Ebook: Gamelife: a memoir
Author: Clune Michael W
- Tags: Computer games, Computer games--History, Video gamers, Video gamers--United States, Video games, Video games--History, Biographies, Autobiographies, Biography, History, Clune Michael W. -- Childhood and youth, Clune Michael W, Computer games -- History, Video games -- History, Video gamers -- United States -- Biography, United States
- Year: 2015
- Publisher: Farrar
- City: United States
- Edition: First edition
- Language: English
- epub
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."
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.