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Another book that seemed to have a lot of people raving about it, so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, it was decent, but I don’t know if I’d rave about it.

The book is about two friends, Sadie and Sam, from age about 11 to 37. They love computer games, and start creating their own together, it sounds a little niche, and it is, a little. The basis of the story though is their friendship, as the cover says “This is not a romance, but it is about love”, which describes their relationship well.

Fortunately, they don’t go into too much technical detail, but when they do talk about the games, they more focus on the narrative or concept of them, and when there is technical language, (like making an engine for a game), I didn’t feel that I needed to understand it to follow what was going on, so it didn’t alienate me.

There were a couple of sections of the book that I found trickier to engage with (the book is divided into ten sections, each of which has a few chapters). One was a series of second person vignettes as someone goes through something that would be a spoiler if I told you, but it was the second personness that weirded me out a bit. The other was told from inside the world of a specific game, so suddenly you were in a whole new world with no warning, and all new characters to boot. But they were only a small section of the book overall, and other than those I enjoyed it and read it in good chunks at a time.

As I often do, a few out-of-context quotes that made me fold down the corners of pages, I’m not saying I agree with all of them, but that they made me think for a bit, or just smile:

• “Friendship is friendship, and charity is charity. […] The people who give you charity are never your friends. It is not possible to receive charity from a friend.”
• “The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures.”
• “Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.”
• “If it doesn’t work, all we’ve lost is a lot of time and money.”