2016
holy hell is this beautiful. i never, ever expected when picking this up that i'd be so pulled into a world i thought i knew nothing about. transcendental, vivid, visually stunning. best memoir for a long time for a multitude of reasons.
November 28, 2015
Part memoir, part meditation, great writing. I really want to go back and replay Suspended and Ultima now, but I'm glad I never have to be 13 again.
February 13, 2016
Leuk, maar alleen als je 35/40 bent en vroeger een Commodore64 had.
January 15, 2018
A great read. I enjoyed it very much.
April 9, 2021
*Spoilers below*
As an avid gamer and someone who has taught on the subject, I hunted down Clune's book because I was ravenous for more personal insight into the meaning of video games. Sadly, this memoir fell short. Though sporting moments of genuine humor and reflection on earlier computer titles, I ultimately found Clune—or, more likely, the fictionalized version of himself he crafted for this work—to be too cynical, arrogant, and pseudo-philosophical to offer much meaningful insight into games as a medium. As another reviewer here has pointed out, our narrator makes grand statements about D&D that anyone who has played it would take serious issue with. Mario is dismissed as an insipid drain on others' intelligence and, oddly, as a representation of child labor. There's a moment where he labels those who do not play games precisely how the developers intended as "losers" and then, a sentence later, as "animals." In short, the book is riddled with the sort of gate-keeping interpretations of games I thought we'd left behind in the 90s, a feeling that no doubt exists due to the memories being mostly unfiltered through the mind of his past self, but without the benefit of an adult Clune commenting on these views. Chapter One held great promise, but as the readings of these games grew more narrow and their meanings more ambiguous—a great deal of this reads like someone working hard to make these experiences sound deeper than they likely were—I became convinced that this was someone's first attempt at writing a book. Imagine my shock when I realized that Clune is a professor and critically acclaimed author, with his first memoir, White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin, being chosen as a Best Book of 2013 by The New Yorker. I can't speak to his other texts, but this one doesn't live up to those standards.
What holds up better than the book's philosophical reading of these games is Clune's reminiscence of a difficult and often very depressing childhood, from tip-toeing around a newly divorced mother to struggling with his entire, eighth grade class ignoring him. However, these moments were not enhanced by the descriptions of the games he was playing at the time (or vice versa) in any way that I expect Clune wanted to achieve, simply because he rarely overtly connects the two in any meaningful way. For example, in the final chapter he links his difficulty working out a code in Might and Magic II with his simultaneous struggle to decipher a cryptic phrase uttered by one of the popular kids... but then ends the book before unpacking either, or even informing the reader of whether he failed at both. More significantly, the book is filled with thematical threads that our never touches on, likely due to that limiting choice to write primarily through the perspective of his child self. The middle chapters quite obviously point to an addition to video games—a young Clune attempts to steal money for the latest title, as a young adult he stares at what's on offer at a Best Buy under the guise of looking for a washer, struggles to finish his dissertation with games as a distraction, jumps at errands that mean he can look at more games before forgetting what he went out for, forces himself to play despite being quite ill with the flu, and we are told that his girlfriend left soon after this incident for otherwise unnamed reasons—yet for all of these details, they're never drawn together under any sort of commentary: about Clune himself, about games, or preferably both. Instead, we're given a loosely connected series of highly subjective memories and left to navigate their importance with only a potentially unreliable narrator as a guide. An interesting exercise, perhaps, and certainly a memoir, though not one that I felt fulfilled the expectations I (and likely others) had for it.
As an avid gamer and someone who has taught on the subject, I hunted down Clune's book because I was ravenous for more personal insight into the meaning of video games. Sadly, this memoir fell short. Though sporting moments of genuine humor and reflection on earlier computer titles, I ultimately found Clune—or, more likely, the fictionalized version of himself he crafted for this work—to be too cynical, arrogant, and pseudo-philosophical to offer much meaningful insight into games as a medium. As another reviewer here has pointed out, our narrator makes grand statements about D&D that anyone who has played it would take serious issue with. Mario is dismissed as an insipid drain on others' intelligence and, oddly, as a representation of child labor. There's a moment where he labels those who do not play games precisely how the developers intended as "losers" and then, a sentence later, as "animals." In short, the book is riddled with the sort of gate-keeping interpretations of games I thought we'd left behind in the 90s, a feeling that no doubt exists due to the memories being mostly unfiltered through the mind of his past self, but without the benefit of an adult Clune commenting on these views. Chapter One held great promise, but as the readings of these games grew more narrow and their meanings more ambiguous—a great deal of this reads like someone working hard to make these experiences sound deeper than they likely were—I became convinced that this was someone's first attempt at writing a book. Imagine my shock when I realized that Clune is a professor and critically acclaimed author, with his first memoir, White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin, being chosen as a Best Book of 2013 by The New Yorker. I can't speak to his other texts, but this one doesn't live up to those standards.
What holds up better than the book's philosophical reading of these games is Clune's reminiscence of a difficult and often very depressing childhood, from tip-toeing around a newly divorced mother to struggling with his entire, eighth grade class ignoring him. However, these moments were not enhanced by the descriptions of the games he was playing at the time (or vice versa) in any way that I expect Clune wanted to achieve, simply because he rarely overtly connects the two in any meaningful way. For example, in the final chapter he links his difficulty working out a code in Might and Magic II with his simultaneous struggle to decipher a cryptic phrase uttered by one of the popular kids... but then ends the book before unpacking either, or even informing the reader of whether he failed at both. More significantly, the book is filled with thematical threads that our never touches on, likely due to that limiting choice to write primarily through the perspective of his child self. The middle chapters quite obviously point to an addition to video games—a young Clune attempts to steal money for the latest title, as a young adult he stares at what's on offer at a Best Buy under the guise of looking for a washer, struggles to finish his dissertation with games as a distraction, jumps at errands that mean he can look at more games before forgetting what he went out for, forces himself to play despite being quite ill with the flu, and we are told that his girlfriend left soon after this incident for otherwise unnamed reasons—yet for all of these details, they're never drawn together under any sort of commentary: about Clune himself, about games, or preferably both. Instead, we're given a loosely connected series of highly subjective memories and left to navigate their importance with only a potentially unreliable narrator as a guide. An interesting exercise, perhaps, and certainly a memoir, though not one that I felt fulfilled the expectations I (and likely others) had for it.
August 13, 2018
A slow, rambling memoir structured around the video games that gave structure to his life throughout the early 80s and into the 90s. I was familiar with some of them, but only had actual playing experience with two (Might & Magic and Pirates). Even if I didn't much care about some of the specific games, the games themselves are merely codes for Clune to discuss more universal feelings and experiences (loneliness, regret, etc).
I have my own games associated with carefree youth. I remember in preschool watching the older kids battle in Super Smash Bros on the Nintendo 64. When I was about 7, my cousins handed us down their old Sega Genesis and several games, including the bright, speedy, all-time classic Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and I struggled to make it through the underwater portions of the second level. I remember coming home from elementary school and beating Shining Force, finally knocking down Dark Dragon for the first time with my party of adventurers as the sun set outside. We never had much money for new consoles in the early 2000s, but I would go over to my friend's house and play his Gamecube and PS2. In my teenage years, I remember wandering through the massive realm of Vvardenfell in Morrowind and spending my senior year putting in over 100 hours beating Final Fantasy XII.
I've always found it interesting how much nostalgia plays into our affection for certain games, as they become so closely associated with periods of our lives and memories. I regularly go back and play retro games from past generations, but the magic is not always there and I don't think it can be recovered. A lot of times, you just "had to be there." Will the same affection for the games of this current generation exist in future decades? Who knows? This melancholy book ultimately left me pondering my own "gamelife." Interesting.
I have my own games associated with carefree youth. I remember in preschool watching the older kids battle in Super Smash Bros on the Nintendo 64. When I was about 7, my cousins handed us down their old Sega Genesis and several games, including the bright, speedy, all-time classic Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and I struggled to make it through the underwater portions of the second level. I remember coming home from elementary school and beating Shining Force, finally knocking down Dark Dragon for the first time with my party of adventurers as the sun set outside. We never had much money for new consoles in the early 2000s, but I would go over to my friend's house and play his Gamecube and PS2. In my teenage years, I remember wandering through the massive realm of Vvardenfell in Morrowind and spending my senior year putting in over 100 hours beating Final Fantasy XII.
I've always found it interesting how much nostalgia plays into our affection for certain games, as they become so closely associated with periods of our lives and memories. I regularly go back and play retro games from past generations, but the magic is not always there and I don't think it can be recovered. A lot of times, you just "had to be there." Will the same affection for the games of this current generation exist in future decades? Who knows? This melancholy book ultimately left me pondering my own "gamelife." Interesting.
December 24, 2017
This slender volume is subtitled "a memoir about computer games," but the word "about" is a misnomer. It's a memoir of a hazy, indefinite span in the author's early adolescence when he played video games—but the games serve not as the subject but as a form of punctuation dividing one set of biographical incidents from the next.
As biography, it's pretty weak tea. The author's apparent goal is not to illuminate childhood experiences with adult insight, but to recapture the feeling of childhood in the fuzzy, indistinct way it is actually experienced by a (relatively comfortable, middle-class, American) kid. At times, the withholding of adult judgment is charming: for example, the author's mother (it must be said) is clearly a bit of a mess; but kids seldom notice things like that, and her portrait in the book is endearingly sympathetic.
More often, though, the author's decision to forgo any thoughts that would not have occurred to an eleven-year-old leaves the narrative confused and flat. The recurring references to video games ultimately don't add much structure to the disjointed, shambolic litany of otherwise unconnected events. Those looking for deeper meanings will likely come away unsatisfied; this is a story of puzzles unsolved, lessons unlearned, and games unfinished.
The prose, although often workmanlike, lurches toward the purple from time to time. What are we to make of a sentence like, "The ancient, primitive mollusk suction-and-release of our orifices gives our words breath and makes our thoughts go," except that the author's expressive talents just weren't up to the task of conveying the thoughts he was having at that moment?
As biography, it's pretty weak tea. The author's apparent goal is not to illuminate childhood experiences with adult insight, but to recapture the feeling of childhood in the fuzzy, indistinct way it is actually experienced by a (relatively comfortable, middle-class, American) kid. At times, the withholding of adult judgment is charming: for example, the author's mother (it must be said) is clearly a bit of a mess; but kids seldom notice things like that, and her portrait in the book is endearingly sympathetic.
More often, though, the author's decision to forgo any thoughts that would not have occurred to an eleven-year-old leaves the narrative confused and flat. The recurring references to video games ultimately don't add much structure to the disjointed, shambolic litany of otherwise unconnected events. Those looking for deeper meanings will likely come away unsatisfied; this is a story of puzzles unsolved, lessons unlearned, and games unfinished.
The prose, although often workmanlike, lurches toward the purple from time to time. What are we to make of a sentence like, "The ancient, primitive mollusk suction-and-release of our orifices gives our words breath and makes our thoughts go," except that the author's expressive talents just weren't up to the task of conveying the thoughts he was having at that moment?
November 20, 2023
i didn't know much about this book before starting it. i was expecting a narrative of a life spent designing games or working in the field - maybe something industry-adjacent but still steeped in coding or promotion. this is absolutely not that book. what we have is a philosophical, ruminative and often oddly lyrical look back at an unhappy childhood, little understood at the time and turned over like a stone in a tumbler ever since. the "game(s)" in Gamelife is the framing device through which to see it, both for the author as a child and for the reader now.
he's older than i am by a small margin, thus the selection of games and animus toward consoles isn't exactly a match. however the escapism most certainly resonates. at one point he describes a swords & sorcery game as being compelling due to the sense of triumph it instills, something an eleven year old doesn't often feel - bang on with that. the sense of reality through imagination is felt. the prose is at times very colorful and equally dull in places, which felt purposeful.
Clune's obsession with the primacy of numbers whiffed with me but you can absolutely feel the child in him, and his need for the supremacy of something, ideally something that made sense, in a cruel world of Catholic schools and frankly terrible children. i forgot how much it sucked to be that age.
he's older than i am by a small margin, thus the selection of games and animus toward consoles isn't exactly a match. however the escapism most certainly resonates. at one point he describes a swords & sorcery game as being compelling due to the sense of triumph it instills, something an eleven year old doesn't often feel - bang on with that. the sense of reality through imagination is felt. the prose is at times very colorful and equally dull in places, which felt purposeful.
Clune's obsession with the primacy of numbers whiffed with me but you can absolutely feel the child in him, and his need for the supremacy of something, ideally something that made sense, in a cruel world of Catholic schools and frankly terrible children. i forgot how much it sucked to be that age.
April 7, 2022
Autobiography mixed with nostalgia about specific old school games. Honestly, this book hit too close to home. I expected this to be like most other old-school gaming books: talk about some famous games, drop some nostalgia nuggets, the protagonist has a difficult life problem that they overcome in a victorious triumph! That is not what we get here. Michael shows us what it is like to gets obsessed with specific things in video games, from the mind of a child. His first experience and obsession is Suspended, a 1983 text based video game. However, his gaming desires soon come into conflict with his conservative mom who sees D&D as a devil tool, as well as his friends who see his interests as loner nerd shit.
There will be many who will not like this book because it feels foreign or annoying or repetitive or doesn't have the right ending. However, I don't know how you would get the essence of this child's obsession without it. It is nostalgic, but bittersweet.
There will be many who will not like this book because it feels foreign or annoying or repetitive or doesn't have the right ending. However, I don't know how you would get the essence of this child's obsession without it. It is nostalgic, but bittersweet.
June 16, 2018
An autobiography through games. An interesting premise -- got me to download the book from my library.
The story about his first game and its effect on his young life was the best. "Suspended" taught the boy how to be methodical.
But sometimes the relationship between the game and the author's life wasn't so clear. The stories of "Wolfenstein" and WWII games (and also "Ultima") seem to imply that he could get so engrossed that he lost track of himself for extended periods. Was this "gaming addiction," or was it some sort of mental illness? The author does not elaborate.
"Pirates" taught the boy economics, and his scheme to get in good with the popular crowd was brilliant, if immoral and misguided.
He escaped from 8th grade by playing "Might and Magic." Was that the end of his gaming, except for that stint with "Call of Duty" in grad school? How could his memoir end so early in life, and at such an awkward time?
The story about his first game and its effect on his young life was the best. "Suspended" taught the boy how to be methodical.
But sometimes the relationship between the game and the author's life wasn't so clear. The stories of "Wolfenstein" and WWII games (and also "Ultima") seem to imply that he could get so engrossed that he lost track of himself for extended periods. Was this "gaming addiction," or was it some sort of mental illness? The author does not elaborate.
"Pirates" taught the boy economics, and his scheme to get in good with the popular crowd was brilliant, if immoral and misguided.
He escaped from 8th grade by playing "Might and Magic." Was that the end of his gaming, except for that stint with "Call of Duty" in grad school? How could his memoir end so early in life, and at such an awkward time?
September 11, 2025
In preparation of his recent book Pan, I wanted to get familiar with his style. What I loved about it was his relation to how my adolescent life was to his. I wasn't as obsessed with computer games as he was, but the juxtaposition of games to life manifested a similar reality and memory. Growing up Catholic, I didn't have much to turn to, and finding my identity definitely imbued a sense of wonder as I got older. That's how Michael was: very curious, and using his games as his learning tool and his foundation. It gets strange at times, but strangely enough, I remember walking around as a soldier in the park dressed up in fatigues as a young boy. There are elements of that here, yet I really latched on to his relationship development; both during their moments of growth and stasis, because of the games.
March 20, 2018
Not unsurprisingly, the video game descriptions are the most lively part of the book. However, when it comes to connecting the games back to human stories, the book only partially succeeds--particularly in the opening chapters, the characters are poorly fleshed out, and the attempts to wax philosophical often felt out-of-place in what was, after all, a story about childhood. That being said, when the book does succeed, it does so in a spectacular fashion, especially in the concluding chapters about Wolfenstein, Elite, and Pirates!. I recommend it for anybody who grew up with a Commodore 64, but it only partially succeeds at constructing a bildungsroman through the lens of video games.
December 26, 2017
Got this one in a giveaway on Goodreads and had wanted to read it for a good while before the giveaway. Unfortunately, it's taken me quite a while to get around to reading it.
I did not grow up playing the same video games as Clune, since we are from slightly different generations, but I do have the same nostalgic feelings when thinking about my first video games and the experiences I had playing them. Those feelings don't ever truly fade. It was a good read, and I enjoyed it just as much as I'd expected I would.
I did not grow up playing the same video games as Clune, since we are from slightly different generations, but I do have the same nostalgic feelings when thinking about my first video games and the experiences I had playing them. Those feelings don't ever truly fade. It was a good read, and I enjoyed it just as much as I'd expected I would.
July 22, 2017
I not convinced that everything you need to know in life can be learned with a video game but after reading this book I think the author may be onto something. As he goes through various games he seems to have an extraordinary ability to see things that are applicable to real life. I was impressed with many of the conclusions drawn and it was definitely a thought provoking book.
I received this book as part of a good reads giveaway but the opinions expressed are solely my own.
I received this book as part of a good reads giveaway but the opinions expressed are solely my own.
November 27, 2025
If I were an editor for this book I would remove all the real life school stories. Summarize all the trauma related around being bullied for the games. Use like one paragraph descriptions of stories like mom banning a game because of runes and then a few years later using tarot with runes. Or playing Pirates made him want to rob a store to lead a pirate crew. There didn't seem to be any pay-off or explanation for not having any friends. It felt kinda like a self-therapy book in weird ways and coming to terms with terrible parenting.
Remove most of that and just focus on the amazing stories of playing the games and the way it inspired the imagination. But also like, finish the stories about the games. Everything seems to be cut off and thrown out as the games weren't completed at the times. I'd rather just hear about the games and their insights and how they related to the real world without all the weird drawn out trauma bits.
Too many changes of tone and loss of focus and it's like a pattern in the story telling and game completioning.
Remove most of that and just focus on the amazing stories of playing the games and the way it inspired the imagination. But also like, finish the stories about the games. Everything seems to be cut off and thrown out as the games weren't completed at the times. I'd rather just hear about the games and their insights and how they related to the real world without all the weird drawn out trauma bits.
Too many changes of tone and loss of focus and it's like a pattern in the story telling and game completioning.
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