YOU
by Austin Grossman
First reviewed July 2016
I have found that You has stuck with me far longer than I expected, and it blinked back into my mind in the middle of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which has similar bones. I liked You more, so if you’re thirsting after more in the game/life genre, look at YOU.
Memories crept up on me as I read You on the bus from New York to New Hampshire; I finished it on the meandering, mostly pretty train ride home from Boston—scenery that I’d seen far too many times to even acknowledge—after poaching a few pages here and there during the infrequent downtime over my long New England weekend.
I was on a bus from Florence to Verona; or maybe it was a train from Rome to Venice. More likely, it was both: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanawas a long book, peppered with bits of Italian that I needed to stop and translate. Topo Gigio? Was I too young, or too American? I saw an entire generation’s worth of popular Italian culture—filtered through the eyes of a character I thought I understood—and it helped me interpret people and places and things in a way far more intimate than I had any right to experience. By virtue of the avatar-as-amnesiac trope, I could access the world of casual references and cultural touchstones, things anyone growing up in Italy would know. But I—as exchange student, as foreigner, as child—clearly didn’t:
“And it gets even worse. I’m playing Brennan, but as a player I don’t know anything about him, so it’s like I have amnesia and for the first hour everybody who talks to me has to explain things like where I live.”
Perhaps it was the ghost of a hum from a jet engine, rumblings from an airplane leaving Chicago, where I fought my standard takeoff-sleep protocol because the book I picked up at the terminal, Ready Player One, had its hooks in me:
“And they’re telling me what to do, which is—here—helping these villagers, who I don’t give the tiniest fuck about. And this guy has a horse, and what if I want to just take his horse—oh, no—I can’t! I can’t do anything except what I’m supposed to do. None of these people are real and they’re telling me—THE PERSON WHO OWNS THE GAME—what to do.”
Or maybe it was a fragment of elation from a day trip to the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, when, just before our train arrived in Naples, my mind finally processed that the cover image on my copy of Alexander the Great was credited to the very museum I was en route to tour: home of the Alexander Mosaic that stared at me so consistently for weeks that my eyes has begun to glaze over it, had already incorporated it as a part of the background:
“If I absolutely have to play one of our video games, the first—the first—thing I do is kill everybody I possibly can—”
“But w—”
“Let me finish! Not because I’m psychotic but because these fake people creep me out, and because it’s a game, it’s supposed to be my story, and that” —she pointed at Realms of Gold— “isn’t my story.”
“I thought you didn’t care about games.”
“I said I didn’t play them. I’m not going to play an art form—excuse me—that says it’s about me, and then it’s about some patronizing, do-gooder asshole and the shiftless fuckwits who asked him for help. Who’s that asshole? Is that your story?”
I wonder, then, about my story when reading fiction like You; did I like it more because it was set in and around Boston, where I was reading it? After setting the book down I was still there—at least partially—because I could ride the red line up to Cambridge or walk around the Common. Kismet, or coincidence? If I was home in New York, would reading about Boston still appeal? Surely, yes; no one lives in, say, Middle Earth, but the Tolkien books are still all right. But thinking about Rivendell might lack the electric thrill of stopping by the Arch at Washington Square while reading The Golem and the Jinni. It is a safe bet that The Eternal Flame of Queen Loana would not burn as brightly in my mind if I was reading it in Indiana rather than Italy. Should that matter?
I am not going to answer that: not in the context of writing, nor as it applies to book reviews. But when it comes to video games, the answer traditionally has been a resounding “No.” Games tend to cater to an entry-level demographic each and every time, and the player is often expected to bring nothing with them into the experience. It is no secret I play a lot of games; even through the tutorials, which nearly every game contains. The “B” button runs. The “A” button jumps. Pushing both at once does a super attack, which drains some of your life meter, but probably less than you would lose trying to fight the monsters with traditional punches and kicks. The first time you are counting on the super move to save you but you lack the health points to activate it and you lose, you might be angry enough to call the game and its designers stupid. Probably on Twitter. Or the first time you activate your super move by accident when your life was too low, and you lose, you’re definitely going to tell everyone watching your Twitch stream that the controls are “unintuitive” and probably “stupid” as well. That each game is allowed to decide on its own control scheme astounds me; it makes ever experience singular, allows the input from the player to become enmeshed within the narrative. "A" doesn't always jump: sometimes it stamps passports; sometimes it builds towers; sometimes it lights torches.
So it sort of irks me that games get tagged with the “bad story” epithet just because they haven’t yet found a way to deftly handle all the issues literary fiction has struggled with for millennia. Just as English Majors the world over cringe at bisected and “translated” No-Fear Shakespeare—with English on one page and, um, English on the other—there’s a contingent of game players that are as fluent in accessing inputs and iconography as any scholar is with Early Modern English references and phrasing:
The state of the technology meant characters were drawn on 8-by-12 pixel grids, a strangely potent, primitive scale. Dogs and mailmen and robots became luminous pictoglyphs hovering in the dark. The cursory, dashed-off feel of the stories seemed to have opened a vein of whimsy in the minds of the programmers and engineers of this first wave. The same limitations threw games into weird, nonperspectival spaces. Games like Berzerk and Wizard of Wor took place in bright Escher space, where overhead and side views combine.
And the dream-logic plots! Worlds where touching anything meant instant death; where mushrooms are friends and turtles are enemies. In each one I felt the presence of a deep logic living just offscreen, each one a bright painting telling a not-quite-explained story: Why am I a plumber fighting an ape for a princess? Why am I, a lone triangle, battling a fleet of squares? Who decided that?
There is a haze of mystery that video games effortlessly capture—it seems to be ingrained in them, functionally—that postmodern fiction like DeLillo’s White Noise or Ball’s Samedi the Deafness approach. Who is telling me the story? How reliable is the narration? The growing schism between the and the book series and the HBO show covering The Song of Ice and Fire is that in the books, the most interesting things happened the generation before the subject of the novels; we hear about them in bits and pieces from a dozen different perspectives, each telling colored slightly by their narrator. It’s brilliant, and it was wiped out in the show because the format to tell those stories doesn't fit. [note from the future: it seems like someone realized this, as HBO is currently doing a before-times story in the Game of Thrones world]
Movies struggle with it, too, or else I’m simply too dim to appreciate the quickly flashing images of a Mulholland Drive.Games can rely on interaction to propel the player through what a viewer might find tedious, or impossible to interpret. When you’re unsure of yourself, of how to control your “body,” of what you’re capable of and what the world is capable of, every moment could be the most exciting thing you do in the game. Mulholland Drive is like watching someone else’s vacation slides: boring without explanation; excruciatingly dull to listen to someone narrate.
People churn through Young Adult fiction because, I assume, there are simple, clean lines of good and evil; they are the Aesop’s Fables of modernity. Teenagers bucking the corrupt system that we adults are mired in; escapism that anyone can appreciate. Plus, reading a book in a day probably makes you feel smart. But it is typically rote, comfortable, tedious. They translate well into a two-hour movie, but there isn't much subtext, mostly the momentum of the plot lurching forward. But games, like the mystical, muddling fiction found in Auster’s The New York Trilogy, often leave it to you to draw your own lines. The less that’s explained, the more you fill in. [note from the future: this is exactly the reason why I still like Dark Souls more than Eldin Ring] Are the blocks in Super Mario Bros. really horsehair and Mushroom People, or was that just the idle musings of the instruction booklet translator?
It changes nothing about the fact that you’re going to smash them up in an effort to continue your quest of moving to the right until you can’t move right anymore. Why are you doing it? Because that’s how the game functions. It is rare that people stop and think about why they are reading a book written in English in contiguous chapter order, from top to bottom, left to right. Reading is a format that has become so ingrained, so natural, that we simply don’t see it anymore:
But in the middle of all this, there’s you, a person playing a video game. For fun, for a challenge, for reasons hard to understand. Some of it is just cognitive burnoff, something to take up the mental cycles you aren’t using and, frankly, desperately don’t want, because a lot of it is just compressed, impacted sadness.
But there is only so much you can do about it. Your character is always going to be you; you can never ever quite erase that sliver of you-awareness. In the whole mechanized game world, you are a unique object, like a moving hole that’s full of emotion and agency and experience and memory unlike anything else in this made-up universe.
You can’t not be around it; it’s you, even though “you” might be the last person you want to be around. But when the game, the second-person engine, starts again, it tells you about yourself, and maybe this time you will get it to tell you the thing you’ve been waiting to hear, the mighty storytelling hack that puts it all together.
You tells the story of a person looking for their future in their own past, another tale of aimless adulthood, the search for meaning and purpose. The major question that games continuously strive to justify, this novel quietly posits; what makes a story memorable—book, movie, game—is your surroundings, your baggage, your you.