A coming-of-age memoir in seven computer games, from the author of Whiteout .

"Unconventionally plotted and oddly moving. . . . Gamelife argues that our hidden inner world, 'the part of our lives that wasn't involved with people,' can save us in an outside world that doesn't always make us feel whole." ―Ethan Gilsdorf, The New York Times Book Review

You have been awakened.

Floppy disk inserted, computer turned on, a whirring, and then this sentence, followed by a blinking cursor. So begins Suspended, the first computer game to obsess seven-year-old Michael, to worm into his head and change his sense of reality. Thirty years later he will write: "Computer games have taught me the things you can't learn from people."

Gamelife is the memoir of a childhood transformed by technology. Afternoons spent gazing at pixelated maps and mazes train Michael's eyes for the uncanny side of 1980s suburban Illinois. A game about pirates yields clues to the drama of cafeteria politics and locker-room hazing. And in the year of his parents' divorce, a spaceflight simulator opens a hole in reality.

In telling the story of his youth through seven computer games, critically acclaimed author Michael W. Clune captures the part of childhood we live alone.

"There's no one who writes quite like [Michael Clune]. . . . Gamelife is a spectacular accomplishment." ― The New Republic

"Clune's memoirs will take over your brain, too, but in the opposite way: they will make you more human, by doubling down on your capacity for empathy, as the best literature tends to do. They will leech compassion from your center and radiate it out though your pores, where you will worry others will see it and stare. These are books you should read if you're interested in being alive on earth. White or male or no, drug addict or no, gamer or no." ―Ian Bogost, Los Angeles Times Review of Books