There’s a charming, affable character in this novel who is referred to by several other characters as an “NPC,” who quietly becomes the main character, if this novel could be said to have a main character. At any rate he gets to narrate one of its most moving and formalistically interesting chapters.
That’s how I feel about this book. I underestimated it at first. For the first quarter, I expected it to be a pleasant and juicy read, combining a classic love triangle with an insidery look at a fictional gaming company and appealing nostalgic references to 90s and 00s culture, in gaming and beyond. By the last quarter, I had to admit how attached I was to its improbably charismatic characters and how personally I took their wins and losses. There are a few oddities that contributed to my first impression–although it does so deftly, the narrative seems to feel obliged to explain both what video games are and what the 90s were, as if trying to appeal to the widest possible age range. Which is weird, because this is a story aimed squarely at people my age, and probably yours: the Oregon Trail generation, the ones who remember life before video games and thus have deep emotional attachments to the first ones we fell in love with. Everyone else can fall in love with these characters and their relationships to one another, but their relationships to gaming belong to us.