Over the holiday season, we’re republishing select articles from Nintendo Life writers and contributors as part of our Best of 2023 series. Enjoy!
Image: Gavin Lane / Nintendo Life
Soapbox features enable our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random stuff they’ve been chewing over. Today, Michelle reads an incredible novel about games, and argues that books and games should get on the same page…
Two kids pore over Super Mario Bros. in a hospital game room. One asks the other, ‘What’s the secret to landing high on the flagpole?’ This is the beginning of Sam and Sadie’s friendship, the centrepiece of Gabrielle Zevin’s novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.
For anyone who’s tried and struggled with hitting the top of the flagpole, jamming buttons and sighing in frustration, it’s a lovely nostalgic nod to the NES game. For everyone, it’s the beginning of a deep friendship that will play out in the pages of this epic tome.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is the first book I’d read that took games seriously yet spoke to a mainstream audience.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow charts the friendship of these characters from meeting as kids, to university students making amateur games, to world-famous developers. It offers insightful and funny commentary on creativity and maturity. It’s not a ‘gamer book’ but a book about games; you don’t have to be a capital-G gamer to enjoy it.
Zevin proves a novel can champion characters who play games and can still be read by anyone. But why is this so unique? Where are the books where a character comes home from a long day and unwinds with their Nintendo Switch? (Totally not basing this off my own life). Why aren’t there more books about games?
Google ‘books about games’ and you’ll see non-fiction books (Blood, Sweat and Pixels, Console Wars, art books, encyclopedias), and novels that occupy the sci-fi space (Ready Player One, Snow Crash).
Games such as Disco Elysium take inspiration from literature and literary forms, and engage players in a similar fashion to novels — Image: ZA/UM
Novels that weave games into a narrative, like T&T&T, are few and far between. Ready Player One, the poster child for game novels, is laden with references that are integral to the reader’s understanding. Its science fiction label is firmly affixed, and it makes no real attempt to make games accessible or appealing to non-game audiences. There’s nothing wrong with that, in theory. But it’s typically the first game novel people think of, and this very fact means that when it comes to books, games still sit somewhere ‘else’, in an arena uninhabited by non-players.
the way mainstream media views games and ‘gamers’ hasn’t changed much since the Game Boy. Zevin pushes against this cliché
I’m sure plenty of aspiring novelists are penning manuscripts like T&T&T,
