Gaming Memoir

Thrill of the Hunt
https://medium.com/mammon-machine-zeal/thrill-of-the-hunt-68ebaaf1e339

We go to the sushi restaurant where I ate my welcome dinner on my first night, so I feel well-versed when it comes to using wasabi and ordering sushi, which glides down the conveyor belt on small race cars. They ask me questions about myself, but I otherwise defer to them, observe the space they create before deciding how I should contribute.

And then we drive around town. We stop at the culture center to play this game that I’ve had to download again. It’s just been released in Japan, and what were quiet nights now bustle. People are on bikes or on foot or in cars with their hazards flashing. This is the nightlife. We walk through neighborhoods in search, looking for virtual creatures that are new or rare. We venture to a park. We park in front of a Buddha statue and walk down an unlit dirt path.
 

This is a great piece of writing, and I could honestly read an entire anthology of essays about various people's experiences with Pokémon Go.

I love how the "gaming memoir" has emerged as a genre of creative writing. I'm not particularly interested in the idea of video game novelizations (outside of fanfic, of course), but I think it would be lovely to have more nonfiction books and essays about single video game titles from a personal perspective.