Gamelife

Portrait of the artist as a young gamer.

Gamelife is part memoir of childhood in the eighties, part meditation on the imaginative world of computer games—and altogether wonderful, luminous and profound. Michael Clune's first computer game is the text-based adventure 'Suspended' in which the player types commands, directing robots to save the planet from destruction. The game raises deep questions for the boy and provides a framework for his imagination about himself and the world. Seven primitive PC games take on an almost religious significance in Michael's life.

Gamelife is one of those books that makes you see things differently, a brilliant memoir of a kid discovering his own mental powers, and the magic of an electronic world he can escape into while riding the shockwaves of his parents' divorce, his own adolescence and his apprenticeship in the world of perception.

Michael Clune is the author of White Out, a memoir of heroin addiction, and Gamelife, a memoir of childhood. He is an associate professor of English literature at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.

‘[Gamelife is] the history of an intellectual awakening told through the medium of video games, which Clune writes about with frequently arresting eloquence and power.’ New Statesman

‘Before starting Gamelife I had zero interest in computer games and, at best, limited interest in male adolescence. But now I’m very interested in Michael W. Clune. I loved this book’ Harper’s Magazine

‘An idiosyncratic but universal exploration of how we teach ourselves to dream, Gamelife charts the interstices between imagination and loneliness in a tender, sad, and funny paean to childhood, all framed around a lost era in video gaming.’ Liam Pieper, author of The Feel-Good Hit of the Year

‘An engaging and enjoyable read…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.’ Australian