Gamelife: A Memoir of a Childhood

(, UK ed.)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Gamelife is part memoir of childhood, part meditation on the imaginative world of computer games - and altogether wonderful, luminous and profound. Structured in seven chapters, around seven PC games that took on an almost religious significance in the author's life, it captures the essential strangeness of childhood, when the world is still revealing itself. It re-creates a place - 1980s suburban Illinois, John Hughes movie territory - in all its quotidian glory. And it explores how the ephemeral worlds of video games gave shape to a boy's days.

Reviews

'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 'Gamelife is a spectacular accomplishment. It's written in a kind of yearning voice that defies easy classification as simple nostalgia.' New Republic 'I steal language and ideas from Michael W. Clune.' -- Ben Lerner, author of 10:04 'I highly enjoyed Gamelife-a beautiful, delightful, surreal, moving, intellectually shocking, vivid, and thrilling book about numbers and death, magic and despair, dimensions and middle school.' -- Tao Lin, author of Taipei 'Along with his spot-on re-creations of childhood and adolescent conversations, Clune's wry observations about growing up in the 1970s and 1980s amid the burgeoning microcomputer revolution make his gamer memoir a standout.' Booklist '[Gamelife] is an extremely well-written retrospective...[Clune] succeeds in not only sharing poignant memories but also confronting the rose-tinted glasses we tend to wear when discussing the past.' Library Journal 'Clune never treats games as an escape but rather an entry into a heightened reality, an education, a creative stimulus, and a portal for self-discovery...[a] provocative book.' Kirkus Reviews '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 '[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

Author Bio

Authors Bio, not available