I thought it was more than just a fun read.
If you take video games out entirely, it’s a story about growing up, about an adolescent trying to decide who they want to be. That’s human experience, and author expressed it as well enough for me (at least) to see the threads in my own life were the same, just slightly different colours.
But she also talked about something I didn’t experience, the heavy hand of gender expectations. I concealed my love of game from ‘norms’ because there was a stigma about it, but there were always a wide spectrum of people (by which I mean ‘fellow possessors of a Y chromosome’) to discuss them with.
So I thought it was memoir writing at its best. It connected the author’s personal experience to both a universal human experience and a wider cultural issue.
