num_pages: 224
description: You have been awakened. Floppy disk inserted computer turned on a whirring and then this sentence followed by a blinking cursor. So begins Suspended  the first computer game to obsess seven-year-old Michael to worm into his head and change his sense of reality. Thirty years later he will Computer games have taught me the things you can't learn from people. Gamelife is the memoir of a childhood transformed by technology. Afternoons spent gazing at pixelated maps and mazes train Michael's eyes for the uncanny side of 1980s suburban Illinois. A game about pirates yields clues to the drama of cafeteria politics and locker-room hazing. And in the year of his parents' divorce a spaceflight simulator opens a hole in reality. In telling the story of his youth through seven computer games Michael W. Clune captures the part of childhood we live alone.
language: English
title: Gamelife: A Memoir
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux