Gamelife

`[Gamelife is] the history of an intellectual awakening told through the medium of video games, which Clune writes about with frequently arresting eloquence and power.' * New Statesman * `An engaging and enjoyable read...A clear thinker and a skilled writer, Clune has thought deeply about why we play games, and he has come up with some worthy answers.' * Australian * `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...[a] provocative book.' * Kirkus Reviews * `[Gamelife] is an extremely well-written retrospective...[Clune] succeeds in not only sharing poignant memories but also confronting the rose-tinted glasses we tend to wear when discussing the past.' * Library Journal * `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.' * Booklist * `I highly enjoyed Gamelife-a beautiful, delightful, surreal, moving, intellectually shocking, vivid, and thrilling book about numbers and death, magic and despair, dimensions and middle school.' -- Tao Lin, author of Taipei `I steal language and ideas from Michael W. Clune.' -- Ben Lerner, author of 10:04 'Gamelife is a spectacular accomplishment. It's written in a kind of yearning voice that defies easy classification as simple nostalgia.' * New Republic * `An idiosyncratic but universal exploration of how we teach ourselves to dream, Gamelife charts the interstices between imagination and loneliness in a tender, sad, and funny paean to childhood, all framed around a lost era in video gaming.' -- Liam Pieper * author of The Feel-Good Hit of the Year * 'Before starting Gamelife I had zero interest in computer games and, at best, limited interest in male adolescence. But now I'm very interested in Michael W. Clune. I loved this book.' * Harper's Magazine *