"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,/ To the last syllable of recorded time;/ And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/ The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!"
It is important to know that the title of this novel derives from one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays spoken by one of the Bard’s most famous characters. In the last act of Macbeth, as the title character’s world is shrinking all around him, he receives news of his wife’s death. This news essentially sends Macbeth into a spiral of despondency and despair. He is desperate to locate a meaning to all the blood, death and savagery which has brought him to this point in time and is simply is not there to be found. Marx continues to recite the full passage leading to its dazzling concluding imagery that life is simply a pointless tale of sound and fury that ultimately has no meaning. To which Sadie responds: “That’s bleak.’ More importantly, however, she proceeds to inquire—implicitly, of course—what on earth all that bleak existential angst and dread could possibly have to do their plans to create video games. It is a meta-textual question, obviously, reflecting the same sense of wonder.
“What is a game? It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”
Admittedly, Marx offers a unique interpretation of Macbeth’s cry in the wilderness in the midst of his darkest moment. Rather than focusing on the sound and fury signifying nothing which inspires Sadie’s entirely appropriate if understated reaction, he stops at the beginning of the quote. The repetition of tomorrows lends texture to Macbeth’s dark vision, but one can appreciate how Marx has ripped it from the context of what follows to focus on redemptive possibilities which Macbeth transforms into mere repetition of folly. Marx has turned to this famous Shakespearean speech because the subject at hand is coming up with name for the video game Sadie and Sam are trying to get off the ground. His suggestion is "Tomorrow Games," and it is greeted with a negative reaction by the other two as being “too soft.” He launches into Macbeth’s speech to illuminate how the idea originates from a point that is hardly soft. Even after his eloquently creative refashioning of the meaning from hopelessly bleak to passionately optimistic, however, his pitch still fails miserably.
“There is no more intimate act than play, even sex.”
The most famous thing that Sam will ever say is also the most infamous. In an interview conducted with a gaming website called Kotaku (which is an actual gaming website) he makes this pronouncement. The internet being what it is, the collective response is directed toward humiliation rather than analysis with the consensus being that only someone who had never actually experienced great sex could even be capable of conceiving this as a legitimate possibility. Of course, Sam is a gamer with all the attendant stereotypes associated with that distilling of an entire human being down to a noun. The point being that in the world, he is not wrong. And he is not wrong for just one very powerful reason, which is that sex is itself a form a gameplay more often than it is not.
