EIn Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, one of the main characters of the trio gives a fictional interview to a very real video game publication. Concerned but passionate Samson Mazur tells the interviewer, “There is no more intimate act than play, even sex.” This is an explosive statement, but a perfect one in the context of a novel that values the act of play and holds it sacred. In a way, this is a thesis statement for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow itself: the novel opens its heart and shows you what it’s really about.
Video games are rarely treated as a place of emotion in literature, but in Zevin’s work, they are precisely the landscape that plays out the full spectrum of relationships, grief and love. The world of video games is a surprisingly unusual place for the modern commercial or literary novel, although they have long since evolved from being a child’s toy or a technical curiosity to a form of entertainment so widespread as to be commonplace.
In Stephen Sexton’s award-winning collection of poems, If All the World and Love Were Young, the structure directly reflects the narrative and physical journey through the Super Nintendo System classic, Super Mario World. Each piece in the work is named after a level in the game and has a direct dialogue with it. The emotional core of the work is that it is an elegy to his mother: as we read the poems, we are immediately drawn into the game’s strange, pixelated world, on Yoshi’s Island, in Donut Plains: but crucially, so are we in Sexton’s childhood, in front of his television, in the landscape of his youth. The discussion of video game terms like “infinite lives” becomes richer and deeper when we take that language and put it back into our own loss navigation. This challenges readers to poeticize a video game term, convey meaning, and develop depth.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow also deals with this dissonance: In video games, death is simply part of it. When you die, you start again. According to metaphors, this very standard video game mechanic becomes deeply confronting.
Video games are much younger than books and we are only at the beginning of what they could become. When asked what she thinks about where video games and literature as mediums relate, Zevin said, “Video games are in an incredibly young form – obviously much younger than books, and we’re only at the beginning of what they could become.”
She’s right: the relative newness of video games compared to the novel is what really sets them apart and makes their intersections all the more special and rare. The first video games appeared in the 1950s, well before the black and white home consoles that brought Pong into living rooms in the 1970s. From that single captivating screen, to the psychedelic, flat touch of Candy Crush, or the undulating and emotive landscapes of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, or the delicate art and literary merit of Disco Elysium, video games have evolved over the 50 years since Pong have traveled an extraordinary distance both technologically and artistically. In contrast, the first Greek and Latin texts that could be considered prose novels date from the first century. Fifty years is a point, a pixel compared to the story of the book.
Arguably, video games have far more in common with cinema in terms of their growth as an art form: Some 50 years after the birth of the moving image in 1895, audiences met Citizen Kane in 1941. Back in 2017, the Hollywood Reporter found that the video game industry earns almost three times as much as the movie industry.
We’re now seeing video games overlap more often with television and cinema, but literature and poetry are still on the other side of a divide. The writers who bridge this, like Zevin and Sexton, are breaking an important path. Ernest Cline’s popular but highly controversial Ready Player One certainly bridged that gap in 2011, but Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow takes a more humane and graceful path through video game culture than the quite literal and dated feel of Cline’s book. Tomorrow is a work about people who play games to survive and make games to live: it doesn’t use video game language as set dressing. Rather, the world of video games and video game development is just the landscape in which life takes place. This work doesn’t punish you for not knowing who Solid Snake is or for never playing any farming simulator. Tomorrow is all about love, and if you miss a reference, you won’t feel it.
Bea Carvalho, Head of Fiction at Waterstones, comments on Tomorrow’s accessability: “The history of gaming here is fascinating and the nostalgia is overwhelming: it will be an instant classic for any gaming fan and will certainly encourage many readers to dust off old consoles. But Zevin’s talent is such that previous fandom is by no means a requirement, as she uses the art form as a prism to understand the era’s political and technological landscape, exploring identity, grief, mental health, success and failure, among many others Subjects.”
The works of Sexton, Zevin, and Cline are by no means the only books about video games, or the only works of art in which video games are central to the emotional arc. Alan Butler’s On Exactitude in Science, shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2017, featured Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi in a cinematic diptych featuring his own mirror work: a frame-by-frame recreation of Reggio’s original shot in the world of Grand Theft Auto 5 Even further back in 1979, long before Charlie Brooker’s Bandersnatch brought the interactive story to modern homes via Netflix, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s installation Lorna invited viewers to participate in an interactive narrative by using a remote control, a television, and a laserdisc system to choose their path through a harrowing story of agoraphobia.
In nonfiction, Boss Fight Books has been publishing slim, thoughtful volumes of personal essays and in-depth studies of gaming since 2013, and is arguably on track to become one of the medium’s rough trade books. Each Boss Fight Book focuses closely on a single video game and the author’s perspective on it, as well as the work’s story, from Earthbound to Goldeneye, reading closely not only the game but often the author’s life that touched the game. to.
Video games have flickered on the fringes of other art forms for as long as they have existed, and watching them become the centerpiece of novels like Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is hopeful. Games are an intimate experience, as is the experience of reading literature and seeing art – and it is this intimacy that can connect and bring them closer together. Her past may be misaligned, but her future is full of promise.