Portrait of the artist as a young gamer.

Gamelife is part memoir of childhood in the eighties, part meditation on the imaginative world of computer games—and altogether wonderful, luminous and profound. Michael Clune's first computer game is the text-based adventure 'Suspended' in which the player types commands, directing robots to save the planet from destruction. The game raises deep questions for the boy and provides a framework for his imagination about himself and the world. Seven primitive PC games take on an almost religious significance in Michael's life.

Gamelife is one of those books that makes you see things differently, a brilliant memoir of a kid discovering his own mental powers, and the magic of an electronic world he can escape into while riding the shockwaves of his parents' divorce, his own adolescence and his apprenticeship in the world of perception...