Highlights §
- I can tell you that the people who give you charity are never your friends. It is not possible to receive charity from a friend.” (Location 437)
- You would think women would want to stick together when there weren’t that many of them, but they never did. 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. (Location 485)
- The idea of Solution was that if you asked questions and didn’t keep mindlessly building widgets, your score would be lower, but you would find out you were working in a factory that supplied machine parts to the Third Reich. Once you had this information, you could potentially slow your output. You could make the bare number of parts required not to be detected by the Reich, or you could stop producing parts entirely. The player who did not ask questions, the Good German, would blithely get the highest score possible, but in the end, they’d find out what their factory was doing. Fraktur- style script blazed across the screen: Congratulations, Nazi! You have helped lead the Third Reich to Victory! You are a true Master of Efficiency. (Location 572)
- he protected Sam, and he made the world a little easier for Sam, and it cost him next to nothing to do so. (Location 996)
- Chinese immigration to America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how Chinese immigrants had only been allowed to do certain kinds of work, like food or cleaning, and that’s why there were so many Chinese restaurants and Chinese laundries, i.e., systemic racism. (Location 1025)
- The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants consists of around four thousand painstakingly accurate fire- blown glass and hand- painted specimens. A German father- and- son team had made them, around the turn of the nineteenth century, as a commission from the university. They were the answer to a problem: How do you preserve the impossible to preserve? (Location 1109)
- 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. (Location 1161)
- It wasn’t so much being on stage that he loved, but the productions themselves. 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. (Location 1238)
- And as any mixed- race person will tell you— to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing. (Location 1341)
- K- town in Los Angeles was massive. It was miles and miles of Korean people and things, right in the center of town. (Location 1359)
- maneki neko, the zaftig hospitality cat, (Location 1480)
- If Marx at twenty- two had a problem, it was that he was attracted to too many things and people. Marx’s favorite adjective was “interesting.” The world seemed filled with interesting books to read, interesting plays and movies to see, interesting games to play, interesting food to taste, and interesting people to have sex with and sometimes even to fall in love with. To Marx, it seemed foolish not to love as many things as you could. (Location 1586)
- Sam’s grandfather had two core beliefs: (1) all things were knowable by anyone, and (2) anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken. Sam believed these things as well. (Location 1654)
- she didn’t know if an idea was worth pursuing until it had made its way through Sam’s brain, too. It was only when Sam said her own idea back to her— slightly modified, improved, synthesized, rearranged— that she could tell if it was good. She knew if she told him her new idea, it would instantly become his, too. (Location 2330)
- To return to the city of one’s birth always felt like retreat. (Location 2424)
- There were so many people who could be your lover, but, if she was honest with herself, there were relatively few people who could move you creatively. (Location 3566)
- “How do you get over a failure?” “I think you mean a public failure. Because we all fail in private. I failed with you, for example, but no one posted an online review about it, unless you did. I fail with my wife and with my son. I fail in my work every day, but I keep turning over the problems until I’m not failing anymore. But public failures are different, it’s true.” (Location 3595)
- “You go back to work. You take advantage of the quiet time that a failure allows you. You remind yourself that no one is paying any attention to you and it’s a perfect time for you to sit down in front of your computer and make another game. You try again. You fail better.” (Location 3599)
- Despite the title, the cherry blossoms are not the subject; it is a painting about the creative process— its solitude and the ways in which an artist, particularly a female one, is expected to disappear. (Location 3738)
- It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.” (Location 3746)
- She realized what a gate was: it was an indication that you had left one space and were entering another. (Location 3757)
- Sadie had often reflected that sex and video games had a great deal in common. There were certain objectives that needed to be met. There were certain rules that shouldn’t be broken. There was a correct combination of movements— button mashes, joystick pivots, keystrokes, commands— that made the whole thing work or not work. There was a pleasure to knowing you had played the game correctly and a release that came when you reached the next level. To be good at sex was to be good at the game of sex. (Location 3863)
- There is always a point where one despairs of one’s luggage ever arriving, (Location 3877)
- “ ‘Zweisamkeit’ is the feeling of being alone even when you’re with other people.” Simon turned to look in his husband’s 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.” (Location 4438)
- (They say success kills relationships, but the lack of it will do it just as quickly.) (Location 4649)
- 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. (Location 4903)
- Macbeth has just heard the news that his wife had died, and he is giving the most famous soliloquy from the play, the “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech. (Location 5438)
- She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive. (Location 6155)
- She was trying hard not to romanticize her daughter’s personality. She didn’t want to ascribe characteristics to her that were not truly hers. A good game designer knows that clinging to a few early ideas about a project can cut off the potential for the work. (Location 6164)
- It was unreasonable to expect a child to emerge whole cloth. Naomi was a pencil sketch of a person who, at some point, would be a fully 3D character. (Location 6170)
- How quickly you go from being the youngest to the oldest person in a room, she thought. (Location 6305)
- if you were one of my students, you’d be wearing your pain like a badge of honor. This generation doesn’t hide anything from anyone. My class talks a lot about their traumas. And how their traumas inform their games. They, honest to God, think their traumas are the most interesting thing about them. I sound like I’m making fun, and I am a little, but I don’t mean to be. They’re so different from us, really. Their standards are higher; they call bullshit on so much of the sexism and racism that I, at least, just lived with. But that’s also made them kind of, well, humorless. I hate people who talk about generational differences like it’s an actual thing, and here I am, doing it. It doesn’t make sense. (Location 6384)
- Since she’d started teaching and become a mother, she’d felt old, but that night, she realized she wasn’t old at all. 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. (Location 6422)
- The book about consciousness that Sadie mentions when she is talking about the brain having an AI version of deceased loved ones is I Am a Strange Loop, by Doug Hofstadter, a source suggested to me by Hans Canosa. (Location 6468)
- Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made, by Jason Schreier; Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, by David Kushner; Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (specifically the section on Sierra On- Line), by Steven Levy; A Mind Forever Voyaging: A History of Storytelling in Video Games, by Dylan Holmes; Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, by Tom Bissell; All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture, by Harold Goldberg; and the documentaries Indie Game: The Movie, directed by James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot, and GTFO, directed by Shannon Sun- Higginson. I read Indie Games by Bounthavy Suvilay after I finished writing, and it’s a beautiful book for those looking to see how artful games can be. (Location 6474)