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For Nathan and Elisa and the princesses
The secular scripture tells us that we are the creators. Other scriptures tell us that we are actors in a drama of divine creation and redemption. Even Alice is troubled by the thought that her dream may not have been hers but the Red King’s. Identity and self-recognition begin when we realize that this is not an either-or question, when the great twins of divine creation and human recreation have merged into one, and we can see that the same shape is upon both.
—Northrop Frye
Grace builds on nature.
—St. Thomas Aquinas
God draws straight with crooked lines.
—Portuguese proverb, quoted by Paul Claudel
1
State of the Art
It was Nathan’s fault that I became God.
It is, as I would learn, hell to be God.
Nathan, to begin with, is as close to a genius as anyone I ever expect to know. If this story has any moral at all, it is that you should stay away from geniuses.
His genius is part brilliance of imagination, part consuming passion for perfection. Maybe five years ago, I took Nathan for a ride on my O’Day 22’ day cruiser in a five-mile wind (about all I risk) on Lake Michigan. He instantly recognized a new challenge—“strategic decision making” were his exact words. Now he races (with great success) a Petersen 42’ racing machine to Mackinac every summer and I still drift around in my five-mile-an-hour winds.
A trim (fitness is a recent enthusiasm), long-haired, medium-height, Jewish political scientist from Detroit (they all don’t grow up in Brooklyn) with a hint of scriptural fervor in his brown eyes, Nathan is a full professor (thus an academic immortal). It was in his other role, however, as impresario of software, that he made me God.
When he was a graduate student, at the age of twenty-three, Nathan took off nine months to work up a data-analysis package in order to write his dissertation. He’s not a programmer but rather an interfacer, a software consumer who can talk Cobol or Pascal or whatever languages the programmers think in these days and tell them what we folks who don’t know a bit from a byte need in the way of data-analysis packages. So his system is in tens of thousands of installations around the world.
Nice side benefit from writing a dissertation, huh?
He’s also a fiction addict, which enables him to interface between the programmers and the fiction addicts of the world. That’s how my troubles started.
I’m one of Nathan’s prime guinea pigs. He tries out his new systems on me because, though he has never quite said it, I think he figures that if a bumbler like me can make something work, any client can.
So when by his own modest admission he had prepared the “state of the art in interactive fiction” last summer, it was natural that he would drive down from New Buffalo to my house at Grand Beach and try it out on me. He claims that he didn’t anticipate what happened, so he is therefore not responsible. I’m not sure I believe him.
One God, after all, is enough. Arguably more than enough.
“Interactive fiction,” he announced proudly, holding up a thick PC program package labeled Duke and Duchess; on the cover was a Boris Vallejo drawing of a lissome princess (reasonably well clad for a Boris princess) and a middle-linebacker kind of knight in a loincloth with a huge sword that he was waving at a terrifying dragon that obviously had evil designs on the princess.
“Data-analysis business slipping?” I asked skeptically.
Nathan’s intense brown eyes sparkled. “No way. But I thought that with our graphics package it would be easy to add a sophisticated parser and create the state of the market for interactive fiction. We have a slow game for those with a PCxt or a clone and a fast game for those who have a machine with an Intel 286 chip like your Compaq.”
“Oh,” I said, “good packaging too. Do you have a dragon in the game?”
“No.”
“No dragon?”
“No dragon. It’s just a symbol of a swords and sorcery game.… What we can do now is like looking at the bison on the walls of the Lascaux Cave in France and being asked to imagine the Mona Lisa.”
“Yeah? I want a dragon.”
“In a few years,” Nathan is strictly hard sell, “we’ll have two spinning laser disks controlled by an even more powerful microprocessor, ten times bigger than the 286. It will be like doing your own cartoons. The disks, just like the ones on the CD players, will hold as much data as thirty-two published books, hundreds, maybe thousands of story lines.”
“Great.” I took off my sunglasses and put down my Elmore Leonard book. “Suppose I don’t want to pick up rocks or kill trolls?”
“We are light-years beyond Adventure,” he said patiently. “We have five thousand scenes on these eight disks.…”
“That’s why the package is so big.”
“… With limited animation. The parser has a vocabulary of four thousand words; you can give it real instructions within certain limitations. They’re all explained in the manual which I wrote myself, so you know it’s good.”
“I can kill animated trolls now.”
“No way.” Nathan was pacing restlessly up and down my sundeck. “This isn’t a souped-up puzzle game. It’s a real story. Even with our randomizer, the novelist has control of the action.”
“Randomizer?”
“Sure, we can’t permit rigid response patterns. It would ruin the fun of the game if we didn’t leave some uncertainties. Nonetheless, within certain limits of variability the author controls the outcome.”
Those words “random” and “variability” implied great problems for me. Stupidly I didn’t challenge them. “He can make the dragon get the buxom princess?”
“Arguably.” He paused in his pacing and jabbed his finger at me. “At least fifty possible story lines that can develop at the author’s choice.”
“That few?”
“We don’t want to be excessive in our estimate.”
“Estimate?” I glanced at the lake. The cloud on the horizon was, as the Scripture says, no bigger than a man’s hand. I wished my teenaged waterski playmates would show up so we could ski before the storm which was promised for the evening.
“No one has played it enough times yet,” he dismissed the problem with a wave of his hand, “to know how many lines exactly.”
That should have been my tipoff. If the bunch of programmers who were ingenious enough to put together an elaborate decision-making package, an absurdly large parser, and an incredible number of graphics images, had still not been able to figure out all the eventualities in their little toy, then it had the capacity to run amok and do things they had never thought about. Guess who was supposed to find
out? But it was too nice a hot, humid summer day for me to be that suspicious.
“So I’m supposed to get a big kick out of playing a game with my 286?” I reached for the portable phone, and dialed the precinct captain in charge of waterskiing.
“You’re not fighting the machine.” Nathan sighed, not quite a West-of-Ireland, advent-of-a-serious-asthma-attack sigh, but nonetheless a noisy notice of weltschmertz. “This is interactive fiction. The machine facilitates your development of the plot by forcing you to exercise your decision-making abilities at key turning points. It’s structuring your story for you.”
“Yeah?”
“It gives you total control of your story line and characters. It makes you God in this particular story. God with color graphics if you plug your machine into a color TV set.”
I think that statement is sufficient indication that Nathan knew the risks in Duke and Duchess. He denies it, but what else would you expect?
“Any storyteller,” I said, forcing myself out of the lounge chair, “is God to his characters. He doesn’t need a machine or ten PC disks to be that. As for God, Her program is not on the market.”
“Stop to think about it,” Nathan had enthused. “How many of your stories have N options for beginnings and endings? You can totally transform a plot with just a few keystrokes.”
“All stories have N options.” I drained my iced-tea glass. “Even the stories of our lives. The storyteller is God, He can do any ending He wants or redo the beginning if He feels like it. Characters get in the way, of course…”
“What kind of God is it,” Nathan demanded, “who lets His creatures get in the way of His stories?”
“Our lives,” I responded, turning theological as I love to do with Nathan, because even though he claims not to believe in God he is basically a rabbi who happens to practice political science and computer software. He is far more a God-haunted character than I am (you don’t have to be very religious at all to be a priest). “Our lives are stories that God tells. We write them together with God. Coauthors. Our free will and His grace in cooperation and conflict. We like to read stories because we’re all storytellers ourselves.”
It was a quote from my friend Shags, but he wouldn’t mind my using it in quasi-rabbinic discussion with Nathan.
“So now you can do it with a couple of keystrokes.” Nathan smiled ecstatically. Then, as an afterthought, “Maybe God has a program like ours in which He does His coauthoring with keystrokes. Hey, while we’re on the subject of God, what happens when His version of our story—assuming that He is, which I don’t necessarily grant—and our version of our story conflict? Who wins? God, I suppose?”
“If you’re a Dominican, yes.” I went back to the hoary old debate between the Molinists and the Suarezians. “If you’re a Jesuit, not necessarily. It’s the classic struggle between grace and free will.”
“And if you’re a sociologist?” Nathan displayed that shrewd smile which occasionally creeps over his expressive lips when he thinks he’s backed me into a corner (an event which I think is rare, but which he would tell you happens often; however, I’m writing this story, so I’m God for Nathan in it, so I decree for the purpose of the world I have created in this story that Nathan is almost always one down to me. If he doesn’t like it, let him write his own story!).
“Well,” I replied cautiously, “maybe you become a Whiteheadian, after Alfred North Whitehead, and decide that She is the Great Improviser, a highly skilled player by ear, a pragmatic empiricist who adjusts to what we do so that the end is one She wants.”
“Sounds like hard work…”
“If She’s addicted to storytelling, as most good story tellers are, She probably enjoys it. Anyway, whoever said that it was easy to be God?”
I would learn in the next few weeks that being God is indeed hard work, so frustrating and painful in fact that I’m sure God would quit if S/He could.
“Not me.”
“Or,” I continued, “you might try an explanation from William James: God is the great model fitter. He keeps trying different paradigms till She finds one that works.”
“Anyway,” Nathan continued enthusiastically, “if you want to be a great improviser or a master model fitter, it’s as simple as a keystroke or a plain declarative instruction with this game. Pick an ending and work your way towards it.”
Nathan was exaggerating as I would later discover. You could pick an ending all right, but once you’d launched the story and set your characters in motion, you could encounter a hell of a lot of difficulty in working your way towards an ending, even more in writing a story without his parser and decision tree and animation. Indeed, after the first game, I must have played it twenty more times (with a different Alpha 10 disk, for reasons which will be obvious later on) and couldn’t come up with the same ending I did the first time—not that it really mattered at that point.
I suspect that the problem is—and it hasn’t hurt the sales of the game, by the way—that the double-decision-tree algorithm Nathan’s warlocks have built into the game is more logical (what else do you expect from a zero/one technology?) than noncomputer storytelling requires. An interactive fiction game, even a brilliant one like Nathan’s (and I’ll admit, damn it, that it’s brilliant, a little too brilliant for me, to tell the truth) permits a writer to tell only those stories that will pass the scrutiny of another computer. Like Mr. Spock in Star Trek, Duke and Duchess won’t let you get away with anything that is “not logical.” Fortunately for us storytellers who are determined to produce the ending we want, our listeners or readers are less hung up on logic or even plausibility than a PCAJ is. If they were all Mr. Spocks, few stories would ever be finished.
Does God labor under the restraints of a computer game, or can S/He play it like we human storytellers? I’m not really sure. Maybe you can decide for yourself as you go on with this story.
But if all human storytellers were held to the logic of Nathan’s algorithm, the fiction market would dry up.
Then we’d all be in trouble. Stories, you see, are not options. Professor Nathan Scott says somewhere that the little kid’s plea, “Momma, tell me a story,” is really a desperate plea for meaning. The astonishing, amazing, and confusing phenomena which impinge on the child’s consciousness seem inexplicable, chaotic, terrifying. Momma’s story puts some order into the confusion, some cosmos into the chaos. Religion in its raw and elemental manifestation plays a “momma” function: it tells stories which suggest that there is order in the confusion, meaning in the terror, cosmos in the chaos. Religion, in short, is a cosmos-creating activity or it isn’t worth a damn and isn’t even religion.
So is storytelling, even if you’re a disciple of Jacques Derrida and are into the deconstruction of stories (one of the most unenjoyable ways of achieving academic tenure that I can imagine). It is as essential for the human condition as is oxygen.
Look, let’s suppose you meet a stranger, maybe on an airplane, and you become friendly enough to ask the stranger who she is. Almost certainly she’ll tell you where she’s from, what she’s doing now, and what the trajectory is for her future. She’s an Annapolis grad who has served on a nuclear submarine for three years (I know women don’t serve on combat craft, but it’s only a story) and is now returning to her home in Rockford, Illinois, where she hopes with some luck to marry her childhood sweetheart who is a successful young lawyer and who, unaccountably, has been in love with her for fifteen years and until recently wanted to marry her. Just when he seemed to have given up, she changed her mind and decided that Rockford, with maybe graduate work in creative writing somewhere and a family of kids plus a weekend in Chicago every month or two, was a perfectly acceptable life. Now she had to win him away from a possible rival, which she thought she could do.
OK? Maybe a little bit more elaborate and appealing than a lot of stories you hear on an airplane, but you get the idea. Beginning, middle, trajectory; or to say the same thing in different ways, beginning, conflict, hope. A
s Berney Geis would put it, you begin with violence, you end on a note of hope, and you have one, better two, likable Jewish characters and one very strong woman.
(All such ingredients are to be found in this tale by the way, and as an extra bonus, a lot of strong women.)
Now suppose that you and the young woman have a bit of the drink taken, several glasses of Baileys Irish Cream, let us say, and she shows some signs of nervousness: maybe she’s missed her opportunity, maybe she’s lost her love because she recognized him for what he really was too late. You ask her what her life means. She hesitates, because that’s a very personal question, but she’s already revealed a lot of herself and you don’t act like she’s a damn fool. So she tries to tell you. Their sub, a black, football-field-long engine of mass destruction, had experienced a malfunction on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. For several hours it seemed that the redundancy systems had all gone out and that they would all either freeze to death or drown in the icy waters of the ocean. She had not been afraid particularly. She continued to monitor her gauges and screens. The cold reminded her of the midnight Mass in her parish church when she was seventeen, and of the light of the crib shining in the darkness of the church. Light in the darkness, the priest said, which the darkness would never put out. She remembered thinking that Martin, her young man with whom she was then in a state of adolescent crush, was a light in the darkness of her discouragement with school and conflicts in her family. She had left home and him because later she thought he was dull. But something seemed to change in him when he graduated from law school and entered his own practice, defying his father’s insistence that he join the family firm. His last letters, before he seemed to give up on her, had been witty and a little mad and very passionate; but she had not thought of him as light in the darkness, Jesus revealing himself in her life, until the lights went out in the sub, and the dim auxiliary power lights flickered on. She didn’t exactly pray, but she did promise herself, and maybe Someone Else, that she would return to Martin and tell him that he had always been her light. Just then the power came back on and the sub was functional again.
God Game Page 1
