Book Club Discussion: TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW (Patreon)

One of the big lessons of criticism is that you can’t plan anything.

I thought I had learned this pretty well by now. There have been so many times where I went to see a film or an event and assumed that I would have something to talk about. Then you get in there and it’s like “… huh.” Meanwhile, there’s been loads of times that I’ll catch something innocuous that I wasn’t planning on writing about and it of course turns into a 10 part essay. But even having learned this, there are still moments these days where I trick myself into putting the cart before the horse. And this is exactly what happened with the Book Club idea I posed earlier this year. To be fair, it mostly happened because I was looking for motivation to read a certain book that was super popular and had been recommended to me again and again and again. Thus, I thought I had the perfect book for the perfect first book club discussion!

And it did not go the way I thought it would.

Because there’s this double edged sword when people recommend you a piece of work that is so personal and so outrageously close to some of your own experiences. It can either become the kind of transcendent art that makes you feel seen and appreciated. Or that closeness means that you can see these hyper-specific ways that it not only gets things “wrong” about said experience, but feels like it uses them in a way that feels downright, well, using. Which is all preamble to say I had very, very, very complicated feelings about TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW.

But wait, wouldn’t that make for great discussion in a book club?!?!?! Isn’t that, like, the point even????? You would think. But because of the exact nature of my thoughts, combined with the fact that I’d effectively be “leading” the conversation, the problem is that it would either be starting the discussion with radioactive energy or sweeping in later and making people feel like crud after they’ve spoken. I agonized over this. I even ran trial discussions with friends and exactly what I feared always seemed to happen. So in the end, the thing I realized is that for this particular book - and more my specific reaction to it - I needed to do the usual modus operandi. I needed to write a response so it could be thought about, then we could talk about it in the comments (and maybe still hold a discussion). I just knew I had to get this out first.

With that, let’s dive in.

* * *

Gabrielle Zevin is a great writer. I want to make that part clear. She can bring you into a real space and both a sense of time and tonal clarity. She can craft a sense of character and interiority, plainly evoking the emotion at the center of one's thoughts and actions. Every important writer-ly tool of conveyance is there. She even digs deep and is clearly telling stories that feel personal, lived in, passionate, and vibrant. Again, there is a GOOD REASON this book strikes such a chord with so many people. But it also comes with a pertinent and frankly, kind of annoying question…

How much do the *exact* details matter?

That may seem an odd question for people who have read the book and enjoyed all its many endearing references, especially if you’ve lived in LA or Boston. Like, it points out the Clownerina building! The Cliff’s Edge brunch spot! Or a T stop you know near Harvard! And it just so happens that the book takes place in all the exact spots I’ve lived in my life and in the same exact time frames that I did, though Zevin did not come here until 2012… Which leads to a very simple problem with the constant references that are made throughout the book: the timelines are CONSTANTLY wrong. Because yeah, the truth is that the aforementioned brunch place wasn’t open yet. The Arclight literally didn’t exist to show The Matrix. And more specifically, the tone and tenor with which she talks about EVERY neighborhood is so so so so so so wrong for the timeline and misses the rapid gentrification that lead to many of the places being talked about. Essentially, it’s documenting the Los Angeles of the mid 2010s and saying it’s the LA of the early 2000s and even with the earlier scenes that go back to the 80’s / 90’s… But why does this even matter?

On one level, it doesn’t. Which is why I swear this isn’t about being pedantic. But, I’ll also cop to the fact that I’ve become weirdly defensive of Los Angeles. Not just because it’s my home of 20 years, but because I’ve come to see this specific ongoing pattern again and again. Specifically, I see wave after wave of New Yorkers come here, lament coming here, complain, constantly compare, and generally say the worst things (often about food or people) that end up often being pretty racist! Because they’re only zooming in on this incredible small, myopic view of what they’re looking at right in front of them. And in reality, Los Angeles is this massive, sprawling city that is full of so many amazing, wonderful things, you just have to explore. Every single day I learn something new and in doing so, realize how much more I still *don’t* know about this wonderful place. To be clear, Zevin is not that kind of New Yorker. There’s no malice, nor disdain, there’s even an appreciation. But time and time again - as revealed so often in those aforementioned details, it reflects the kind of assumptive popular thinking of, “it was always like this, right?” And no, no it wasn’t. But it’s less about the possible lessons of gentrification and the city’s crucial history…

And more the way it infects the larger story being told.

Because it does the same *exact* thing with the core subject of the book: video games. Again, at first glance you wouldn’t be able to tell. It all feels well-researched, planned out, and wholly understanding of the current landscape. But it’s that simple issue of timeline and supplanting the things that came later as always being there. I realize there is partly a genuine explanation for some of this, in that it is positioning the main characters as pioneers and forerunners in the industry. Thus, their games need to be incredibly successful and groundbreaking! And I get the instinct to do this, but I cannot explain just how the tenor of it feels utterly out of place and I feel like people are missing it. To wit, the book weirdly got heat with accusations of plagiarism in regards to Romero’s “Train” board game, which is odd to me when clearly BOTH are just invoking the central game mechanic of 2014’s Papers Please (and in general I feel like the internet has a really bad handle on what narrative plagiarism actually *is*). But there is this weird streak to me in taking that landmark indie game and saying a kid in college invented it fifteen years prior in a text-based game no less. It’s only showing the kinds of games, the culture, and the ideas that came about now and crucially ignoring what created them.

For one, it is impossible to talk about The Indie Game boom without talking about the rise of Steam. You see the hallmarks in all the games our beloved characters “invent” whether it’s Fez, Braid, Minecraft, Undertale, and especially Stardew Valley, but doing so all in the timeframe of years prior when there weren’t the resources nor distribution systems to finally get back to “garage game-making” (and there's a reason the indie market didn’t explode until 2014 when downloading games finally really the norm). Because everything about the characterization of our main character’s journey taps into the modern indie landscape, only it is painstakingly applying them to the older late 90’s / 2000’s landscape - often in a way that feels researched, but unfamiliar in practices, like the way everyone refers to “3.5 inch disks,” but no one ever uses the word “floppy disk.” Meanwhile, there’s a reason that many of the core inspirations of the book that Zevin names, that would be the great Ken and Roberta Williams and the Johns, Carmack and Romero, all rose to indie prominence during the first indie games boom of the 80s when garage game-making was also possible. Even with the closest parable to the book’s company, Tim Schafer and Double Fine Games, there’s a reason they came out of the LucasArts powerhouse. Like Los Angeles, everything timeline-wise about the industry feels wrong. It is taking the conditions of the present and rubber-stamping it onto a hypothetical past. And again, the fair question is why does this even matter? It doesn’t on a pedantic level, but it does on a theme level.

Because ultimately it’s about fucking gamergate.

No, it never uses that phrase because it all takes place years before, but it absolutely is / uses a lot of specifics directly associated with it. To wit, the books central heartbreaking plot-turn is the death of Marx, the third member of their triumvirate and the agreeable glue / wedge in Sam and Sadie’s creative partnership. But then two toxic fans come in and lament the game for being too progressive and they shoot Marx (outside of endless threats made in gamergate, the closest event of violence like this directly in the game community is the Jacksonville shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacksonville_Landing_shooting , which more reflected the toxic competitive culture). In the event, the shooters are even using the terminology “you’re an NPC!” a popular colloquialism that literally didn’t even gain popularity until 2018. And again, this horrific fictional event is happening in the 2000s.

And again, the question is why does it matter?

Because in the 2000s none of this was happening. At least not like this. On the popular level, studios were just beginning to think harder about the cultures and conditions of the games they were making. Video game fans were far more “secure” because they still ruled the proverbial roost and acted like tyrannical bullies of their hardcore space - and reasonable gamers who were mostly embarrassed by them. But all these groups were far more concerned with legitimizing the medium as an art form in popular eyes. Which is why in the late 2000s you had the first burgeoning conversations from young games journalists starting to ask the questions: ludonarrative dissonance, the evolution of Joystiq and Kotaku, and Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives in 2010 is this huge fulcrum point in the popular narrative. These things may have had pesky questions to hardcore gamers, but they also legitimized them. And either way, it was part of “The Bubble” of their own controlled space of everything happening in games. All seemingly agreed upon with the “innocence” of trolling, shitposting, indulgent game making, maximizing violence, and basically everything that created a certain set of conditions. Because the biggest problem with the book's timeline is just how much The Bubble was hugely important to what came next. Because with the post steam indie boom / rise of more sensitive gaming storytellers (read: the characters in this story, who really should be coming in the 2010s) came all the horror.

Specifically, the popping of The Bubble and the feeling that games were “getting taken away” from them, which was actually just part of the genuine orchestration of conservative groups led by Steve Fucking Bannon with Milo Yiannopoulos to poison the well. It’s not conspiratorial, all of this is meticulously documented here. They were bored ironic shit posters in the 2000s who then go radicalized to the right as part of the 2010’s online fascist movement. As part of that, The Bubble of ignorance was crucial to how that selection pool spent years metastasizing. Hell, when Gamergate hit, there were so many people in the industry who agreed with it, or at least “both sides-ed” it. It was this horrible year of hemming and hawing, all before gorwing to this reckoning moment that finally spurred on some larger sense of collective fucking responsibility for the exact minsets they had been indulging for years within The Bubble - and we’re still running into the fallout with the Blizzard / Activision stuff and so many other spaces.

None of which exists in this narrative.

Again, it’s not that the book has to show this, but it paints almost everyone as the innocent party when it comes to the culture of what gets fostered. They were good-minded folks who more or less wanted to make progressive art (with a few concessions mostly explored between Mazur and Sadie’s creative relationship) and experienced tragedy because of it. Which is NOT the essential story of the games industry in the 2000s. Because guys like Mazur? And especially guys like Dov Mizrah? They were the architects of not only the culture of The Bubble, but the culture of anger and entitlement. Everything about their characterization is so utterly fundamental to the conditions that caused the exact thing that radicals took advantage of. But when the book makes that NPC shooting comment, it just harkens that familiar refrain, “it was always like this, right?” No it fucking wasn’t. There was a critical systemic shift.

But I realize this is complicated because the book actually does a really good job exploring the issue on an interpersonal character-based level, namely Mazur’s feelings of guilt and Sadie’s feelings of anger - and how it affects their relationship. And it’s ultimately about the way these two people are tied together despite (often reckong with the boundary crossing events, too). I get that emotional core of it so succinctly. Because it means the metaphor is so so so close to tying into the character’s stories. To the point that I think you could be incredibly generous and say that’s the point! It’s the author telling the story emotionally, not sociologically! Or that these characters not “getting it” is the point! But I just never get that little tip of awareness that shows the author understands this throughline. I mean, it’s plain-faced in its sociological commentary of late 2010’s culture, but nothing prior? I just don’t get a single tip that makes me foster the connection. And if it were just this one thing, even that would be excusable. But as I’ve gone through this whole book and it’s the fatal flaw of every bit of approach of “it was always like this, right?” And it makes me feel like the book truly doesn’t realize what it is ignoring, nor what it is propping up because of that ignorance. And that leads to what is perhaps the most essential question.

Does the book HAVE to recognize any of this?

Of course not. I mean, there’s a reason it has received critical acclaim. Zevin is an incredible, thoughtful, sensitive writer. I’m not stupid enough not to recognize that, nor even begrudging of that success. What I’m talking about her is something deeper and more personal. Which is why I have so much hesitance in this discussion. It’s just that I have been in these specific worlds for 20 damn years now. I know what it’s like to have Kotaku link to you and get swarmed by the rabid Batman fans making threats, along with invasions into personal space that make you sick to your stomach. I watched this exact story happen, often to friends in a horrific manner. I’ve seen the arc of time. And I think that if you are going to tell THIS story, I think it’s absolutely completely fucking beyond critical that you understand the arc of that space. If you just want to talk about the conditions of now, that’s one thing. Go for it. But if you are going to tell the story of “gaming pioneers”, well then it evokes a line from Kelly Reichardt’s incredible FIRST COW where two characters musing over their frontier journey and one says “history isn’t here yet. It’s coming, but we got here early this time. Maybe, this time, we can be ready for it.”

Whether it’s Los Angeles gentrification, the history of games, and the rise of far right radical violence, it all speaks to the age old lesson of history itself and being doomed to repeat it. In that, the blind assumption of “it was always like this, right?” is the death-knell of everything critical. At best, it evokes the idea that bad things always exist - but it falsely paints them as a  static condition, which can also lead to a false sense of security with the safety of the present. The point is that The Bubbles are dangerous spaces. And the timeline and oscillations are the key to causes in these cycles. To really speak to tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, you have to show how much you have actually understand yesterday and yesterday and yesterday. I know that connecting those dots may not matter to you. But for me?

It’s the only point really worth making.

<3HULK