Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.” (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, p. 336)

Gabrielle Zevin is a very popular author whose books I had only vaguely heard of until my sister gave me this one! Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is about a group of electronic game designers who get together while they are in college in the mid-1990s. They play games together and create new games that become widely successful and make them rich, but not very happy. The setting for the first part of the book is Boston, where the characters, Sadie, Sam, and Marx, are enrolled in MIT and Harvard; later they all move to LA — these locations are important in creating the atmosphere of their lives and their relationships.

As in any good novel, the characters are complex. Their experiences before and during the roughly 25 years covered in the novel involve a number of tragedies. Gaming and inventing games sometimes, in some ways, gives the characters an escape from reality, such as disability and pain, illness or even death of beloved family members, bad exploitative relationships, but not poverty — they aren’t poor, ever. Each character also has some very fulfilling and loving relationships. The author is very skilled at depicting their lives, their problems and successes, the games they devised, and the way they worked on games. I liked the technical descriptions as well as the imagining of the game environment and in-game characters.

Here is the character Sam, who says: “I am, as you know, a bottomless pit of ambition and need. But I also want to make something sweet.” (p. 70) 

“With his sweet, roundish face, light-colored eyes, and mix of white and Asian features, Sam looked almost exactly like an anime character. Astro Boy, or one of the many wisecracking little brothers of manga. As for his personal style: Sam looked like Oliver Twist, during the Artful Dodger years, if Oliver Twist had been from Southern California and a low-level pot dealer instead of a pickpocket. Sam had dark curly hair that he wore parted in the middle and bluntly cut, just above his shoulders. He wore cheap John Lennon–style wire-rimmed glasses and one of those rough hemp striped parkas that are sold in Mexico. His blue jeans were holey and faded to almost white, and he paired his Teva sandals with thick white athletic socks.” (p. 53)

Here is the character Marx:

“But for Marx, the world was like a breakfast at a five-star hotel in an Asian country—the abundance of it was almost overwhelming. Who wouldn’t want a pineapple smoothie, a roast pork bun, an omelet, pickled vegetables, sushi, and a green-tea-flavored croissant? They were all there for the taking and delicious, in their own way.” (p. 92)

Here is the character Sadie:

“She liked playing games, seeing a foreign movie, a good meal. She liked going to bed early and waking up early. She liked working. She liked that she was good at her work, and she felt proud of the fact that she was well paid for it. She felt pleasure in orderly things—a perfectly efficient section of code, a closet where every item was in its place. She liked solitude and the thoughts of her own interesting and creative mind. She liked to be comfortable. She liked hotel rooms, thick towels, cashmere sweaters, silk dresses, oxfords, brunch, fine stationery, overpriced conditioner, bouquets of gerbera, hats, postage stamps, art monographs, maranta plants, PBS documentaries, challah, soy candles, and yoga. She liked receiving a canvas tote bag when she gave to a charitable cause. She was an avid reader (of fiction and nonfiction), but she never read the newspaper, other than the arts sections, and she felt guilty about this. Dov often said she was bourgeois. He meant it as an insult, but she knew that she probably was. Her parents were bourgeois, and she adored them, so, of course, she had turned out bourgeois, too.”

I know few if any individuals in these characters’ age group, and I know nothing whatsoever about electronic games. I was familiar with one game that preceded the lives of the characters — a text-only adventure and exploration game called Cave that ran on mainframe computers, before personal computers were invented. While many people could access these computers at once, the Cave game only worked for one person at a time. I remember playing Cave on a “terminal” that printed out all the commands and responses as you went along. You probably don’t even know what I’m talking about.

Sadie, especially, admires this early game because it was ahead of its time and had a special feature they liked. Sadie says:

“In order to solve the problem of going from the caves to the cabin, the programmers invented this special command, Xyzzy. … When you use the Xyzzy command, you can magically switch between two places. … it’s genius, actually. It’s the best part of the game, because it acknowledges that the world you’re playing is not the real world. And since you’re not in the real world, you don’t have to move as if you are in the real world. But that’s what I want our game to be like. I want it to be like Xyzzy. Only instead of toggling between two places like in Adventure, the game should toggle between two worlds. Like, in one world, you’re this ordinary person living an ordinary life, and in the other world, you’re the hero. And the game lets you play both sides. I haven’t worked everything out yet. It’s early.” (p. 142)

These characters all live in their games — the ones they invent, and the ones they play, and in a way they continue to do so almost until they are middle-aged. This is so far outside my own reality that it’s amazing, so I enjoyed it very much. Besides liking the way that the author presents the story, I enjoyed the way that each character viewed life in general, in the context of playing so many fantasy and adventure games. 

I know NOTHING whatsoever of gaming: not the popular or unpopular games and not the culture of gaming among the age group in the book or any other age group! These things, at the center of the novel,  made me enjoy the book tremendously because they were so unfamiliar. Indeed, I never knew if the games being described in very great detail were actual games, ones the author made up, or games bearing no relationship at all to truly existing games in the real world — or if you like, in the world of actual games.

Review © 2023 mae sander