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You have been awakened.
Floppy disk inserted, computer turned on, a whirring, and then this sentence, followed by a blinking cursor. So beginsSuspended, the first computer game to obsess seven-year-old Michael, to worm into his head and change his sense of reality. Thirty years later he will write: "Computer games have taught me the things you can't learn from people."Gamelife is the memoir of a childhood transformed by technology. Afternoons spent gazing at pixelated maps and mazes train Michael's eyes for the uncanny side of 1980s suburban Illinois. A game about pirates yields clues to the drama of cafeteria politics and locker-room hazing. And in the year of his parents' divorce, a spaceflight simulator opens a hole in reality.In telling the story of his youth through seven computer games, Michael W. Clune captures the part of childhood we live alone.
?You have been awakened.?
Floppy disk inserted, computer turned on, a whirring, and then this sentence followed by a blinking cursor. So begins Suspended, the first computer game to obsess seven-year-old Michael, to worm into his head and change his sense of reality. Thirty years later he will write: ?Computer games have taught me the things you can?t learn from people.?
Michael Clune?s Gamelife is a sui generis memoir. It captures the essential strangeness of childhood, when the world is still revealing itself. It describes cafeteria politics, locker-room hazing, and divorce with a sharpness that will leave you laughing and squirming. It re-creates a place?1980s suburban Illinois, John Hughes movie territory?in all its quotidian glory. And it explores, like nothing before it, how the ephemeral worlds of video games gave shape to a boy?s days.
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