This being the world — the video game world, especially — it’s Sam whose work receives the lion’s share of cultural and critical attention, despite Sadie’s arguably greater contribution. It’s very much to Zevin’s credit that she draws out this long process of creative usurpation as being no one’s fault in particular, and even takes pains to show Sadie’s complicity in her own erasure. In a word, it’s complicated, as most matters of artistic collaboration are. While Sam and Sadie are making their first game, “Ichigo,” they decide to assign no explicit gender to its eponymous character, referring to the small being at the center of the game only as “they.”
Eventually, a game publisher presses Sam and Sadie to go ahead and call Ichigo “he” — games with female leads don’t sell, they’re told — and it’s Sam who urges Sadie to capitulate. Their first creative fissure forms — and we spend the rest of the novel watching it widen along a fault line of fame, money, success and eventual tragedy. Zevin gets a lot of the detail-y things about game development right, among them the centrality of having a good producer — this is Marx, in Sam and Sadie’s case — along with much of the terminology: “volumetric lighting,” the shorthand use of “MC” for main character, “texture layers” and so on.
What’s largely absent here, however, are the unadorned realities of game-making. The despair, for instance, that results from an idea that seems as if it should be fun, but isn’t fun, no matter what you do. There’s very little depiction of how central play-testing and quality assurance are to game design, or of nuking core design conceits because of cost overruns or talent underruns. For the most part, Sam and Sadie’s games tend to work out the way they imagine they will, yet one of the most critically acclaimed titles I ever worked on, “What Remains of Edith Finch,” a game about a cursed family whose members all perish in freak accidents, began its life as a scuba simulator, of all things. No one — trust me on this — wants an entirely accurate novel about game development, which would be a thousand pages of motionless ennui with an exciting 10-page coda, but if there’s a criticism to make of Zevin’s novel, it’s that the professional parts of her game creators’ lives seem far too easy, while the personal parts often seem far too hard.
I have no idea if Zevin has ever read John Irving’s “The World According to Garp,” but she seems to have subliminally recreated it in certain ways. Both novels are about highly creative people struggling, and often failing, to overcome their sex baggage, their mother baggage, their money baggage and identity baggage. Both novels traffic in what could be called whimsicruelty — a smiling, bright-eyed march into pitch-black narrative material: child trauma, amputation, a narratively crucial fatal car accident. Both are finally riven by a random act of shocking violence.
