References to video games, gaming terms, and gaming history occur throughout the novel. As Samson Masur and Sadie Green grow up, the games they play also change, from single-player, simple-graphics games like The Oregon Trail to multiplayer, role-playing games such as Pioneers. One of the most important aspects of game creation that the novel explores is games as works of art and literature on par with books. This is fitting since some of the earliest groundbreaking video games were inspired by science fiction novels. During the 1960s, MIT students Steve Russell and his friends created Spacewar!, a science fiction-inspired dueling game between two spaceships. Spacewar! wasn’t released to the public since at the time, computers were too large and expensive for consumer use and were confined to universities and offices.

To be commercially viable, video games needed displays like computer screens and televisions could provide. The solution in the 1970s was arcade games, where audiovisual games could be played on coin-operated machines in video game arcades. One of the earliest such games released commercially was Computer Space, inspired by Spacewar!. While Computer Space failed to take off commercially, Pong, an arcade ping-pong game, launched in 1972 and was a huge hit.