To design a game is to imagine the person who will eventually play it.
The key to being a good thief, Sam always felt, was utter brazenness.
But because he had been mostly raised in Asia, he had been completely sheltered from the kind of racism that Asians experienced in America.
I thought you were worried I was going to die,” Sam said. “No. You’ll never die. And if you ever died, I’d just start the game again,” Sadie said. “Sam’s dead. Put another quarter in the machine.” “Go back to the save point. Keep playing, and we’ll win eventually.
He wanted to ask her to work with him at a special place – the occasion of their prospective creative union should be memorable. Even then, he felt that if they made a game, and if the game became what he knew it could be, he would want there to be a story about the day Sam Masur and Sadie Green had decided to work together. He was already imagining Sam-and-Sadie lore, and he didn’t even have a definitive idea for a game yet.
The way he saw it, he would be proposing to Sadie. He would be getting down on one knee and saying, “Will you work with me? Will you give me your time, and will you trust my hunch that this time will be well spent? Will you believe that we could make great things together?” For all his natural arrogance, he did not assume that she would say yes.
The pain seemed to occupy spaces in his mind that had heretofore been untouched or reserved exclusively for imaginary endeavors.
You aren’t just a gamer when you play anymore. You’re a builder of worlds, and if you’re a builder of worlds, your feelings are not as important as what your gamers are feeling. You must imagine them at all times. There is no artist more empathetic than the game designer.
I think she must have been terribly blue. I think she must have had troubles in her life.” “Do you ever get blue?” “Yes, everyone gets blue. But I don’t think I could ever get melancholy like that, because I have you.
Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you love someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it.
What a funny turn of phrase, she thought. Licking your wounds would only make them worse, no? The mouth was filled with so much bacteria. But Sadie knew it was easy to get addicted to the taste of your own carnage.
I think I don’t like children because I hated being young.
She retraced the same route she and Sam had taken just that morning when the world seemed soft-focused and filled with possibility. The path now seemed dismal and dangerous to her. And she thought to herself that it was strange how quickly the world could shift. She let her mind go to the dark place.
Okay, so you spoke to her. She was definitely not a ghost. Did she ever reply?” Bong Cha narrowed her eyes at Sam, deciding if her grandson was trying to trick her into appearing foolish. “Yes, in my mind, she did. I knew your mother so well I could play her part.
He had never seen anything die before and so, he could not be certain that she was dying. And yet, somewhere deep inside himself, he felt a recognition and then a reckoning: this was death, and he would die, and his mother would die, and everyone you ever met and ever loved would die, and maybe it would happen when you or they were old, but maybe not. To know this was unbearable: it was a fact too large for a nine-year-old avatar to contain.
Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.
Your cousin Albert told me that, in business, they call this a pivot. But life is filled with them, too. The most successful people are also the most able to change their mindsets.
As he said to Sam, “If I’ve done the work in the scenes before I die, if I’ve made a real impression, they’ll feel me in the scenes I’m not in anyway.
He was tanned and buttery, like a quality handbag; his hair had the color and rigidity of onyx; his teeth were enormous white rectangles. He gave the impression of being handsome without actually being handsome.
This is the most violent poetry game I’ve ever played,′ Marx said.