“You are suspended — physically immobilized, frozen but alive — 20 miles beneath the surface of an automated planet.” That was the idea, as Michael W. Clune explains in his new memoir, “Gamelife,” behind a 1980s computer game called Suspended that hooked him when he was 7. “Think logically,” the game’s manual read. “Act decisively. Your life — and that of the entire planet — depends on you.”
Sold on a floppy disk and played on a Commodore 64, Suspended became young Michael’s gateway into the solace-giving realm of video games. Compared with the graphically realistic mind candy of today — Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, Skyrim — the landscape Clune sketches in “Gamelife” is more primitive. Titles like Zork and Oregon Trail provided skeletons of immersive worlds. Their rudimentary text directives and chunky imagery scrolled across dim screens like chalk marks on a cave wall. But for Clune, now a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, these Reagan-era games offered a way to navigate the perils of his baffling preadolescence.
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“After a few seconds the frustration drained away, and it hit me: I’d been inside. I’d been somewhere else.” That space, the computer’s imaginary universe, provided a “new direction to grow,” Clune recalls, not toward people but “out, away from