You Paperback – April 8, 2014

I finished Austin Grossman's second novel, You, while on vacation last week, and am just getting to writing some thoughts on it now.It's quite different than his first novel, Soon I will be Invincible, which I loved.You is the story of a law-school-dropout-turned-game-designer who accepts a job at the game studio his high school friends have turned into a hit-factory. Like his own career, the game studio has hit a point where its future is in question. The creative genius behind the original games is no longer around, the key founders have left, investors threaten to sell off the company, etc. In trying to prove they still have what it takes, the lead character learns about the company's past games and a lot about himself.It's in this that the book starts to get interesting. The title "You" is a nod to the second-person narrative involved in many games, going back to the old Infocom titles like Zork ("You are standing in an open field, west of a white house, with a boarded front door"). Without spoiling too much, the company's games' characters, world, and eras are metaphors for the high school friends, events and phases of their lives. The author takes a long time to build this up for the reader. To tell the truth it was initially a little slow for me, and some of it was a little over my head. However, when he brings it all together toward the end it really is quite well done, and I found it very satisfying and quite moving.I know Austin through friends, and knowing his history working at Looking Glass and on games like Ultima Underworld, I can't help but think that there's a lot of history underlying the work. It certainly is the most realistic depiction of what game development is like that I've ever read.Some reviews I've seen have made reference to Ready Player One, perhaps because of all the references to games of our youth. I don't think that's fair though. This is far more a book about coming of age. More Breaking Away than Wargames, IMHO.Good book. Recommended.

First off, I'm being unfair, I'm comparing this to 'Soon I Will Be Invincible', but listen, or rather read on, I pre ordered this, at full price, so someone had my money for a couple months and I'm a little peeved about the $0.0017 in interest I would have earned.What 'Prep' by Curtiss Sittenfeld is to boarding school novels, 'You' is to the video game culture and industry. Like 'Prep' the writing in 'You' is beautiful and powerful. If you didn't play video games or did play video games (read comic books, grew up with a Star Wars Fan Club card in your nylon two fold velco wallet, double or triple tapped Superman showings in one day, etc. etc.) you will understand and find the scenes and descriptions of the times poignant and moving. Grossman, like Sittenfeld, but in his own right of course, is a wonderful writer and there are those pages and passages you will say, "Hey, man, get out of my head/childhood".But, ... the immersion into the main character's life, day dreams, and hallucinations lose coherency, fascinating vistas are glimpsed, and never revisited or elaborated on. To put it in context, it's interesting that Michael Moorcock's character Elric, or more accurately, the brother sword (Mournblade) to Elric's sword (Stormbringer) features so prominently in the novel. In the Elric novels, somewhere, probably between 'The Weird of the White Wolf' and 'The Bane of the Black Sword', even the fantasy adherent loses track of what it is these books are about and reads on only to see what next duel or piece of intrigue or sorcery comes along because the reader has lost all connection to the plot and the characters. It's not a totally bad thing, you're not bored, you just read on, snaking the remote optics down the rabbit hole but not going down because, well, that would be too much work.For anyone who dabbled, delved, wadded gingerly, or dove deep into all things geek will love the references and the nostalgic (or current)feeling of those mental forays and campaigns into other worlds. Personally I never got into video games, I played lots of Avalon Hill board games with my brother (who amongst us didn't have Regatta, play it once, then turn it into a map for all sorts of naval battles. I still have a complete 'The Creature that ate Shebogan', which my kids enjoy to this day as a demented Monopoly) and when the digital age dawned I just stuck with comics, novels , and movies, but I will attest that Grossman writes the emotional aspects of certain scenes that I very much understand the gamer world and worldview.More buts. . .Going back to the 'Prep' comparison, I will say I rooted for Lee (the main character) in a way I couldn't root for Russell. There were times where Russel's voice is lost and a beautiful, very literary, scene or description simply dead ends or just fades away. You want more Lisa, and more complete understanding of Simon's death, not just as how one or two other people related to it. The hallucinatory aspects lose coherence and could be distracting to the uninitiated in the culture, there is little to tie them together (IMGO) with the overall narrative. Russell's voice, always coming in and out of focus, gets lost in the last quarter of the book. It is lost to a tone that resembles a Wired or Vanity Fair article, an interesting Wired or Vanity Fair article but at some point you don't care about Russell, because he is really not there anymore.Sorry, can't give it more than 3 stars. It's a good book, if you want a trip into that culture, and almost as an extreme long article about that culture, it's very good. As a story, a narrative, a character piece, it's on the weak side of good, and towards the end, again, reads like an article about the genre/time.I'm a fan, so like most, I'm waiting for the equal of 'Soon I Will Be Invincible', and I will wait through whatever ages of the realm I have to.

This is my first review in ages on amazon, but after reading this book i felt like i have to warn my fellow readers. I had hy hopes, as i saw this book being compared to ready player one a lot. I have no idea how anybody could come up with such a comparison.You feels like the very first and very rough draft of a book. As the author loves to put exhaustive lists in his book, i will follow his lead and co pose my review of a list of things i disliked about this book:- all the lists, that just add to the lenght of the book. My favorite: a list about every item that could probably exist in a fantasy rpg- very confusing timelines- jumps between the timelines, without any indication when you are at the moment. And i felt like the timeline just doesnt make sense what so ever, or was really flawed. I didnt bother to check- incoherent characters, that change their behavior like underwear, not to speak of their motivations- a highly unlikeable hero- an almost non existant plot, stuffed to the brim with filler material- plot hooks that are abandoned all the time, while the most uninteresting part in described in great detail- descriptions of descriptions of fictional videogames with a story as shallow as the book- with lots of list of places- that arent even interesting or original

You starts out very promisingly with some sharp writing and a good set up - which I expected to be a mystery / suspense plot in the real world being solved or at least influenced by actions within a game.Instead, after the first third of the book, the plot sprawls horribly and none of the initial threads are picked up. There are long sections of in-game descriptions, which would be fine if it was one game and we were getting a feel for a secondary storyline, but instead it's lots of different games (albeit linked ones) with their own lore and characters and world maps and histories and a large part of the second half of the book is just like reading a half dozen game manuals or fantasy book blurbs back-to-back.The ending is almost non-existent, which is less of a let down than it should be since there's nothing really driving the plot in the first place. As someone else mentioned, the characters are rather flat. Even the narrator is not revealed as having any depth and at times becomes almost just a floating viewpoint.There are lots of sections of nice writing, but even that is inconsistent. There will often be a couple of great paragraphs in a row followed by a sentence or construction that barely makes sense or a piece of dialogue or action that ruins what's just gone before.I'm still giving this 3 stars because up to about a third of the way through I was still thinking this is excellent! Even after that, there are enough good moments to save it from being worthless, but in the end it's ultimately highly disappointing.

The story grips you and doesn't quite go where you expect. Gives a great insight into a massive industry which is still struggling between it's back bedroom roots and corporate manouverings. It also provides an interesting take on generic fantasy, sci-fi and gaming tropes, with the foundation of quite a good fantasy story in it's own right, mixed in with the (possibly) real world mental implications of high pressure jobs with harsh deadlines. The only criticism is that it ends a bit like real life, mostly a "What now? Is that it?" feeling, rather than a nice story book ending.

Man hätte es sich denken können falls man "Soon I will be invincible" gelesen hat. War die Art des Erinnerungs-Erzählens beim letzten Buch noch recht neuartig und ungewöhnlich fürs Genre, kommt es bei diesem Buch überhaupt nicht gut an. Falls ihr euch fragt was ich damit meine; Austin Grossman schreibt anscheinend gerne Erinnerungen der Charaktere, was sinnvoll ist um den Helden etwas Tiefe zu geben, aber absolut sinnfrei ist in diesen Ausmaßen wie sie in "You" vorkommen. Es wird wirklich unglaublich viel Zeit in der Vergangenheit verbracht, eigentliche Handlung gibt es ehrlich gesagt wenig. Das wenige was in der Gegenwart spielt ist recht unspannend und ließt sich mehr wie ein Insiderbericht der PC Games über Spieleprogrammierer, wirkliche Handlung die diese Bezeichnung auch verdient kommt sehr schleppend auf...Muss gestehen dass ich es nicht fertig gelesen habe, es war einfach zuuuu langatmig.Wenn man sich die Rezensionen über dieses Buch durchließt kommt man grob auf 2 Schlussfolgerungen:-Hat man selbst die Zeit der ersten Computerspiele erlebt und möchte sie nochmals durchleben bzw. interessiert sich für die Anfänge dann bitte, kauft es.-Möchte man ein Sci-Fi/Fantasy Buch eines doch sehr gelobten Autors lesen dann FINGER WEG! Es ist viel zu teuer, selbst als E-Book, die magere Story rechtfertigt nicht den Preis! Besser man greift zu Drew Hayes etc.

As a teenager, Russell ran with a pack of geeks - Lisa, Darren and Simon. The were the ones who, given 15 minutes on a shiny new Apple II at school, news what to do - knew that this was going to be the future. Together, they created a game world. But Russell drifted away, looking for an ordinary career, and Simon died. Years later, Russell returns to the company founded by Lisa, Darren and Simon, a company still developing games that have at their core the fruits of those long, after hours sessions in the computer lab.There's a reassuring shakiness about Russell's narration. A great deal in hinted at but never spelled out. The story of the four friends is told in short highlights, intercut with play from the sequence of games they made over the 80s and 90s - games that feature four heroes, "the same four heroes you found in any video game that featured four heroes, anywhere" - a fighter, a magician, a thief and a princess. As the pressure of game development deadlines increases, Russell also has to embark on a quest through the successive games to track down a bug that could threaten not only the company but even the wider world - a bug built in from the start and propagated through every successive build and update since. Delving to the source of this means coming to terms with what he ran away from all those years ago.It also means interrogating the whole lifestyle of gaming, in debates which Russell holds increasingly frequently with the four heroes themselves - Brennan, Lorac, Prendar and Leira. As Grossman cuts back and forth between straight narration, ongoing gameplay, dreams(?), debate with the heroes, flashbacks to the 80s and extracts from game manuals and helpfiles, it becomes less and less clear what is "real" and what is a "game". As a games designer, Russell's job is to make games that confine and chivvy the player along the chosen narrative. But he and his friends set out originally to make the ultimate game, in which the player can do whatever he wants - a totally lifelike experience. So when is life a game, and a game life?It's an intoxicating read, leavened by humorous interludes such as Russell's experiences demoing a game at a trade fair, when everything goes wrong, and for me there was a glow of nostalgia in the D&D language and early 80s computers. It all stops in the early days of the Web, which is right, I think, because then it can celebrate an age before the really big corporations began to throw their weight around again.I'm so glad I read this book. For me, it was touching, nostalgic and - despite concluding in 1998 - modern. I wrote my first computer program in about 1979 or 1980, in BASIC, on a Nascom 2 computer with 32kb of RAM. It was a Space Invader clone. I thought at the time I was very clever: to make it work I had to add a realtime keyboard reader routine which I got from a photocopied fanzine. I never made a career out of programming, but I can relate to the sense in this book that Grossman describes of coding as a creative act, insane fun, and something newly and wholly unexpectedly within reach.The nearest book I can think of to this would have to be  Cryptonomicon  but "You" is less of a thriller, while still more weird than other books which use game conventions and insights such as  Bedlam  or  Halting State  - though it recognisably shares something, an outlook, an aesthetic, with them.Highly recommended. CryptonomiconBedlamHalting State