Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

From the onset of the novel, Sam and Sadie’s friendship is depicted as a wave with crests and troughs. Since Sam and Sadie bond most over work and creativity, they often leave their emotions and insecurities unarticulated, perhaps wishing the other would just divine it by themselves. This leads to frequent miscommunication and clashes between them. Chapters 3 and 4 add an additional dimension to their conflict: their varying worldviews, which are partly a function of their circumstances. For Sadie making games is about her desire to create something new and interesting. For Sam, it is also about achieving greatness, popularity, and commercial success. While Sadie’s purist position may seem more authentic, it is also true that Sadie can afford to be a purist because she hasn’t had to worry about money. Sam has struggled for money all his life, as he tells Sadie when opting for Opus: “You’ve never been poor…so you don’t understand” (130).

The art-versus-money debate frequently crops up in their friendship: while Sam admires Sadie’s creative genius, he wishes she would also consider the game’s marketability. Sadie values Sam’s input and marketing savvy but wishes he would be motivated, first and foremost, by creative impulse. Complicating this situation are their respective insecurities and challenges. As a woman in gaming, Sadie frequently bears the brunt of pervasive sexism. During the promotional tours for Ichigo, Sam, rather than Sadie, becomes inseparable from the game: “The men at Opus wanted Sam to be the face of Ichigo, and so he was. The gaming industry, like many industries, loves its wonder boys” (132). Sadie cannot help but resent Sam for the attention, even though she knows Sam is not trying to grandstand her.

The flip side of this dynamic is the overwhelming love Sam and Sadie have for each other. Sam keeps reaching out to Sadie whenever she becomes incommunicable, just as she did for him when they were children. Zoe, Marx’s girlfriend, puts her finger on the pulse of their friendship when she tells Marx, “Those two are thick as thieves. They’ll do anything for each other” (147). Sam will not move to California to get his foot operated on, but he will if Sadie needs to get away from Dov. Sadie, too, will agree to the move for Sam’s sake. As Zoe predicts, Sam and Sadie move to California for each other. Another interesting aspect of their friendship is that they never date each other, even though their relationship can be described as romantic. Sam frequently makes grand gestures for Sadie, some of them almost clichédly romantic, such as pursuing her across a train station or shouting for her under her window: “SADIE MIRANDA GREEN. I CAN SEE YOUR LIGHT ON” (137). The narrative subverts these conventional romantic tropes to show that a romance can exist between friends, without them acting on the physical desire they may or may not have for each other.

While Sam’s love life is not mentioned by this point, Sadie’s relationship with Dov and Marx’s with Zoe are explored in detail. The absence of sexual love in Sam’s life indicates Sam’s discomfort with intimacy as well as his body image issues. This is also why Sam routinely ignores his physical pain and even refuses to look at his injured foot. Sam has yet to accept his disability or be comfortable with his body. With this, the text explores the complex ways in which individuals are forced to navigate their disabilities. Marx and Zoe’s relationship is healthy; in Zoe, Marx finds his longest partnership to date, indicating his growing emotional maturity. Sadie, meanwhile, slips into a problematic pattern with Dov, who routinely violates her boundaries, in the bedroom and outside. Marx and Zoe notice that “Sadie sometimes showed up to the office with light bruising on her face and limbs, rope burns, small scratches, and on one occasion, a sprained wrist” (149). Sadie tries to convince herself that Dov’s treatment of her is consensual, dominating play, rather than an abuse of power. However, at one point she acknowledges that “[h]e wouldn’t have sex without her consent, but he felt free to make her uncomfortable and embarrassed” (152). This is after Dov leaves her stripped and handcuffed in response to her telling him she is moving to California. The problematic relationship shows the pressure Sadie experiences as a brilliant, young woman in gaming: Dov admires Sadie for her mind—something the larger world doesn’t offer her yet—so her judgment around him is sometimes clouded.

This section finally details the circumstances of Anna Lee’s death. Significantly, Sam revisits the episode when in the hospital. This highlights how trauma and grief work: Specific triggers open the floodgates of memory. The description of Sam’s life with Anna reveals the camaraderie he enjoyed with his mother, with them getting purposefully lost in Hollywood in Anna’s “silly emerald-green sports car” (168). This sequence makes Sam’s grief real for the reader and also explains some of his attraction for Sadie as well as his love for showmanship. It can be inferred that Sam transfers some of his love for Anna to Sadie. Further, Sam inherits his gift for drama from his actor mother. The sequence also shows the role class, race, and gender bias play in Anna and Sam’s lives. Like Marx, Anna finds it difficult to land a good acting part because of her race and appearance. Additionally, she has to fend off sexual harassment in the workplace. As a single mother, she fights to make ends meet as “life was expensive anywhere you were” (163). However, despite the tragedy in Anna and Sam’s lives, the narrative stresses they have been lucky in other ways. Sam’s grandparents, Dong Hyun and Bong Cha, are unconditionally loving and supportive, and he finds rare, lifelong friendships with Sadie and Marx.

The motif of gaming features prominently in Chapter 3 as well, with games moving the plot forward and helping depict character development. Games are also an important component of Sadie and Sam’s friendship as the common language that they share. For instance, Sadie tells Sam that luck is like “that ginormous polyhedral die that you throw when you’re playing Dungeons and Dragons” (136), a reference to the many-sided dice typical of the iconic tabletop role-playing game. It is a reference that Sam immediately gets and that displays the shared, unique vocabulary that has always brought Sam and Sadie together. The name of Sam and Sadie’s company, Unfair Games, is a reference from mathematics as well as game theory. It refers to the fact that a player can always win a game if they play it properly. Video games are fair, unlike real life, which cannot be gamed or mastered. Any player in life can be bested by the luck of the draw, fate, or chance.