evanmc's review against another edition
3.0
I really liked this book, as the setting and main character drew me into an unfamiliar world of game design. My biggest gripe is the fact that the teased 'Mystery' of the death of one of the main character's childhood friends is never investigated, never solved, and left as a huge glaring loose end that kept this from being an either 4 star or 5 star book in my opinion.
tnanz's review against another edition
5.0
I mean five stars for sure, I thoroughly enjoyed it and think anyone with even a passing knowledge of Mariokart or Runescape would feel the same way. But at the same time, I'm not sure this book had an ending? And I definitely didn't find out as much about the characters as I wanted to (Darren in particular doesn't really make sense to me. I don't get him. Maybe that's a good thing though?), but I can live with that. The insight into gaming structure and development was shockingly accessible and fascinating. The Cambridge/Somerville/Alewife setting came through shockingly clearly. I think it's the characters that are still giving me pause, that make this book less than perfect. While they are fascinating and well rounded, they don't shift or move or grow at all during the narrative. Something about that constancy doesn't feel right.
But again, thoroughly enjoyed it, will be immediately sending copies to my brother and father, and will most likely read it again. Certainly makes me want to pick up more of Grossman's books, the prose itself was top notch (particularly impressive in this highly technical setting).
But again, thoroughly enjoyed it, will be immediately sending copies to my brother and father, and will most likely read it again. Certainly makes me want to pick up more of Grossman's books, the prose itself was top notch (particularly impressive in this highly technical setting).
nakedsushi's review against another edition
2.0
An account of making video games at a fictional video game company. This sounds right up my alley, right? Unfortunately, it fell short of my high expectations. The writing is noticeably sloppy at times, like when the narrator somehow knows everything another character is thinking, feeling, and seeing. Then it jumps to second person perspective for no good reason. Then there's a whole lot of telling, not showing.
This isn't the 80s face-explosion that [b:Ready Player One|9969571|Ready Player One|Ernest Cline|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1333576871s/9969571.jpg|14863741] is, but it does have numerous references to video games in the 90s and early 2000s. Yes, some of them were necessary, but other times it just seemed excessive.
The main problem I had with this book was that about halfway through it, I wanted it to end. I had already guessed where the story was going and while I could see that Grossman tried to make the characters complex, they were still too one-dimensional and stereotypical for me. They had about as much depth as a video game character. In fact, I've played games that had more depth to the story than this one.
Another major nitpick I have with this are the technical inaccuracies. No, I've never been a professional game developer, but I am a developer and I do know the process we take when trying to examine and fix bugs. And the process Russell and the Black Arts crew took when searching for a large bug was just nonsensical. It's like when Hollywood shows what happens when people are "hacking" or "programming" or doing anything vaguely technical. Yuck.
This isn't the 80s face-explosion that [b:Ready Player One|9969571|Ready Player One|Ernest Cline|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1333576871s/9969571.jpg|14863741] is, but it does have numerous references to video games in the 90s and early 2000s. Yes, some of them were necessary, but other times it just seemed excessive.
The main problem I had with this book was that about halfway through it, I wanted it to end. I had already guessed where the story was going and while I could see that Grossman tried to make the characters complex, they were still too one-dimensional and stereotypical for me. They had about as much depth as a video game character. In fact, I've played games that had more depth to the story than this one.
Another major nitpick I have with this are the technical inaccuracies. No, I've never been a professional game developer, but I am a developer and I do know the process we take when trying to examine and fix bugs. And the process Russell and the Black Arts crew took when searching for a large bug was just nonsensical. It's like when Hollywood shows what happens when people are "hacking" or "programming" or doing anything vaguely technical. Yuck.
samusiamus's review against another edition
2.0
I bought this book when it came out and didn't get around to reading it until now, I actually just finished his first novel "Soon I Will Be Invincible". The debut novel was not a satisfactory read, and I hoped that YOU was going to be an improvement as the mark of an experienced author. It is worse, in my opinion.
I liked the premise and was interested in the suggested enigma of the mysterious death of Simon, a video game programmer prodigy and distant friend of the main character, Russell. However, YOU is not even about Simon and does not mention him that often. We don't even learn how he died or when, exactly. This is a book about Russell and his friend group (which includes Simon) in high school, how they created this video game for a class project, continued it during a nerdy summer camp, and developed it into a popular game franchise--but ultimately how Russell grew apart from them during their last year in high school to focus on college; how he barely reached out to his former friends until he had a crisis of some sort and decided he didn't want to be a lawyer, he wanted to fall back into the exciting uncertainty of video game design with his former friends.
It's also a sort of walkthrough through almost every game this fictional developer, Black Arts, made. Literally a walkthrough, disguised as Russell playing through the whole backlog to understand the games, to understand Simon a little more, and to figure out the origination of this game-breaking bug interspersed with flashback. The perspective changes often, and there are random interludes of Russell talking to the characters of the game as if they existed in the real world (but as their video game selves). These moments are not introduced in anyway, they just happen and you don't know if it's something he is daydreaming, actually dreaming, or hallucinating. The narration will change from "Leira and I" when Russel is talking about playing a game, to using "we", to using "you" without ceremony.
Towards the end of the book, I was getting really bored with reading about the next game's history, the character bios, and then an apparent write-up of someone ("you") playing through the game and what the story is. It felt like I was reading a video game manual and I was getting annoyed that the confrontation that it had been building up to was not only anti-climactic, but it didn't reveal anything about Simon like one would expect. In the grand scheme of things, Simon is barely a blip in this whole story even though the summary makes it sounds like he is one of the driving forces of the story and why Russell is there. On the inside flap it says, "but mostly he needs to know what happened to Simon, his strangest and most gifted friend, who died under mysterious circumstances soon after Black Arts' breakout hit". But Russell never learns about what happened to him, and doesn't really seem all that concerned about Simon during the entire book. Just... slightly regretful.
My only guess as to why this was so badly written--and dry-- is because Grossman is a "video game design consultant, which is nothing like being a story writer. He tried to put too many things into one book and it became over-convoluted and meaningless.
I liked the premise and was interested in the suggested enigma of the mysterious death of Simon, a video game programmer prodigy and distant friend of the main character, Russell. However, YOU is not even about Simon and does not mention him that often. We don't even learn how he died or when, exactly. This is a book about Russell and his friend group (which includes Simon) in high school, how they created this video game for a class project, continued it during a nerdy summer camp, and developed it into a popular game franchise--but ultimately how Russell grew apart from them during their last year in high school to focus on college; how he barely reached out to his former friends until he had a crisis of some sort and decided he didn't want to be a lawyer, he wanted to fall back into the exciting uncertainty of video game design with his former friends.
It's also a sort of walkthrough through almost every game this fictional developer, Black Arts, made. Literally a walkthrough, disguised as Russell playing through the whole backlog to understand the games, to understand Simon a little more, and to figure out the origination of this game-breaking bug interspersed with flashback. The perspective changes often, and there are random interludes of Russell talking to the characters of the game as if they existed in the real world (but as their video game selves). These moments are not introduced in anyway, they just happen and you don't know if it's something he is daydreaming, actually dreaming, or hallucinating. The narration will change from "Leira and I" when Russel is talking about playing a game, to using "we", to using "you" without ceremony.
Towards the end of the book, I was getting really bored with reading about the next game's history, the character bios, and then an apparent write-up of someone ("you") playing through the game and what the story is. It felt like I was reading a video game manual and I was getting annoyed that the confrontation that it had been building up to was not only anti-climactic, but it didn't reveal anything about Simon like one would expect. In the grand scheme of things, Simon is barely a blip in this whole story even though the summary makes it sounds like he is one of the driving forces of the story and why Russell is there. On the inside flap it says, "but mostly he needs to know what happened to Simon, his strangest and most gifted friend, who died under mysterious circumstances soon after Black Arts' breakout hit". But Russell never learns about what happened to him, and doesn't really seem all that concerned about Simon during the entire book. Just... slightly regretful.
My only guess as to why this was so badly written--and dry-- is because Grossman is a "video game design consultant, which is nothing like being a story writer. He tried to put too many things into one book and it became over-convoluted and meaningless.
itsmytuberculosis's review against another edition
2.0
This book was like going to a fancy Italian resturant and when you sit down a sous chef comes out and starts filleting mac and cheese in front of you. When you go to tip them you discover it's secretly 3 lizards in a trench coat.
erinsanson's review against another edition
2.0
Literally no rising action. Reads like a programming manual for chapters at a time. Can't believe that this was hyped as much as Ready Player One. Ugh.
mferrante83's review against another edition
4.0
Austin Grossman’s You has drawn some comparisons to Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One from many venues but is a very different beast in many respects. While both lean on the nostalgia factor of readers You trades the frenetic action and bright palate for a more subdued story that occasionally stumbles but manages on the whole to be an engaging and entertaining read. Where Ready Player One is an open love letter to the 80s, You is a paen to a lost age an exploration on how the heart of an industry has changed over the long years.
You opens with Russell interviewing for a job at video game studio Black Arts Games after having spent years in a different (or rather several different) career paths. He has an in having gone to high school with the studio’s creators and having had a hand in the prototype version of the studio’s first major success Realms of Gold. Black Arts has recently lost their visionary programmer, Simon, to a freak accident. As a major change in company leadership shakes the company Russell finds himself delving into the past releases of the studio in a hopes to better understand both his own past and the legacy Simon has left behind in the code he has written.
It should be noted that Austin Grossman, as described in author biography, was at one time a video game designer and writer who worked on Deus Ex, System Shock, and Ultima Underworld II. These facts place Grossman’s own involvement in the game industry roughly close to the same period during which the novel is set. I have no way of speaking towards whether or not Grossman accurately represents video game development (a complaint I’ve seen in several other reviews) and truth be told I think that is irrelevant to the text of the novel itself. While the story might involve the development of a game You is a novel about the games industry, about growing up, and about the loss of innocence.
Throughout the novel Russell plays through the games released by Black Arts in chronological order while simultaneously relating personal historical information from his own life, and the lives of his friends. It is a story of growth and change on a personal level as well as a story of change on an industry level. As the characters in Russell’s life move into adulthood the loss of innocence, or one could say purity, is reflected in the changing nature of the games developed by Black Arts. In the novel as major financial backers step in there is a radical shift in the way the game is developed as the people holding the money don’t really understand the thing they are investing in. Grossman carefully contrasts the expensive cars and tastes of “Rock Star” developers, the bombastic and over-the-top ridiculousness of E3 with the desire for fun, for bringing friends together, for bragging rights, for telling a personal story that marked the early days of the character’s lives.
You is a retrospective coming-of-age story for the video game industry and a novel about reconnecting to the things that mattered to us in our youth. It’s a novel about remembering why we love the things we love even if they no longer resemble the thing they were. While average readers might take issue with its somewhat rambling nature or lack of a conventional cohesive plot (this isn’t a novel I’d hand to my Mom and expect her to understand) there is a certain charm to the novel’s eccentricities, bugs that work as features, that speak to a particular audience of gamers. You looks back at the golden days of youth, both of its characters and the industry in which they work, and its strong sense of nostalgia keeps away any potential indictment or finger pointing with regards to how the industry has changed over the years. You isn’t a novel that seeks to cast blame but rather one that asks to remember why we first picked up a controller, or dropped a coin in an arcade machine, all those years ago.
You opens with Russell interviewing for a job at video game studio Black Arts Games after having spent years in a different (or rather several different) career paths. He has an in having gone to high school with the studio’s creators and having had a hand in the prototype version of the studio’s first major success Realms of Gold. Black Arts has recently lost their visionary programmer, Simon, to a freak accident. As a major change in company leadership shakes the company Russell finds himself delving into the past releases of the studio in a hopes to better understand both his own past and the legacy Simon has left behind in the code he has written.
It should be noted that Austin Grossman, as described in author biography, was at one time a video game designer and writer who worked on Deus Ex, System Shock, and Ultima Underworld II. These facts place Grossman’s own involvement in the game industry roughly close to the same period during which the novel is set. I have no way of speaking towards whether or not Grossman accurately represents video game development (a complaint I’ve seen in several other reviews) and truth be told I think that is irrelevant to the text of the novel itself. While the story might involve the development of a game You is a novel about the games industry, about growing up, and about the loss of innocence.
Throughout the novel Russell plays through the games released by Black Arts in chronological order while simultaneously relating personal historical information from his own life, and the lives of his friends. It is a story of growth and change on a personal level as well as a story of change on an industry level. As the characters in Russell’s life move into adulthood the loss of innocence, or one could say purity, is reflected in the changing nature of the games developed by Black Arts. In the novel as major financial backers step in there is a radical shift in the way the game is developed as the people holding the money don’t really understand the thing they are investing in. Grossman carefully contrasts the expensive cars and tastes of “Rock Star” developers, the bombastic and over-the-top ridiculousness of E3 with the desire for fun, for bringing friends together, for bragging rights, for telling a personal story that marked the early days of the character’s lives.
You is a retrospective coming-of-age story for the video game industry and a novel about reconnecting to the things that mattered to us in our youth. It’s a novel about remembering why we love the things we love even if they no longer resemble the thing they were. While average readers might take issue with its somewhat rambling nature or lack of a conventional cohesive plot (this isn’t a novel I’d hand to my Mom and expect her to understand) there is a certain charm to the novel’s eccentricities, bugs that work as features, that speak to a particular audience of gamers. You looks back at the golden days of youth, both of its characters and the industry in which they work, and its strong sense of nostalgia keeps away any potential indictment or finger pointing with regards to how the industry has changed over the years. You isn’t a novel that seeks to cast blame but rather one that asks to remember why we first picked up a controller, or dropped a coin in an arcade machine, all those years ago.
blevins's review against another edition
1.0
Austin Grossman: Two strikes and you are out. I gave one star to the only other Grossman book I read--SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE--and against my better judgement, I read a second book by him. Why did I read it? I got fooled by the video game element to the story I guess. YOU is just as infuriating and unlikable as the other one! I hate, hate, hate giving one stars to books because A/ I respect any writer who sinks a lot of time, planning, dreams, sweat & tears into writing something from imagination and B/ it means I've wasted a good chunk of my life to something I didn't enjoy. But, I don't feel too guilty as there are plenty of people out there who probably will like this book...I'm just not one of them.
You will like this book, for example, if you want to feel like you are reading long-winded, detailed notes of fantasy game design including many, many characters, vivid level descriptions and game action--YOU is for you. I didn't buy much of this book despite the fact Grossman has worked as a game consultant. Oh, the games in the book I'll buy, but the characters? Every single person is thinly constructed and the protagonist? Come on, he drops out of law school to take a low-level programming job and barely knows how to program and five minutes later is promoted despite doing virtually nothing at the company AND then he doesn't even know what E3 is? A few pages later he's claiming that going to E3 was something he'd always dreamed of doing...must be writer memory loss since he'd just asked another character what E3 was. There was a lot of that kind of loose character organization in YOU.
I'm not opposed to long descriptions of what it might be like to play a video game but I think Grossman thought he was doing for in character video game description action what Neal Stephenson did for virtual reality worlds in SNOW CRASH [referenced a few times in YOU]. He's dead wrong. The difference between the two is that in SNOW CRASH, "Hiro" is immersed in another complete world, but in YOU it is just descriptions of a person playing a video game. SNOW CRASH is one of my favorite books. Even in the awesome READY PLAYER ONE, Ernest Cline describes what it is like to be in a computer world that is exciting, fun and interesting, Grossman just feels like he took his notes for a consulting gig and stuffed them into the novel, there's no tension and it's just not engaging to me at any level.
At least Grossman has achieved something that I likely won't give anyone else on here--double one stars!
You will like this book, for example, if you want to feel like you are reading long-winded, detailed notes of fantasy game design including many, many characters, vivid level descriptions and game action--YOU is for you. I didn't buy much of this book despite the fact Grossman has worked as a game consultant. Oh, the games in the book I'll buy, but the characters? Every single person is thinly constructed and the protagonist? Come on, he drops out of law school to take a low-level programming job and barely knows how to program and five minutes later is promoted despite doing virtually nothing at the company AND then he doesn't even know what E3 is? A few pages later he's claiming that going to E3 was something he'd always dreamed of doing...must be writer memory loss since he'd just asked another character what E3 was. There was a lot of that kind of loose character organization in YOU.
I'm not opposed to long descriptions of what it might be like to play a video game but I think Grossman thought he was doing for in character video game description action what Neal Stephenson did for virtual reality worlds in SNOW CRASH [referenced a few times in YOU]. He's dead wrong. The difference between the two is that in SNOW CRASH, "Hiro" is immersed in another complete world, but in YOU it is just descriptions of a person playing a video game. SNOW CRASH is one of my favorite books. Even in the awesome READY PLAYER ONE, Ernest Cline describes what it is like to be in a computer world that is exciting, fun and interesting, Grossman just feels like he took his notes for a consulting gig and stuffed them into the novel, there's no tension and it's just not engaging to me at any level.
At least Grossman has achieved something that I likely won't give anyone else on here--double one stars!
rhymernovak's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
5.0
The blurb on the back of this book is misleading, but it’s still wonderful!!!