What’s in it for me? A sweeping tale of friendship, artistry, and gaming.
Gabrielle Zevin’s immersive yet intricately detailed novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, spans thirty years in the friendship and creative collaboration of Sadie Green and Samson Masur.
As eleven year olds, the two initially bond over their interest in video games; later, as a game-designing duo, they will become a bonafide sensation in the gaming industry.
Despite their stratospheric rise, life intervenes – their story encompasses love, loss, resentment, professional jealousy, gender dynamics, disability, racism, belonging, and betrayal.
The novel has been hailed as the first to give video gaming, the gaming industry, and gamers their long-overdue serious literary treatment.
From sly jokes about Donkey Kong to thoughtful meditations on the meaning of play and the place it holds in our lives and friendships, this novel brings nuance and joy to its consideration of the games we play, both on screen and IRL.
Sam and Sadie: a platonic love story
It’s Los Angeles, 1987 and two kids, both eleven years old, are sitting on a sofa and playing Super Mario Bros.
So far, so typical.
But these two kids – their names, by the way are Sam Masur and Sadie Green – aren’t sitting in a living room.
They’re in a hospital games room.
Sadie is visiting her older sister Alice, who is 13 and has leukemia.
Sam, as the cage-like contraption around his foot attests, is recovering from devastating injuries sustained in a car crash that also killed his mother.
Sadie has just wandered into the games room to find Sam in the middle of rescuing Princess Peach.
A keen gamer herself, Sadie strikes up a conversation, and soon the two are amiably gaming and chatting.
This is more significant than it might appear.
As a nurse later informs Sadie, Sam has spoken to no-one since the accident – no-one except Sadie.
Instead, he’s been absorbed in gameplay and in drawing intricate mazes on paper in the style of M.
C Escher.
The nurse asks Sadie if she’d be willing to meet Sam in the games room regularly.
Sadie’s mum reminds Sadie that she needs to do community service for her upcoming bat mitzvah – these visits to Sam could count towards that.
Sadie and Sam spend nearly a whole summer together, getting to know each other, crafting elaborate inside jokes and, always, gaming.
But when Sam discovers Sadie has been using him as a community service project – even though Sadie has long since begun to consider Sam not only a friend but her best friend – he is furious.
He stops speaking and the two fall out of touch.
In their twenties, though, they bump into each other at a train station.
Impulsively, Sadie presses a floppy disk into Sam’s hands.
It contains a prototype of a video game she has been working on.
Sam, and his roommate Marx, play the game.
In fact, they stay up all night playing it.
By the time he has finished playing, Sam’s mind is made up.
He and Sadie Green need to be making video games together.
The first game they make is called Ichigo.
Here’s the premise: a child (the child’s gender is unstipulated in the game) is playing on a beach when a freak wave washes them out to sea.
The aim of the game is to help the child, named Ichigo, navigate back to shore.
Sadie is artistic and rigorous – she decides that the game’s aesthetic should be influenced by Hokusai’s famous woodblock prints of waves, and she painstakingly programs game sequences.
Sam is, unlike Sadie, a self-taught programmer.
He’s the first to say when something isn’t working, and knows when to cut corners instead of pursuing an elusive perfectionism.
When they work well together, Sadie and Sam work incredibly well.
Ichigo is a breakout hit.
But Sam and Sadie don’t always work well together.
The novel courses their development as creative partners and co-founders of their studio, Unfair Games.
They, and their studio, have creative and commercial successes.
But there are rifts and creative differences, too.
Sadie’s work can become self-indulgent without Sam to reign it in; Sam pushes Sadie to make decisions based on profits and not on creative vision.
Sam is more comfortable with public speaking than Sadie and soon becomes the public face of the studio – but Sadie worries this means Sam gets more credit for their successes, and Sam resents the amount of public-facing work he has to do.
Through it all, Sam and Sadie deal with personal, as well as professional difficulties.
Sadie struggles with bouts of depression, and grieves the loss of her partner.
Sam never fully recovers from the car accident – his foot is painfully and permanently disabled – and he struggles to let others into his life.
But despite their frequent fights and protracted disagreements, Sadie and Sam have each other.
Their friendship is fraught, and, at times, non-existent.
But the pull to keep collaborating means they are always in each other's orbits.
Sam and Sadie are friends, never lovers, and there’s almost no hint of romantic tension between the two – an unusual, and refreshing, literary dynamic.
By centering the story on this relationship, Zevin asks us to reframe our thinking about which relationships are central to our lives.
An ongoing creative partnership, this book seems to suggest, can be just as meaningful, just as fulfilling, and just as dramatic as a romantic partnership.
In fact, as Sadie tells Sam towards the end of the book, lovers are common, but “true collaborators are rare.
” Multiple episodes in the book emphasize that, when Sam and Sadie collaborate they are greater than the sum of their parts.
For example, following a disagreement, they decide to design a game with two separate but connected storylines.
Though they are nominally working together, the two are hardly on speaking terms, and each works with a separate team to complete their half of the game.
The game is a flop, creatively and commercially.
As much as they might disagree about their collaborative projects, as much as they might be frustrated with each other on a personal level, each brings out the best in each other and tempers the other’s worst influences.
It’s no surprise that the novel ends with Sadie handing Sam a hard drive which contains the beginnings of a new game.
Games offer the promise of infinite tomorrows
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow charts decades in Sam and Sadie’s relationship, from their first encounter in that hospital waiting room to the present-day, when they are presiding over a video game empire.
But the novel itself opens at a subway station in Boston.
Sam is in his twenties, attending MIT.
He is aware, through mutual acquaintances, that Sadie is also based in Boston, where she is attending Harvard.
The two of them haven’t spoken in years and, in these pre-social media days, have no way of getting in touch with each other.
And yet, among the crowd that has gathered to stare at a billboard containing the latest novelty fad, a Magic Eye poster, Sam sees the back of a head he would recognise anywhere.
It’s Sadie’s.
It’s telling that the novel opens with this chance encounter.
And not simply because, once again, the duo have been brought together by a game of sorts.
Chances, second chances, happy coincidences, and devastating accidents are all themes running through the novel.
The title, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, comes from a speech made by Macbeth in Shakespeare’s play of the same name.
Here, it hints at the infinite possibilities offered in the world of gaming, and the rather more finite and consequential chances we are offered in life.
Luck plays a large role in the outcomes of the games Sadie and Sam play as children; luck – good and bad – will impact the course of their real lives, too.
It was chance, or luck, that led them to reconnect in the subway.
It was chance that they met in a children’s hospital in Los Angeles in the first place.
While Sadie is a native Angeleno, Sam was born and raised in New York.
His mother hastily decamps to California, where her parents run a pizzeria in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, after a woman falls from a skyscraper and lands at her and Sam’s feet on a New York sidewalk.
The woman survives long enough for Sam’s mother to discover that the two women share a name.
This uncomfortable coincidence prompts her move – and sets in motion the sequence of events that will bring Sam and Sadie together.
The difference, of course, between video games and reality is that, in life, second chances are not a given.
In the video games they play as preteens, Sadie and Sam simply reboot when they lose a life – sometimes, in order to uncover a secret level or access a new power in-game, they deliberately die over and over, until they’ve unlocked their objective.
In real life, as they’ll soon discover, there’s no unending supply of second chances, and there’s no way to reboot and get a do-over.
In many ways, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a story of the chances Sadie and Sam take, the chances they don’t take, the second chances they are sometimes offered, and the consequences of all of these.
Exploring identity through the lens of gaming
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow explores multiple issues around identity politics, trauma, ableism, and misogyny all through the lens of gaming.
In doing so, the novel portrays video games – once thought of as frivolous fun – as legitimate avenues for exploring and working through serious issues.
It also depicts the fraught role these same issues play in the gaming industry.
The car accident Sam is involved in as an eleven year old boy leaves him permanently disabled and frequently in pain.
The games he plays in the hospital waiting room don’t simply offer him an escape from his reality.
They’re also a medium through which he can begin to work through his trauma and, especially when he is playing them with Sadie, begin to connect with the outside world again.
Later, when Sam is designing video games he will especially relish creating sequences where characters perform dazzling physical feats – he feels they offer him an escape from his own “unreliable body.
” In Both Sides, a game he develops with Sadie, Sam insists on making the protagonist Alice Ma disabled.
Sadie, meanwhile, as a female game designer in a largely male industry, must contend with consistent misogyny – sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, and nearly always present.
One example of this is her relationship with her older male tutor in game design at Harvard.
She is one of only two women in the large class.
Her tutor, Dov, is older, more sexually experienced, and well-established in the field of gaming – a field which Sadie is still trying to crack.
The power dynamic is tipped in his favor from the outset.
Yet it is Sadie who will pay a larger professional price for this short-lived and ultimately unsatisfying romance: years after she has made a name for herself as one of the most accomplished game developers – female or male – of her generation, rumors and gossip will persist about how she purportedly leveraged her relationship with Dov for professional success.
Together, Sam and Sadie often strive to create games that are inclusive and diverse.
Notably, they develop an MMORPG – a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, where players adopt virtual identities and can interact with each other in-game – named Mapletown whose politics often contrast with the USA’s real-world politics at the time.
In Mapletown, for instance, same-sex marriages are legally recognized long before they achieve that same recognition outside the game.
And Ichigo, the genderless character with the pronouns they/them, who is the protagonist of their first game is a groundbreaking early instance of non-binary representation in video games.
Yet, decades after Ichigo’s first release, Sadie wonders aloud whether the game would have garnered such a positive reception – or been greenlit at all – in the current climate.
She points out that neither she, nor Sam, are non-binary or Japanese.
She recognizes the need for authentic representation in gaming, as elsewhere, but questions whether the current cultural climate limits creative experimentation and risk-taking.
Sam, too, addresses this topic in an interview with a gaming magazine.
Musing on cultural appropriation, he points out the alternative to appropriation is a world where creator’s can only draw on their own cultures.
As he points out, he is half-Korean, half-Jewish, with no particularly strong sense of belonging to either culture – what room does this approach to creativity have for a person like him?
How, and to what degree, identity politics should play into creativity is, within the book, a question that is both vital and unresolved.
What is never in question is the power that games have to build inclusive, diverse, and meaningful spaces for players of all backgrounds.
Video games get the literary treatment
In Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, play is serious business.
Zevin sets out to portray game design as a serious art form – and succeeds.
In particular, through charting the highs and lows of Sam and Sadie’s friendship, Zevin also gives the reader a crash course on the history of and principles behind contemporary game design.
While Sam and Sadie, and their staff at Unfair Games, create a number of games that reach cult classic status in the world of the novel, the text is also littered with references to other classic games.
The pizza parlor Sam’s grandparents run in K-Town has a Donkey Kong machine in the back room – Sam holds the top score, naturally.
And after he and Sadie meet in the hospital they don’t simply bond over the admittedly iconic Mario Brothers gaming franchise.
Sadie rhapsodises over her favorite game, Oregon Trail, a lo-fi game where players are cast as members of a wagon train trying to make the treacherous journey from Missouri to Oregon.
While Zevin isn’t afraid to name drop big video games in text, the novel’s interests skew towards niche, alternative games.
The games Sadie designs as a Harvard student certainly show limited commercial potential.
One, EmilyBlaster, is a first person shooter – with a twist.
Instead of shooting assailants, the player aims at couplets of poetry as they run across the screen, with the aim of recreating stanzas originally written by the poet Emily Dickinson.
Another, Solution, is a nod to the classic game Train by iconoclastic game designer Brenda Romero, and it questions the very ethics of gameplay.
In Solution, the player assembles equipment in a factory.
The faster they play, the more points they score.
They are given the option to ask questions about what the factory is producing.
Stopping to ask questions will, however, slow their output.
The catch?
If the player chooses to ask questions, they will soon comprehend that the factory is owned by Nazis in the third reich, and the equipment they are producing will be used building transportation routes to concentration camps.
Later, Unfair Games will embrace contemporaneous trends in game design, notably through their launch of the MMORPG Mapletown, but at heart the studio, like its founders, is devoted to artistic indie games.
Sam and Sadie may disagree on many things, but they share a fundamental understanding that gaming and play are intimate, meaningful, and challenging ways of connecting with other players and with the world.
And it is gaming, and collaborating on new games, that keeps the pair connected at a deeper level, even while superficial arguments can blow their friendship temporarily off course.
After all, as Zevin notes “To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk…To play requires trust and love.
Final Summary
As children, Sam and Sadie were keen friends, then bitter enemies.
But a chance encounter on a Boston subway leads them to reconnect over their love of gaming and embark on a glittering career as a video-game-designing duo.
They will grapple with disability, racism, and misogyny, fall in love, and grieve terrible losses.
These life experiences will permanently impact the games they create together, just as the games they create and play will impact their lives.