through this period is to make things anyway.

“And what is love, in the end?” Alabaster said. “Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?”

he had learned to tolerate the sometimes-painful present by living in the future.

Sam didn’t believe it was possible to spoil a game. The point was not what happened, but the process of getting to what happened.

anfractuous

Whether it felt in bad taste, and whether people would even want to play a game like Mapleworld at this moment in history. The world seemed so chaotic, people so tribal, and their game was so soft. In the end, they decided that there was never a good time to do anything. Mapleworld would launch as planned.

“Before. I shouldn’t have said that,” Sadie apologized. “I mean, in case you are actually dying. This being a children’s hospital.” The boy, piloting Mario, climbed up a vine that led to a cloudy, coin-filled area. “This being the world, everyone’s dying,” he said. “True,” Sadie said. “But I’m not currently dying.” “That’s good.”

At a certain age—in Sadie’s case, thirty-four—there comes a time when life largely consists of having meals with old friends who are passing through town.

What, after all, is a video game’s subtextual preoccupation if not the erasure of mortality?