Everything you need to understand or teach Playground by Richard Powers.
In Richard Powers's novel Playground, Todd Keane and Rafi Young become friends when they start attending Saint Ignatius for high school. They connect over their similarly fraught home lives and encourage one another's interests in games, computers, and literature. Over time, however, the friends' passions begin to diverge and incite irreparable conflicts between them. Written from the first and third-person points of view, the narrative explores themes including meaning, connection, and creation.