Gamelife: A Memoir by Michael W. Clune
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
So torn here.
Good book. Good read.
Some of the more philosophical portions left me a little lost. I couldn’t picture what we were talking about. The movement from describing something visual to using that description to make a larger point, that kind of movement in the book lost me a little.
But really good stuff, overall, and I think this is a great example of a gaming memoir, something that has a gaming thread throughout, but doesn’t spend much time telling us that X happens in this game and then Y happens, or the ol’ “And now I’m here, in this place” when you mean “I’m playing a game where the character is in this place.” The parallels make sense in this book because Clune, as a boy, acted out so many of his games in his real, but private and inner, life. And we don’t get a lot of descriptions or backstories of games as filler, and the metaphors feel right, not contorted.
I do want to say this as well, I normally judge how much I enjoyed a book by how strong my desire to read it was. What would I put down in order to pick this book up.
But that didn’t work with this book because it did such a good job of taking me back to the shittiness that was 8th grade.
I fucking hated life in 8th grade, and I could relate to Clune’s descriptions of things. The weird way in which popularity is important and also seems, at the time, completely random. The kind of mock or be mocked way that most of us probably felt in school. The way I think a lot of us felt, which was that we felt like school was insane and our home lives seemed unstable because we were starting to see our parents didn’t really know what the hell they were doing some of the time.
And don’t get me wrong. This isn’t the kind of “oh, I was so awkward” thing that we trade a lot in anymore. The stories in this book are not cute. This is some fucked up shit. It’s not someone who barely got a date in school. This is guys taking another kid’s school uniform and literally taking a shit on it while the kid begs them not to because his parents can’t afford another one.
It’s a good read and well-written, especially in the more concrete sections. And it’s just left me at somewhat of a loss because it was like fucking 8th grade was on the nightstand, and the last thing in the world I wanted to do was go back to eighth grade.