YAC HIT LIST: The Gamer List

By Ned VizziniDecember 8, 2012

YAC HIT LIST: The Gamer List

The Other Normals by Ned Vizzini

I AM NOT A GAMER. I don't have any video games on my computer, in my house, or on my phone, except for the version of mahjong that ships with Windows 7, which I play in dark moments on plane trips. 


But I wish I were a gamer. Because I remember how good it was.


 In 1989, when Nintendo was new, only my upstairs neighbor Brock had it. He was an older kid, pretty unpleasant; he liked to toss his hamster through his laundry basketball hoop for fun and once destroyed this amethyst geode I had when he pushed me into a bookshelf. 


But I played Nintendo with Brock whenever I could. Any unpleasantness was worth it for Super Mario Brothers. My eight-year-old brain was absolutely sure that it was as much of a beautiful encapsulation of the human condition as the Narnia books or The Phantom Toolbooth. 


I stopped playing games in high school, when Doom became the rage. I wasn't interested in 3D real-time environments where enemies tried to kill me -- that was what high school already was. 


 So my game experience involves a very specific, classic period that was immortalized by the Scott Pilgrim movie. (And, Disney hopes, by Wreck-It Ralph.) Call it the sub-20-bit period. Here's what it taught me:


1. A creative direction not to take.


I never just played video games. I always designed them. On graph paper. With mechanical pencils. I finished Super Mario and tried to invent my own game like that, Desert Jumper. (It wasn't terribly original.) What I discovered was that in order to design a video game, I had to actually learn how to program a computer, and that was a lot more difficult than writing a story. The technical barriers of game creation turned me toward writing.


2. The thrill of victory.


 You never win watching television. I used to watch a lot of it -- all the Saturday morning cartoons, from 5:30am to Pee-Wee's Playhouse -- and when I finished, I always had a weird sick feeling, like I was wasting my life, plus dizziness. But if I played hours and hours of a video game and won, I felt like an adult.


3. The importance of a princess.


 It was nuts how many games involved a princess. Not just Mario, but Zelda, Ninja Gaiden, Double Dragon... in the more modern games it was a "girlfriend" instead of a "princess." Even if you saved the world, it didn't matter if you didn't find love. I remembered that when I started writing.


 The first generation of gamers are now making movies, writing for television, and writing books. I'm one of them; my young adult novel The Other Normals is about a kid in summer camp who falls into a fantasy world based on his favorite game.  


Here are my favorite books about gaming for young adults and those who used to be them.


 ¤



  • Interstellar Pig by William Sleator (YA)



  • Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (YA)



  • Extra Lives by Tom Bissel (non-fiction)



  • Glory Season by David Brin (SF)



  • Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered The World by David Sheff (non-fiction)



  • Fantasy Freaks & Gaming Geeks by Ethan Gilsdorf (non-fiction)



  • Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who Play It by David M Ewalt (May 2013) (non-fiction)


 


 

LARB Contributor

Ned Vizzini is the author of It's Kind of a Funny Story, Be More Chill, and Teen Angst? Naaah.... He has written for The New York Times, Salon, and Season 2 of MTV's Teen Wolf. His work has been translated into seven languages. He is the co-author, with Chris Columbus, of the forthcoming fantasy-adventure series House of Secrets. His newest novel is The Other Normals.

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