The Riverside Press-Enterprise
4 LOVE AND WORK IN PLAY
Gabrielle Zevin touches on friendship, on- and offline identity and more in a past era of video games
“I think that there’s sometimes a weird illness that’s brought upon by having an online identity, where people act as if the things they do online have no effect and have nothing to do with the real world. So even if they’re nice in their everyday lives, they feel like it’s fine to be horrible on a message board or playing a game over a headset. They’re like, ‘Well, it’s not real.’ One of the things I’m saying in the book is that what you do online is real, that it’s still part of you when you do those things.” — Gabrielle Zevin, author of “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”
Can a story about work also be a story about great love? Absolutely, according to bestselling author and screenwriter Gabrielle Zevin, and that’s what her latest book is all about. Spanning three decades, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” tells the fictional tale of video game creators Sam Masur and Sadie Green. The two have different backgrounds — Korean American Sam is disabled and living with his grandparents in Los Angeles’ Koreatown; Sadie is Jewish and lives in Beverly Hills — but they strike up a deep though brief friendship over video games.
As college students, they reconnect in Cambridge (via an inside joke from Oregon Trail, an educational game popular in the ’80s and ’90s and a cultural touchstone for younger Gen X-ers/ older millennials) and embark on creating their own game, Ichigo, with the help of Sam’s roommate Marx. Released in that brief window of history when games built by two or three people in a dorm room could explode in popularity, Ichigo catapults Sam, Sadie and Marx to industry stardom. But it also raises questions of individual identity that Sam and Sadie must grapple with, and sets seemingly impossible expectations for what their partnership must accomplish next.
In “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” out now from Penguin Random House, Zevin examines teamwork, online and offline identities, the intensity of friend relationships, and how work that is fueled by love can produce transcendent art. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
QThere’s something very enticing about a book about work and the potential of creative partnerships — can you talk about that?
AThere’s this idea that there’s only one kind of great love story, and usually, you know, it’s romantic love. Friendship is somewhat seen as a lesser kind of love; same for colleagues or work, that this kind of love is not worth discussing. But I think these days, there’s also fatigue around the idea of romantic love being the only kind of love.
Sometimes people are the most loving and best versions of themselves at work or in play or in friendships. I think that a great love story can be a work story, and it can be a friend story, and I wanted to write about that. I’ve always loved books about creative partnerships; stories about work and making art together.
QWere there any game industry personalities you took inspiration from for your characters and the story?
AOne of my early inspirations for the book was thinking about near-educational games like the King’s Quest series from Sierra Entertainment. Those games were made by a married couple in Southern California, Ken and Roberta Williams.
There’s also John Carmack and John Romero, the guys behind Doom and Commander Keen. I thought of all these people as the mix of the many kinds of personalities you need to succeed in any game endeavor — any artistic endeavor.
There was a point in the early ’90s where you could make a really big game with relatively few people working on it. And I wouldn’t say that that’s necessarily true anymore, with a few exceptions — the guy who made Stardew Valley was basically a one-man operation. But for the most part, big games are made by big companies with teams of hundreds now.
QCan you talk about intersecting identities as a theme? How you went about tackling the interplay of Sam’s disability and his online identity?
APeople nowadays are used to having multiple identities, something a prior generation of people has had no idea about. Sam is the only character I’ve ever written who has the same racial background that I do — I am a half-korean, half-jewish person. When you’re biracial, if you’re in one place, you might be seen by others as one thing, and if you’re somewhere else, you might be seen by others as something else. For biracial people, the sense of identity is always shifting.
There’s also our online identities. These days, people have more hand in creating their identity than they’ve ever had before. I think for some people — Sam is one of these people — the self that is online can be more true than the actual self. What’s interesting to me is how when you create a game persona, you can be whoever you want to be, but you can also acceptably be whatever you want to be, to an extent. I also think having multiple selves changes the way you’re going to be a human on the planet.
When I was starting to write the book, one of the questions I asked myself was: “Why do people play?” And one of the reasons I came up with was that people play to escape the limitations of a physical body. For Sam, gameplay is a lifeline and a place where he can feel more capable and more part of the world. You might think of gaming as being an isolating activity, something that people do because they don’t want to connect with other people. But for Sam, it’s something he does because he really wants to connect with other people
QFrom the happy foot, sad foot sign in Silver Lake to the ballerina clown in Venice, there’s so much of L.A. in this book.
AI’ve been living in L.A. for the entire pandemic. I wrote a lot of this book during lockdown, and it reflects the extent to which I felt a great longing for cities I had lived in. All the cities in the book are cities I’ve either lived or worked in extensively. I remember when I moved back to L.A. in 2012 just being overwhelmed by Koreatown. I remember thinking, “Would my books have been completely different if I had been raised here?”
Another thing about L.A. is that it’s one of the least historically preserved cities on the planet, you know? So you end up giving the happy foot, sad foot sign for a foot doctor historical significance.
I’ve always loved the clown ballerina building in Venice. I don’t know the answer to what that sculpture is supposed to be about — but I liked depicting some of these places that I thought were a little bit more LA.
QThe book also gets into some of the challenges and dangers of what we choose to do within online identities.
AGoing back to the subject of identity, I think that there’s sometimes a weird illness that’s brought upon by having an online identity, where people act as if the things they do online have no effect and have nothing to do with the real world. So even if they’re nice in their everyday lives, they feel like it’s fine to be horrible on a message board or playing a game over a headset. They’re like, “Well, it’s not real.” One of the things I’m saying in the book is that what you do online is real, that it’s still part of you when you do those things.
I do want to say that I don’t think games make people violent. I think that’s ridiculous.
Q AWhat do you want your readers to understand about games and about this book?
Stories connect us. They determine how we tell the stories of our own lives. What I would want people to understand about games is that they’re really another form of storytelling, and that this book can be understood as a book about people trying to make sense of their lives.
Some people might think, “What do games have to do with my life?” Well, we can certainly argue about the fact that even people that don’t think they game actually game. Everybody games; everybody who’s ever joined Facebook has gamed.
And even though we have more and more ways to connect, it still seems really difficult. So this is a book about how rare it can be to truly connect with somebody, in a virtual world or in the real world.