Play
This is a novel in which playing videos games—and creating them—lies at the center of the plot. But it is not just video games. The big topic here is play itself which is described metaphorically as “the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can.” It’s a weird comparison at first, but the more you think about it, the truer it rings. Play can mean many things, but the inherent understanding is that it won’t be real and therefore nobody gets hurt. Except, of course, sometimes when the dog bites playfully, it does draw blood.
Time Travel
As things stand circa summer 2022, time travel remains theoretical. Therefore, it is best described using metaphor: “Sam looked at Sadie, and he thought, This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently.” Of course, that isn’t what time travel is really, but then that is the whole point of metaphor. To be able to look at someone and see them as they are now and as they were in the past is an experience related to the concept of traveling through time. Which is, ultimately, an exercise in comparative perception.
Sick, Sad World
Sexism is notorious in the real world within the gaming world in which this story is set, and that reality is replicated here. The sad thing is that sexism itself is misogynistic. “You would think women would want to stick together when there weren’t that many of them, but they never did. It was as if being a woman was a disease that you didn’t wish to catch.” One cannot forgive all the men Sadie must deal with who are terrified of women and transform that into feelings of sadly misplaced superiority. Sadie’s assumption is that women don’t stick together because then they can at least argue the case to all the scared little boys that they might be a woman, but they aren’t one of those women.
Proposing
The story of Sadie and Sam is a love story, but not in the traditional sense: “The way he saw it, he would be proposing to Sadie. He would be getting down on one knee and saying, `Will you work with me?’” Their love of video games is the bond that ties them together.
An Idea
The creative process is a strange thing in that not only does it have no rules, but it also does not really have a hierarchy. There is no language to differentiate when a thought becomes an idea because by definition an idea is a thought. Still, the creative mind somehow seems to intuit the timeline: “Sadie came up with the idea for Both Sides…and she’d been turning it over in her head ever since. It wasn’t much then. A glimmer of a notion of a nothing of a whisper of a figment of an idea.” This is as good a definition as any for that initial moment of impulsive inspiration before it begins to take on a definite shape. In reality, the glimmering notion of a whispering figment is a metaphor without a literal correlation.
