God Game
Page 2
As she tells you her story of light and darkness, her own eyes, dull from worry and weariness, regain brightness and enthusiasm. Her hope is renewed. Martin, lucky man, hasn’t a chance of escaping from her.
The struggle between light and darkness and the triumph, contested but indomitable, of light over darkness, a “structuring” symbol which her heritage has inherited and partially reshaped from Persian religion, has become the critical symbol (the “privileged symbol” Paul Ricoeur calls it) of what her life means, the core of her religion, the cosmos-making story in her existence.
A cliché narrative? Not to her and presumably not to Martin either. And not to a storyteller worth his salt or to readers for whom the storyteller can make her adventure come alive.
To her it is a great adventure, scary, anxiety-producing, romantic, challenging. It’s a story in which she is the narrator, the protagonist, the center of the action, sometimes the only attractive character, other times a sinner seeking redemption, a pilgrim from light to darkness.
Thus are we all storytellers, narrating the story of our own lives and finding in our religion, whatever its overarching symbols, the cosmos-making themes that give final purpose to our existence.
Even if we insist that life has no meaning, if like Jacques Monod we think it is all chance, we still explain who we are by telling stories.
Fiction doesn’t imitate life. Life imitates fiction.
Sometimes life imitates fiction imitating life.
So Nathan and his elves were meddling in matters that they did not understand, and to be perfectly fair, could not be expected to understand. They didn’t realize that sometimes fiction can take control of life.
Neither did I, as far as that goes.
I didn’t argue all that out with Nathan on the sundeck. Later, however, after we’d watched the tapes and tried to figure out what the hell had happened, we agonized for hours, like two Talmudists, about these themes. Particularly about who Ranora was. I accused Nathan of wanting to hire her as a programmer. He accused me of wanting her as an adoring teenaged daughter—which was, I thought, a complete misreading of ‘Nora’s character. But more about that extraordinary peppermint-candy young woman later.
“It’s perfectly possible,” Nathan raved on that first day on my sundeck, “to postulate a double ending of the game, which will be equiprobable. Like in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.”
“There are four endings, counting the two by Meryl Streep in the film, and three of them are not probable at all. Besides, it’s an abdication of a storyteller’s responsibility not to make his own choice of an ending.”
“Absolutely no obligation,” Nathan insisted.
“Flann O’Brien or Brian O’Nolan,” I continued to disregard his comments, “starts At Swim Two Birds with three beginnings, all equally improbable, and finishes with three endings which are not merely improbable but quite mad. That’s fun, classic fun, but it really isn’t storytelling.”
“Fine.” Nathan suppressed a yawn. “Try that, too, if you want. Our program can do anything a storyteller can do. Only better.”
As things turned out, it could do one thing that a storyteller couldn’t do. Not only could it influence people who are created in the writer’s imagination and eventually the reader’s, it could influence real people.
At least we think they are real people.
God only knows.
“God with complete control.” Nathan followed me down the steps towards the babble of teenaged male and female voices (Michele, of course, in charge) talking the argot which is common to the species.
That was simply untrue, though whether Nathan’s mistake was in algorithm or theology is a puzzle I haven’t straightened out yet.
Anyway, after the punks and punkesses thoroughly humiliated me on the lake, we returned to Grand Beach as the black storm clouds began piling up on the Chicago side of the lake and marching inexorably towards us. A lover of summer storms, I noted with satisfaction that it looked like a humdinger.
I’d better say a word or two about Michele since she plays an important part in the story. Well, maybe she doesn’t. You’ll have to judge that for yourself.
At first impression, she is like a thousand pretty Irish Catholic teenaged women I have known—brown-eyed, brown-haired (slightly red tint inherited from the maternal side of the clan), with a raincloud-exorcising smile, articulate, intelligent, strong willed (an understatement), and talented (in her case singing and acting). Unlike most of them she will not, as another one put it once, “peak out” at seventeen. Also unlike many of the others, she is a superb athlete, more because of grace and balance than because of strength and determination. Twice her “Irish Twin” brother, Bob, failed after a dozen tries to master a new ski. Both times Michele popped up on the first effort, much to her sibling’s dismay. Neither time did she lord it over him, so, poor guy, he was reduced to bragging about her accomplishment when we returned to the village.
Her relationship with the “twin” (thirteen months younger) gives a clue about a striking difference between Michele and most of her species at the same age. Perhaps because she spent so much time as a child taking care of another member of the family who was desperately ill, she is extraordinarily sensitive to others’ suffering and discreetly concerned and caring in her attitudes and behavior towards them. Sometimes, I think, almost too “responsible.”
Not, however, about unimportant things. Like returning phone calls.
Does this character description explain what happens at the end of the God Game story?
As I say, you’ll have to make up your own mind about that.
After I dropped Michele off at home, I had to deliver the other skiers to their respective stations before I could try Nathan’s game. John Larkin to the “Pav,” as the local clubhouse eatery is called (short for “Pavilion,” if you please) to cook hamburgers and spin his own SF tales about an imaginary trip to Brazil, and Heidi to the beach where she plays the lifeguard role with precinct-captain skills on which we Irish apparently don’t have a monopoly.
After I had left the teens at their posts, I decided that it was time for a bite to eat. I ate a banana and opened the instruction book for Duke and Duchess. It was, I’ll admit, a clever package. The narrative context was elementary. Two principalities, partly medieval but partly futuristic (the Star Wars milieu) which had been feuding for centuries. One was presided over by a Duke, the other by a Duchess; each had been raised from childhood to hate the other and the other’s principality. They were surrounded by evil viziers (Come on, Nathan, they’re not Turks!), high priests, witches, wizards, mad scientists, and others with vested interests in either war or peace. The characters of the two protagonists were undefined. You will create their personalities, the manual announced enthusiastically, by imposing decisions on them.
There was nowhere in the manual, and I must insist on this, any mention of an “ilel.”
A basic plot structure, a familiar story line, jazzed up by fantasy mummery. You can make one of them bad and the other good. The bad or the good then will win the conflict depending on your narrative vision. Or you can go the irony route and make them both bad. Or you can choose the tragedy line and make them both good but sufficiently flawed that they still destroy one another. Or you can opt for comedy and make them both good and sufficiently wise and/or flexible that they overcome the obstacles and create peace between the two principalities. Only if they do succeed, it must be against heroic odds and just barely at the last minute.
OK. Standard plot, standard dilemma from the human condition: Can we overcome our own prejudices and the prejudices of those around us sufficiently to live in harmony, and perhaps love, with those who are different from us?
The medieval/futuristic setting, the computer mumbo jumbo, the parser and the graphics, the ingenious double-decision tree (the essence of the algorithm that Nathan’s resident gnomes had dreamed up) were merely gimmicks. Nonetheless, they might be interesting gimmicks to teach stu
dents of any age the craft of storytelling. Given the undisciplined and self-indulgent tripe that passed for serious fiction in the little magazines, that might not be all bad.
Yet there was a naïveté in Nathan’s enthusiastic prose. Your characters do not emerge as the tabula rasa which liberal social science likes to think is the human personality at the beginning of life. Characters spring into existence like Venus from the sea, fully grown and with biases and prejudices, weaknesses and strengths, fragility and courage, hopes and frustrations like anyone else you meet in the course of life. The storyteller, an artist in bricolage, has to make do with what his preconscious has given him in the way of character fragments. How could Nathan’s medicine men deal with that? I suspected that the characters of the Duke and the Duchess were a given in the algorithm, possibly projections of the unconscious and preconscious biases of the medicine men, oops, medicine persons. So it really wouldn’t be my story.
I made a note to tell Nathan that he had to permit his authors to build in their own character/personality program for the various leads in the tale. This could be done by a menu-driven program, pop up a series of questions, multiple choice, which forced the “author” to think through the kinds of people his characters were. Neat idea. It would knock Nathan’s algorithm into a cocked hat. But with all the available RAM space in an AT and its clones, his magi should be able to program for “precharacterization,” and that would make the game even more fun and a better teaching device. It would also enhance the marketing pitch: “Create your own persons!”
(As those of you who have played the revised game know, that is precisely what the magi, programming and marketing, did. They even built a Ranora into the game when I decided that the real version of that strange little imp would enjoy enormously becoming part of the game.)
Oddly enough, the people I had to deal with when the game finally began rolling, including Ranora, were persons I might have created if I had a menu-driven program, characters who lurk in ready-made, “off the shelf” bits and pieces in my own preconscious.
I glanced again at the Boris cover painting. Someone on Nathan’s staff must be a science fiction buff. If the Duke, a certain Lenrau, was dumb enough to choose the dragon over the Duchess, known appealingly as B’Mella, he needed psychiatric help, poor man.
My theology goes in the comic direction, anyway. Tragedy is horrendously real, I believe, but only penultimate. Every storyteller is a theologian and every story is about God, one way or another, despite what the local Cardinal of your choice might try to tell you.
The first thing to do was to connect my Compaq 286 (so called because it is based on an Intel 80286 chip)—a portable clone of the PC/AT—into my TV. No easy task for one as electronically illiterate as I am, because the cables and connections behind my Zenith wide screen make a mare’s nest look neat and orderly. The only way I could force the hookup to work was to run it through my satellite receiver box, which would soon prove to be the cause, or maybe only the occasion, of my God problem.
We don’t have cable at Grand Beach, you see, so I have this massive green mesh disk pointing at the sky, listening (as I used to tell people jokingly) for communications from outer space or from God. Actually, it is mostly useful for bringing in the Bravo channel every night of the year. Without thinking about it, I programmed the system to save not only the input from Nathan’s floppies but also from my first game.
Another note for Nathan: If you can’t condense this monster and if the laser-driven disks are not ready yet, you have to tell the user how much space he’s going to need on the cover of the package.
I finally loaded the monster, ordered the machine to execute the program, and waited for my big screen to light up in rather anemic pink and green with the title:
The Duke and the Duchess
A Medieval/Futuristic Fantasy Romance.
Good for you, Nathan; you’ve touched every base. No, on second thought, you don’t have the word “mystery” in the title.
I’ll admit that I should have read the manual more carefully; but who reads manuals carefully save for the magi, gnomes, and medicine persons who think in Pascal?
I did grasp the distinction between “commands” and “utilities.” The former were simple propositional statements, followed by the required
The utilities were programmatic instructions, almost always self-explanatory, like SUSPEND GAME, STATUS, TERMINATE GAME, BEGIN GAME, DUKE, DUCHESS, D&D (for both the Duke and Duchess, apparently in random order), PAUSE. They were linked to function keys; Nathan and his elves even provided a card you could insert over the Compaq’s function keys so that you didn’t have to remember that F3 was STATUS and F10 was TERMINATE GAME.
Also you could assign in process a shift/function key to a particular character—like Malvau or N’Rasia—who wasn’t listed in the manual but to whom you wanted to give a name and a role in the story and then, should that character’s subplot move backstage, you could reprogram the shift/function key.
Clever.
So I told the machine that I wanted the game to start.
I made another mental note: call it “story” not “game,” and pushed the STATUS key, perversely thinking of it as F3.
The screen erupted in a kind of sickly red with black flashing letters that said WAR!, kind of an overdone and garish version of the Airplane and Submarine games.
Keep those two in mind when you’re reading this report. Nathan’s crowd had obviously studied them very closely because they were both winners in the crazy software market and had figured, not unreasonably, that if they could develop a product that the reviewers—who have almost as much impact on software purchases as do New York drama critics on the theatre—would compare to either game but say it was “more advanced” but still “user friendly,” they would have a super winner.
User friendly it is, until your electronics mare’s nest goes out of control. Still, the blurb I let Nathan use over my name tells the truth, in spades: “The most compelling game I have ever played. The most fascinating story I have ever heard.”
Tell me about it.
Anyway, after a lot of color pyrotechnics, the graphics changed to a bunch of little blips like the graphics on a TRS model 100 banging off one another. The machine made a lot of shrill screeching noises, a poor imitation in my judgment for the sound of war and no competition for the rushing wind, the roaring lake, the crackling lightning and booming thunder outside. I was tempted to turn off Duke and Duchess and watch the far more interesting show the real God was putting on.
Which is exactly what I should have done.
I pushed the D&D function key to get a look at B’Mella and Lenrau. The Duchess was a blob of blue on a beige background and a concatenation of high-pitched screeches on the Zenith. The Duke was red on black and less-high-pitched beeps. The caves of Lascaux, huh, Nathan?
Then lightning struck my house.
More specifically, it struck my satellite dish and sent a glow of blue light dancing through my house. No time for an act of contrition either.
The lights went out, the big screen turned black, then blank, and the rain beat furiously against the roof.
“Wow,” I said with dismaying lack of originality. I crept over to the dining-room window and looked out at the dish. It hung like a wilting flower, now focused on none of the satellites. No Brazilian movie with Sonia Braga on Bravo tonight.
Then the lights came back on. Instead of Nathan’s game there was a movie on the screen. So maybe the dish was not completely hors de combat. A slender, attractive woman, a somewhat younger and darker Faye Dunaway (or, if you want, Kathleen Turner at the present) probably in her late twenties or early thirties, stood on a s
hallow hill against an ominous gray sky. “Carnage,” she said grimly.
“We are routing them,” a suspicious-looking old goat with a scraggly black beard whispered in her ear.
“Linco, if this continues,” she closed her eyes, “everyone will be dead.”
“More of them will be dead, Lady B’Mella,” said the old goat, who was wearing a cloak covered with stars, “than of us.”
B’Mella? What the hell?
She didn’t look like Boris’s pneumatic blonde. Rather, she was tall and slender and elegant, a brown-eyed, brown-skinned, long-haired, dark lady from the fringes of the land of night. She was wearing a loose and thin blue gown which hinted at loveliness instead of revealing it. However, the most striking thing about B’Mella, if that was really her name, was the drawn, haunted expression on her finely carved face, a woman who in a brief span of life had seen uncounted horrors but was still vulnerable to being hurt by more horror. I think I fell in love with her at once.
Before I could move from my place in the dining room, or even begin to figure things out, the film cut to another hill. A medium-sized man, with broad shoulders and fair hair, wearing some sort of weird red armor, was peering at a distant view, surrounded by an array of dubious characters like the old goat Linco we had just left behind on the hill.
“Victory will be ours by sunset, Lord Lenrau,” a thin, bald old man, an anorexic Lt. Kojak, shouted triumphantly.
Lenrau was no linebacker for the L.A. Raiders either. He, too, was probably in his early thirties, compact, tense, square-jawed, a quarterback maybe who was not quite tall enough to make it in the pros. His intelligent blue eyes were dull with pain and, I thought even then, a hint of being recalled from somewhere else.
“Only the lord of death will triumph today,” he murmured wearily.