Highlights
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“Well, this is entirely up to you,” Sharyn said. “But the nurse wondered if you might come back tomorrow to talk to Sam again.” Before Sadie had time to respond, Sharyn added, “I know you have to do community service for your Bat Mitzvah next year, and I’m sure this would probably count.” To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love.
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Sam would later tell people that these mazes were his first attempts at writing games. “A maze,” he would say, “is a video game distilled to its purest form.” Maybe so, but this was revisionist and self-aggrandizing. The mazes were for Sadie. To design a game is to imagine the person who will eventually play
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“Yes, but the boy doesn’t know about the arrangement, am I right?” “No,” Sadie said. “It never came up.” “And do you think there might be a reason you haven’t brought it up?” “When I’m with Sam, we’re busy,” Sadie said lamely. “Darling, it may come out later, and it could hurt your friend’s feelings, if he thinks he is a charity to you, and not a genuine friendship.” “Can’t something be both?” Sadie said. “Friendship is friendship, and charity is charity,” Freda said. “You know very well that I was in Germany as a child, and you have heard the stories, so I won’t tell them to you again. But 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.”
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Freda stroked Sadie’s hand. “Mine Sadie. This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.”
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She wasn’t hiding the fact of her community service from Sam, but the longer it went on, the less she felt that she could ever tell him. She knew that the presence of the timesheet made it seem as if she had an ulterior motive, though the truth was obvious to her: Sadie Green liked being praised, and Sam Masur was the best friend she had ever had. Sadie’s community service project went on for fourteen months. Predictably, it ended the day Sam discovered its existence.
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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. Cue MIDI Wagner. The idea of Solution was that if you won the game on points, you lost it morally.
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Sadie hadn’t worked on a game of her own since she’d been with Dov, though she did occasionally help him with his. It was easier, in some ways, to work with and for Dov than it was to do her own work. Her work seemed basic and uninteresting compared to the kind of work Dov was doing. Her work was basic and uninteresting. She had just turned twenty. Everyone’s work is basic and uninteresting at twenty. But being around Dov made her feel impatient with her twenty-year-old brain and the quality of its ideas.
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He had not done the things she had done. Compared to him, she felt aged and withered, and she thought, if they spoke, he would be able to sense her decay.
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If she told him about a game she admired that he didn’t think much of, he would tell her the reasons the game was terrible. And that didn’t just go for games—it was movies, books, and art, too. It got to the point where she would never outright say her opinion of anything. She trained herself to begin conversations, “What did you think, Dov?”
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She had emphasized the volunteerism aspects of the relationship and had described Sam as “pretty pathetic.” There was a part of Sadie that hadn’t wanted Alice to know Sam, to offer her opinions about him as candidly as Alice offered opinions of Sadie’s other friends and classmates. Alice was clever, but she had the kind of cleverness that verged on the unkind,
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She might want to work at a company that he worked for. She might want to design a game with him. She might end up on a panel with him, or he might be the judge for a gaming award. Sadie, like Sam, had a gift for imagining herself in the future. She saw a future in which she would not be Dov’s lover, but she still might be his colleague, his employee, his friend. If she was cool, this time won’t have been a waste. Life is very long, she thought, unless it is not.
New highlights added 2024-07-04 at 10:47 AM
- The terse explanation she’d given for her depression was a “bad breakup.” Sam felt it had to be more than that, but out of respect for her, he did not push her to elaborate. They had the rare kind of friendship that allowed for a great deal of privacy within it. One of the reasons they had become such good friends originally was because she had not insisted he tell his sad stories to satisfy her own curiosity. The least he could do was return the favor.
New highlights added 2024-07-31 at 11:38 PM
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As Sadie would put it in an interview with Wired, “The game character, like the self, is contextual.” In Koreatown, no one ever thought Sam was Korean. In Manhattan, no one had ever thought he was white. In Los Angeles, he was the “white cousin.” In New York, he was that “little Chinese kid.” And yet, in K-town, he felt more Korean than he ever had before. Or to put a finer point on it, he felt more aware of the fact that he was a Korean and that that was not necessarily a negative or even a neutral fact about him. The awareness gave him pause: perhaps a funny-looking mixed-race kid could exist at the center of the world, not just on its periphery.
Highlights
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But I saw what she and Sammy [Masur, programmer and designer, Ichigo] were trying to do, and it seemed really special to me, and like something I wanted to be involved with. I thought that Ulysses could help them. Listen, Ulysses shouldn’t take away from anything Sadie and Sammy did. The amount of work those two kids did was astounding. I cite them as an example to my students of how much two kids and a couple of computers can get done on their own. Game companies have gotten too big and impersonal. You have ten guys doing texture layers, and ten guys doing modeling and ten guys doing backgrounds, and someone else is writing the story, and someone else is writing the dialogue, and literally, no one ever talks to each oth
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Once Ichigo had become a real boy, his identity and Sam’s identity became more and more inseparable. People beyond Aaron Opus started to say Sam looked like Ichigo—he did, somewhat. They ate up Sam’s colorful and tragic biography: the childhood injury and playing video games as a way to be invincible, the Korean grandfather with the pizza parlor and the Donkey Kong machine. They tried to find ways in which Sam’s biography and Ichigo’s overlapped.
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Sadie didn’t feel like explaining to Dov that she wasn’t sorry, and that he hadn’t answered the question she was asking. “Okay,” she said. “Thanks, Dov.” By eleven-thirty, Sadie was in her pajamas, teeth brushed and flossed, ready to go to bed. She wondered if this was what other twenty-three-year-olds’ Friday nights were like. When she was forty, would she lament that she hadn’t had sex with more people and partied more? But then, she didn’t enjoy many people, and she had never gone to a party that she wasn’t eager to leave. She hated being drunk, though she did enjoy smoking a joint every now and then. She liked playing games, seeing a foreign movie, a good meal. She liked going to bed early and waking up early. She liked working. She liked that she was good at her work, and she felt proud of the fact that she was well paid for it. She felt pleasure in orderly things—a perfectly efficient section of code, a closet where every item was in its place. She liked solitude and the thoughts of her own interesting and creative mind. She liked to be comfortable. She liked hotel rooms, thick towels, cashmere sweaters, silk dresses, oxfords, brunch, fine stationery, overpriced conditioner, bouquets of gerbera, hats, postage stamps, art monographs, maranta plants, PBS documentaries, challah, soy candles, and yoga.
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Most of promotion had been a grind. It had been telling the same stories over and over again but acting as if he were telling them for the first time. It had been listening to stupid people make stupid observations about Ichigo, their baby, and having to act as if these observations were delightful, trenchant, and original. It had been dragging out his personal traumas for the amusement of the game-buying public. It had been seedy sales conferences. It had been signings in run-down game stores in strip malls. It had been smiling for photographs until he had a headache. It had been endless airplane travel and rental car lines.
New highlights added 2024-08-03 at 11:47 PM
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He wasn’t a fool; he knew what Marx had been doing when he’d insisted they move their business here. Marx had let him think that they were moving for Both Sides, for Sadie, for himself, and for Zoe even. But the truth was, they had done it for Sam, because Sam had been afraid of facing the winter, because Sam had constantly been in pain, because Sam had been afraid of the surgery and it was obvious to everyone that the surgery could not be put off. They had been worried about him, and they had wanted to make his life easier. And so they invented reasons—some of them even compelling and real. And they had not done this for the game or the company, but because they loved him, and they were his friends. And he felt grateful.
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And didn’t it follow that he would have guessed that the bad breakup she had had was with Dov, and that Sam hadn’t paused, even for one moment, to consider what going back to him would mean for her? How different would the last three years have been if Dov hadn’t had so much professional and personal power over her? If it was true, it was absolutely a betrayal. Sam had wanted what he wanted, and he hadn’t cared what it would mean for Sadie. He had wanted Ulysses, in the same way he had wanted the deal with Opus, in the same way he didn’t truly care if Ichigo was a boy, in the same way he let everyone in the world believe Ichigo was his game, in the same way he had renewed their friendship for the sole purpose of making a game in the first place. She let herself think Sam was her friend, but Sam was no one’s friend.