Gamelife

June 1, 2015
A memoir about coming of age with video games, in which the author finds a reality more real than the outside world. Having written a well-received memoir of heroin and recovery (White Out, 2013), Clune (English/Case Western Reserve Univ.) illuminates a different and perhaps more powerful addiction. The author makes no pretense of academic objectivity toward his gaming experience or even older-and-wiser distance from it. "You think I wrote a book about computer games for fun? If I want fun, I'll play a computer game," he writes, after postulating a theory about how "the history of computer games is also a philosophical encyclopedia containing every important truth available to our species." The ideal readers for this book are those who are as immersed and invested in gaming as the author is (or has been; the narrative only offers a few fleeting glimpses into his post-adolescence). But many of the issues that it raises-the plight of the boy at the dawn of the Internet, trying to process suburbia, divorce, and alienation from would-be friends-have wider resonance. 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. "It isn't easy to grow away from the people," he writes. "You need imagination. My imagination was as weak as a baby's arm until computer games trained it." He writes of games as a means of bonding with kindred spirits, though the memoir ends with him on the outside looking in, very much alone. The author also flashes forward to the years when he was pursuing his doctorate and had apparently kicked the habit: "My professors and so-called friends had broken me. They'd convinced me that...computer games were sucking my life dry instead of nourishing it. Deadening my brain instead of illuminating it." Ultimately, Clune remains unconvinced and unrepentant, offering his rebuttal in this provocative book.

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June 15, 2015

Clune (English, Case Western Reserve Univ.; White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin) recalls a childhood in a rather unique way: by reflecting on the lessons he learned growing up in the suburbs of Illinois through the lens of seven computer games that came to be associated with important events in his early life. This is an extremely well-written retrospective, and while Clune views his childhood with nostalgia, at the same time he acknowledges negative (and ongoing) feelings of confusion, fear, and discomfort he experienced as an adolescent. To that end, the author succeeds in not only sharing poignant memories but also confronting the rose-tinted glasses we tend to wear when discussing the past. Clune's latest is highly recommended for adults whose childhood has been influenced by gaming, as it will cause them to explore their relationship with escapism. Teens with similar interests may also find enlightenment among Clune's words. VERDICT This strong memoir delves into a topic that will resonate with increasingly more people as gaming becomes a mainstream hobby.--Lewis Parsons, Sawyer Free Lib., Gloucester, MA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2015
In his critically acclaimed memoir White Out (2103), Clune recounted his alternately disturbing and comical misadventures with heroin addiction. In his latest work, Clune mines the plentiful amusing and sobering anecdotes from his childhood love affair with an entirely different type of addictive medium: computer games. Clune divides his recollections into seven chapters corresponding to the seven games he became enamored with from second grade on through eighth, including The Devil in the Garden and Pirates! In Suspended Clune describes his baffling interactions with a text-only game running on the primitive Commodore 64 computer, while his visiting Irish cousin provided profanity-laced feedback. In A Heart of Sky, he chronicles how his passion for Might and Magic II helped him through his traumatic middle-school experiences as a shy outcast. 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)