You

YOU determine the story! YOU choose your own destiny! When Russell gets a job at Black Arts games, he reunites with the people who were once his closest friends: the people who he spent hours designing, playing and discussing games with. He soon realises that all is not well at Black Arts. There's a software glitch threatening the next revolutionary product launch - and in order to find it and save his job Russell has to follow it back through twenty years of real and virtual worlds, boardrooms, computer camps, rivalry and loss. You is a story of facing dangers, realising that the most obvious path isn't always the best one to follow, and learning that playing a game can sometimes save your life.

A brilliant, incisive, and very funny journey through the adolescence of the computer game industry, delving with wit and charm into the fascinating question of exactly whose story is being told., The idea of what drives people to make games - other than the fact that it seems like a fun thing to do - remains one that continues to feel frustratingly out of reach...Austin Grossman's new novel might be the most illuminating effort at answering that question yet., YOU confirms Grossman's status as a major talent. Grossman isn't just chronicling the rise and fall of a company, or of a character, or even an industry. Rather, he uses YOU as a tool to prise open the mystical center of what art is, what games are, what fun is, and how they all mix together. A novel that both uplifts and entertains, and reframes the world we live in and the things we do in it. Easily one of the best books I've read this year., A razor-sharp comedy ... a smart meditation on the nature of gaming. Grossman, who has designed video games, brings experience but more importantly abundant affection to describing this world, Some of the most startling, acute writing on video games yet essayed

Austin Grossman is a video game design consultant and the author of SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE. He lives in Berkeley. Visit his website at austingrossman.com or follow him on Twitter @AustinGrossman.