Early in Gabrielle Zevin’s novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a game developer wunderkind named Dov Mizrah leads a student workshop at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Advanced Games seminar (clearly based on MIT’s real Game Lab).

As in a writing workshop, each student has to bring in two games to critique. Dov deflects all nitpicky questions about what programming language to use. Instead, he says, “The idea is to blow each other’s minds … I hate hate hate hate hate being bored.” The best friends of his student, Sadie Green, find him repellent and arrogant, with his leather pants, topknot, and “roofie of a cologne”; Sadie finds him vulgar but exciting.

I couldn’t help but think that if I’d ever had a seminar like that in college, I might’ve stuck with writing fiction. No dull mimicry for the sake of art—games can be off-putting, gory, or weird, but the good ones are never boring. Unlike Moby-Dick, no one has ever handed anyone else a controller and said, “This is God of War. Force yourself to get through it.” The most important component to any video game is that you have to love it.

Ostensibly, Zevin’s utterly absorbing novel is about creativity, the work process, and designing decidedly not-boring play. Sadie Green and her childhood friend, Sam Masur, make a video game together. That game, Ichigo, becomes a blockbuster classic. Their studio becomes a legend.

If you’re a tech geek, you might be disappointed. While Zevin describes herself as a lifelong gamer, she only inserts enough detail about the technical process to lend the story verisimilitude. The Ulysses engine—a tool for rendering water that acts as a MacGuffin for several key plot points—is described in a single sentence as a jury-rigged variation on adaptive tile refresh. Sam and Sadie’s brilliance is rendered in broad strokes. One went to Harvard, the other to MIT. Sadie programs until the blood vessels in her eyes explode.

Instead, for Sam and Sadie—and their third best friend, Marx Watanabe—games are a means of connection. Unlike a book, a game isn’t complete until someone else plays it. Over the course of 30 years, Sam, Sadie, and Marx hand each other games, their hearts’ blood. “Understand me,” they tell each other in not so many words. “Play with me. Love me.”

Whether it’s musical theater, death metal, or comics, every nerd has had a similar moment of connection—when you realize that out of all the faceless rabble that populates this huge, heartless world, here is someone who loves the same thing you do. Connecting is hard, but not this time. You have something to talk about.

Sam and Sadie both find themselves alienated from most of the people in their lives. Sam is half-Jewish and half-Korean. He’s poor and kind of funny-looking, and has lived through a disfiguring tragedy. He is unwilling to talk to anyone except … well, Sadie.

Zevin, who is herself mixed race, has Sam express his sense of displacement in an interview with Kotaku on cultural appropriation:

The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don’t exist in it. And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.

For her part, Sadie is smart, more conventionally attractive, and wealthy, but she has been neglected in favor of her sister, who had leukemia when they were kids. As a result, she has a gory, nihilistic sense of humor. She’s dark, obsessive, and weird, and Sam likes it.

She’s also a woman who works in a male-dominated industry, which comes with its own specific pitfalls. To be a woman is to be less than; other women avoid her. “It was as if being a woman was a disease that you didn’t wish to catch,” she thinks. She struggles with how the public defines her: not through her accomplishments, but through her relationships with men.

Sam and Sadie are lonely, but not when they’re with each other. As Sam notes somewhat controversially, romance is easier to find than another kindred spirit—a creative person who inspires and motivates you even if they occasionally baffle and infuriate you. By the time they’re 25, Sam and Sadie have become celebrities in their industry. They’ve also broken each other’s hearts multiple times through cruel actions and misunderstandings and gone years without speaking.

But they always keep circling back to each other, to the point of dismissing Marx simply because he is charming, good-looking, and normal. Both of them agree that he’s kind of shallow, boring, and a little dumb, until it’s almost too late. As Sadie muses ruefully, life is long, unless it isn’t. Like a save point mid-game, we all get redos—another tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, to fix everything. We all will have only one day where we don’t.

Until I read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, I had never heard of anyone playing games the way my husband and I play games, the way that Sam and Sadie do—on campaign mode but passing the controller back and forth. It takes a shattering lack of ego to play this way, knowing that someone else has the power to make a decision that would change the storyline or garner the skills to play through certain sequences that you’ll never see again. All that matters when you play like this is that you’re moving forward, and you’re together.

As a semiprofessional hobbyist in the Gadget Lab, I speak from personal experience when I say that people can be really dismissive of recreation as you hit middle age. After 25, you start to seem a little weird or unserious if you’re still really into, say, roller-skating, Dungeons & Dragons, or seeing Phish live.

Real grownups have more pressing demands on their time. Maybe you should be reaching the C-level in your profession, or own a home and care deeply about your landscaping. There’s an unspoken implication that by the time you reach a certain age, the main thing you do for fun should be to sit around a table, drink alcohol, and compare mortgage rates with your friends, not practice killing robot dinosaurs with a bow and arrow.

But what is friendship but time spent together? And what are hobbies but love? Is the connection any less deep or real because you found each other through surfing or Fortnite instead of through an app or mutual friends? Sam can’t tell Sadie how he feels about her outright, but he can make a game for her. Maybe we’d all be better off if we had more ways to say to one another, “Hey, I’d like to spend a lot of time with you.”