Top highlights from Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.
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And what is love, in the end?" Alabaster said. "Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else's journey through life?
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What is a game?" Marx said. "It's tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It's the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.
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Why wouldnt you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.
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We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn't chosen.
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If you're always aiming for perfection, you won't make anything at all.
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But it is worth noting that to be good at something is not quite the same as loving it.
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This is what time travel is. Its looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.
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To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back---I know you won't hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love. Many years later, as Sam would controversially say in an interview with the gaming website Kotaku, "There is no more intimate act than play, even sex." The internet responded: no one who had had good sex would ever say that, and there must be something seriously wrong with Sam.
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When they had been deciding what to call their company all those years ago, Marx had argued for calling it Tomorrow Games, a name Sam and Sadie instantly rejected as "too soft." Marx explained that the name referenced his favorite speech in Shakespeare, and that it wasn't soft at all."Do you have any ideas that aren't from Shakespeare?" Sadie said.To make his case, Marx jumped up on a kitchen chair and recited the "Tomorrow" speech for them, which he knew by heart:Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted foolsThe way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,And then is heard no more. It is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."That's bleak," Sadie said."Why start a game company? Let's go kill ourselves," Sam joked."Also," Sadie said, "What does any of that have to do with games?""Isn't it obvious?" Marx said.It was not obvious to Sam or to Sadie."What is a game?" Marx said. "It's tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It's the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.""Nice try, handsome," Sadie said. "Next.
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There is a time for any fledgling artist where one's taste exceeds one's abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.
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Every time I run into you for the rest of our lives, I'll ask you to make a game with me. There's some groove in my brain that insists it is a good idea.""Isn't that the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result.""That's a game character's life, too," Sam said. "The world of infinite restarts. Start again at the beginning, this time you might win. And it's not as if all our results were bad. I love the things we made. We were a great team."Sam offered Sadie his hand, and she shook it. She pulled him into her, and she kissed Sam on the cheek. "I love you, Sadie," Sam said."I know, Sam. I love you, too.
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It isnt a sadness, but a joy, that we dont do the same things for the length of our lives.
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He loved the intimacy of being in a tight group of people who had come together, miraculously, for a brief period in time, for the purpose of making art.
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What's everyone talking about?""The end of The Iliad.""That's the best part," Marx said. "Why is it the best part?" Sadie asked."Because it's perfect," Marx said. "'Tamer of horses' is an honest profession. The lines mean that one doesn't have to be a god or a king for your life to have meaning.
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Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?
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Why do you keep coming?" she asked."Because," he said. Click on this word, he thought, and you will find links to everything it means. Because you are my oldest friend. Because, once, when I was at my lowest, you saved me. Because I might have died without you or ended up in a children's psychiatric hospital. Because I owe you. Because, selfishly, I see a future where we make fantastic games together, if you can manage to get out of bed. "Because," he repeated.
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Sadie walked under the gates, one by one by one. At first, she felt nothing, but as she kept moving ahead, she began to feel an opening and a new spaciousness in her chest. She realized what a gate was: it was an indication that you had left one space and were entering another.She walked through another gate.It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through. (Until, of course, there wasn't.)She walked through another gate.What was a gate, anyway?A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.By the time she reached the end of the torii gate pathway, she felt resolved. Both Sides had failed, but it didn't have to be the end. The game was one in a long line of spaces between gates.
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There are no ghosts, but up hereshe gestured toward her headits a haunted house.
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It was never worth worrying about someone you didnt love. And it wasnt love if you didnt worry.
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Friendship, Marx said, is kind of like having a Tamagotchi.
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I love that world more, I think, because it is perfectible. Because I have perfected it. The actual world is the random garbage fire it always is. There's not a goddamn thing I can do about the actual world's code.
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To Marx, it seemed foolish not to love as many things as you could.
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This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.
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To build a world for someone seems a romantic thing from where I stand." Dov shook his head. "Sam Masur, that fucked-up, romantic kid.
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Zweisamkeit is the feeling of being alone even when youre with other people. Simon turned to look in his husbands eyes. Before I met you, I felt this constantly. I felt it with my family, my friends, and every boyfriend I ever had. I felt it so often that I thought this was the nature of living. To be alive was to accept that you were fundamentally alone. Simons eyes were moist. I know Im impossible, and I know you dont care about German words or marriage. All I can say is, I love you and thank you for marrying me anyway.
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Sam looked at her outstretched hand, which he knew as well as any hand except his own---the precise pattern of the lines that made up the grid of her palm, the slim fingers with the purplish veins at the knuckles, the particular creamy olive hue of her skin, her delicate wrist, pinkish, with a penumbral callus that must have come from Dov, the white gold bracelet she wore that he knew had been a gift from Freda on her twelfth birthday. How could she honestly think he wouldn't know about the handcuffs? He had spent hours sitting next to her, playing games and then making them, staring at her hands as her fingers flew across a keyboard or jabbed at a controller. Tell me I don't know you, Sam thought. Tell me I don't know you when I could draw both sides of this hand, your hand, from memory.
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The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures.
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There's no game without the NPCs. There's just some bullshit hero, wandering around with no one to talk to and nothing to do.
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The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures.""That's an oversimplification of the issue.""The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world don't you? I'm terrified of that world and I don't want to live in a that world, and as a mixed race person, I literally don't exist in it. My dad, who I barely knew, was Jewish. My mom was an American-born Korean. I was raised by Korean immigrant grandparents in Korea Town Los Angeles and as any mixed race person will tell you-- to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.
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If this were a game, he could hit pause. He could restart, say different things, the right ones this time. He could search his inventory for the item that would make Sadie not leave.
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Sadie, do you see this? This is a persimmon tree! This is my favorite fruit." Marx picked a fat orange persimmon from the tree, and he sat down on the now termite-free wooden deck, and he ate it, juice running down his chin. "Can you believe our luck?" Max said. "We bought a house with a tree that has my actual favorite fruit!"Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met - he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn't truly understood the nature of Marx's good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know - were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had hey just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard? He had certainly never mentioned persimmons before.
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You couldn't be old and still be wrong about as many things as she'd been wrong about, and it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were.
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Long relationships might be richer, but relatively brief, relatively uncomplicated encounters with interesting people could be lovely as well. Every person you knew, every person you loved even, did not have to consume you for the time to have been worthwhile.
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Time was mathematically explicable; it was the heartthe part of the brain represented by the heartthat was the mystery.
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That love is all there is; is all we know of love. It is enough; the freight should be proportioned to the groove. What is the freight? he wondered. What is the groove?
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I thought you were worried I was going to die," Sam said."No. You'll never die. And if you ever died, I'd just start the game again," Sadie said."Sam's dead. Put another quarter in the machine.""Go back to the save point. Keep playing, and we'll win eventually.
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And as any mixed-race person will tell youto be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.
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How much of your life had been happenstance? How much of your life had been a roll of the big polyhedral die in the sky? But then, werent all lives that way? Who could say, in the end, that they had chosen any of it?
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What was a gate anyway?A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.
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Though you cannot see him, you become aware of the fact that your father is sitting on the floor. He is folding cranes so that your mother can string them. This is marriage.
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The most important thing is finding someone you wish to play with.
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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.
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...it is not an inevitability that we should be our worst selves behind the mask of an avatar. What I believe to my very core is that virtual worlds can be better than the actual world. They can be more moral, more just, more progressive, more empathetic, and more accommodating of difference. And if they can be, shouldn't they be?
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You try again. You fail better.
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And the thing about games is, if you get good at one game, you can be good at any game. That's what I think. They're all hand-eye coordination and observing patterns.
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We must fill our infinite days with something.
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A glimmer of a notion of a nothing of a whisper of a figment of an idea.
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Its tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Its the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption.
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How I will miss the horses.
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It is the same world, she thought, but I am different. Or is it a different world, but I am the same?
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It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.
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In games, the thing that matters most is the order of things. The game has an algorithm, but the player also must create a play algorithm in order to win. There is an order to any victory. There is an optimal way to play any game.
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Maybe it was the willingness to play that hinted at a tender, eternally newborn part in all humans. Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from despair.
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What does love even mean when you can find it with so many people and things?
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There is no purity to bearing pain alone.
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And this is the truth of any game - it can only exist at the moment that it is being played. It's the same with being an actor. In the end, all we can ever know is the game that was played, in the only world that we know.
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A programmer is a diviner of possible outcomes, and a seer of unseen worlds.
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I am so tired of your crap. Do you honestly think you suffer more than everyone else? Do you think you suffer more than I do? Do you think you're the first person to ever have a baby? Or lose someone? Do you think you're some goddamned pioneer when it comes to grief?"Sadie shifted forward, and he could feel the momentum in their argument. He could feel the cruel thing she was about to say in response to the cruel thing he had said. But the cruel thing did not arrive. Disturbingly, she slumped forward, and started to weep.He watched her, but he did not go over to her. "Snap out of it, Sadie. Come to the office. We work through our pain. That's what we do. We put the pain into the work, and the work becomes better. But you have to participate. You have to talk to me. You can't ignore me and our company and everything that came before.
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Lesson 1: To play requires trust and love. “To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. But it is also a way to connect, to share, and to learn. To play is to be alive.”
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Lesson 2: Failure is an opportunity to learn and grow.“Next time, we fail better.”
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Lesson 3: It's important to be true to yourself, even if it means going against the grain. “It was as if being a woman was a disease that you didn't wish to catch. As long as you didn't associate with the other women, you could imply to the majority, the men: I'm not like those other ones.”
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Lesson 4: Life is precious and unpredictable. “… life is very long, unless it is not.”
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Lesson 5: It's important to cherish the relationships we have with others. “The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.”
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Lesson 6: Art is a way to express ourselves and connect with others. “Art doesn't typically get made by happy people.”
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Lesson 7: It's important to be open to new experiences and challenges. “I'm always seeing the world with magic eyes.”
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Lesson 8: We are all connected in ways we don't always understand. “How many times can you look at something and know that everyone around you is seeing the same thing or at the very least that their brains and eyes are responding to the same phenomenon? How much proof do you ever have that we're all in the same world?”
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Lesson 9: Time is a precious and mysterious thing. “Time was mathematically explicable; it was the heart-the part of the brain represented by the heart- that was the mystery.”
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Lesson 10: Love is the most powerful force in the universe. “And what is love, in the end?” Alabaster said. “It is the thing that binds us all together. It is the thing that makes us human.”
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