“Truly great games dominate us, subject us to pattern. They take over our brains, in the same way drugs do an addict’s. By replacing emotion with pattern. By separating humans from their humanity.”
“In Gamelife, Clune argues that games build an exoskeleton of cool, steady logic around a human world obsessed with warm, weird experience. By “logic” I don’t mean “reason,” by the way, but structure and repetition. Pattern. A way of doing things. If used properly, logic can help stanch experience’s tendency to oversupply sensations — the source of all torments — by explaining them as part of a larger cosmic order.”
“Clune knows that logic underlies games in the form of numbers, which do what language cannot: they couple directly to the machinery of the universe rather than mediating it through human-made symbols”
“Games connect you with the sublime infinity of the mathematical universe, but they intersect with the real world only in secret and for pretend. Only in your head.”
“Some games access the cosmic sublime, while others just caricature real life.”
“It turns out that games can get us into habits, but not past them. To get beyond habit, we need language. Habit and affect are opposites. To be affected, we need literature. Perhaps this is why games are so often associated with the asocial or autistic, the medium of those who cannot deliberately embody affect, or at least who cannot master it.”
“These days, though, the memoir often inaugurates success rather than commemorating it. Girls’s Lena Dunham has one. So does Playboy bunny Holly Madison. Orange is the New Black was a memoir before it was a hit Netflix series. Literary fiction, too, has shifted closer to memoir: Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, Teju Cole, Tao Lin, Sheila Heti. Even academic scholarship, like Alice Goffman’s On The Run, can now take the form, and claim some of the poetic license, of memoir.”
“In another sense, our cultural moment is an endless hailstorm of micromemoir: a cacophony of people speaking in their own voices, in quips and hot takes and overshares on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and on personal blogs and online magazines. Most of our internal monologues don’t warrant preservation, and so they vanish, rightly, into the oblivion of deep scrolling. But some memories really are worth holding on to, and that’s why we still need books. This is the power (and the danger) of the memoir form: It allows mental connections to flourish, merely because they emanated from the mind of a writer who can render memory into memorable prose. Memoir is a virus for memories, reproducing them in the brains of strangers. A way of sharing not just what’s on our minds, but how our minds work.”