Significant Zero

by Walt Williams

  Turns out they loved it. After that, Digital Extremes sent me everything that had managed to slip through the cracks. I wrote barks for the game’s four-player multiplayer mode in which a samurai, a Mossad agent, a voodoo doctor, and a Scotsman who’s drunk enough to realize he’s a video-game character team up to find the Spear of Destiny. I churned out a Glenn Beck–inspired radio show decrying the socialist underpinnings of a beloved character whose name “starts with an M and ends with an Ario.” I created hours of fake public-access programming and delivered commercials for such fine establishments as Dave’s Drive-Thru Daiquiris & Discount Divorces and Itty Bitty Bang Bang, New York’s premier—and only—little-person gentlemen’s club, a call-out to the Rope article I wrote in college that set me on the path to game development.

  Writing lore for The Darkness II was my fucking vacation, a chance to free myself from the brutal self-loathing of Spec Ops and go full tilt into the Lizard Brain. If you get a chance, you should really pick up a copy. It’s the only game in existence that includes the shrunken head of Pope John XII and a PSA for a failed Planned Parenthood drive asking college students to not use the condoms that came stapled to their safe-sex brochures.

  * * *

  LIKE ANY VACATION, MY time with The Darkness II came to an end far too soon. The downside to being a fast writer is that you reach the finish line long before everyone else. With my work finished, I returned to my normal life of waiting to die or for Spec Ops to ship, whichever came first.

  Spec Ops: The Line was finally released on June 26, 2012, three years later than we had hoped. By then, my life was back in boxes. It had been that way for months. My brain was ready to run again, but my body didn’t know where to. Working remotely had made me realize I could do my job from anywhere so long as I had an Internet connection. Five years after D. T. had spiraled out of control, I was contemplating the same thing he once had. I could put my belongings into storage and then leave to wander the world, living from paycheck to paycheck, sending dispatches from wherever I happened to be at the time. There were so many places I’d never seen, so many vacation days unused. If I was going to work too hard, it was only logical that I do it in a way that showed me the world.

  Mainly, I just wanted to run away. My depression had returned with the release of Spec Ops. It would be easy to say I was affected by the game’s performance. While Spec Ops found critical success, it didn’t fly off the shelves. According to Strauss Zelnick, Take-Two’s chairman and CEO, sales of Spec Ops were disappointing and “lower than expected,” which helped contribute to a net loss of more than $110 million during Take-Two’s first-quarter. Believe it or not, that didn’t bother me one bit. It’s not like it was my money. I could appreciate why Take-Two wouldn’t be excited, but the lack of sales certainly wasn’t a reflection on me. The only thing I cared about was the story, which seemed to be resonating with people. For the most part, reviews praised it. We were nominated for some awards, and even won a few. Some people didn’t like it, but honestly, that didn’t bug me, either. The way I saw it, if you played through the entire game and didn’t like it, your opinion was as valid as anyone else’s. So why was I depressed?

  If you give yourself completely to a project, when it eventually ends, you’ll find part of you is gone. Your mind will linger in the mental space you created for that game, but only as a sense memory. The game itself is no longer in your grasp. You brought it into existence, and now that it has left you behind, your purpose has been served. I was depressed because Spec Ops was over.

  It had been eight years since I told my parents “Don’t worry. I’m going to be a writer.” Everything had worked out fine, just as I said it would. I had found success. Why, then, did I feel like such a failure?

  It took me a long time to figure it out. It didn’t even come to me until I was writing this book. Success is an oasis in the middle of the desert. Is it real or a mirage? There’s no way to know, but we pursue it anyway. Some of us never reach it, but those who do are met with a surprising realization: an oasis is not paradise; it’s just shade and water. If that’s not what you’re looking for, then it has nothing to offer.

  I thought success would be a transformative experience. Once I found it, I would be content knowing that I had accomplished what so many had failed to achieve. There would be this warm, fuzzy glow in my chest, kind of like what I assumed the Prize felt like in the film Highlander. I’d stand up straighter and carry myself sexier, and when I looked in the mirror I’d see the person I had always wanted to be.

  None of that happened. Writing didn’t get easier. My confidence decreased rather than soared. And the only things that gave me a warm, fuzzy glow were watching porn and eating half a jar of peanut butter in one sitting.

  Success didn’t make me happy, because I wasn’t looking for success. I was looking for a new me, and that asshole never showed up.

  16

  * * *

  NOT THE FALL BUT THE STOP

  I was eating dinner at a Chili’s in Frisco, Texas, when I got the email.

  FROM: The Fox

  SUBJECT: Hey

  When it comes to work emails, “Hey” is one of the worst subject lines you’ll ever see. “Hey” is not a greeting; it is the textual equivalent of sitting you down, taking your hand, and saying, “We need to talk.”

  The email read, “I hope you are having a great Thanksgiving. We should have a call after the holiday.”

  The Fox once told me, “You can always tell when someone is about to quit. If they poke their head into your office and ask if you’ve got fifteen minutes, they just want to talk. But if they ask, ‘You free?’ they’re quitting.” The brevity is what gives it away. People tend to use fewer words when they’re setting someone up for bad news. It’s a trick we all use when we need to be serious but don’t wish to cause alarm. I’m not sure it’s ever worked. Instead you immediately know something terrible is coming. Your brain kicks into overdrive as it runs through the possibilities. That’s the worst part; the not knowing.

  My mind immediately jumped to its standard foregone conclusion. Surprisingly, I felt no panic; my heart didn’t race. I looked at my family gathered around me—my grandparents, mother, aunt, cousin, and her three sons. I had a plate of chicken crispers with a side of honey mustard and ranch for optimal dipping. There was still queso in the skillet, waiting to be eaten. After dinner, we’d head back to my cousin’s house and play rummy around the kitchen table.

  It was nice.

  Whenever I was out with people, I’d place my BlackBerry facedown on the table. The idea was that if I couldn’t see the flashing red light, I wouldn’t be constantly checking it—which of course made me check it more often because I couldn’t see if the light was flashing. It was terrible manners, but my friends and family had come to accept it. I think that’s why they noticed when I shut off the BlackBerry and shoved it in my pocket.

  “Is something wrong?” my mom asked.

  “Nope. I just got an email from the Fox, but it’s no big deal.”

  “What’d it say?”

  I smiled and reached for the tortilla chips. “Either I’m getting fired or the Fox is.”

  * * *

  MY GUESS HAD BEEN close to the truth—the Fox was leaving, by choice. He’d been at it for ten years and was ready to move on. He wanted to try something new, work on a smaller scale than big-budget AAA games. But that was down the line. For now, he was going to take time off, spend it with his family, get in as much kitesurfing as possible.

  I flew to San Francisco to meet my new boss, the Owl. With me, he inherited a strange situation, so it was important to introduce myself: “Hi. I’m the guy who works for you but never comes to work. Please keep giving me money.” He agreed to let me keep my job, but only if I moved back. I said I needed to think about it.

  That night, I met the Fox for dinner in San Francisco. We ate sushi and spent most of the meal quietly judging an exceptionally fit man in his late forties. The Fox swore he knew
the man. “I see him on the weekend at the soccer fields. He likes to hit on the fifteen-year-old girls.” Looking at him, it wasn’t hard to believe. He wore a Lycra shirt and shorts, in December. While perusing the menu, he commented aloud so no one in the restaurant would miss out on his very important opinion. He was a joke, and made for an easy distraction from our uncomfortable conversation.

  Maybe eight years is too long to work with the same person. The closer your relationship, the harder it is to separate that person from the job. Just the sight of their face can trigger an emotional response, ingrained through years of shared stress. The Fox and I had our ups and downs. Through the years, our relationship had been paternal, empowering, toxic, or any combination of the three. We’d never been afraid to speak openly with each other, so you might think our dinner conversation would have been an honest reflection of our time together. In my experience, that’s not how endings work in the games industry.

  There is relief that comes with the completion of a project. It is an opiate, numbing you to the pain you’ve felt for months, even years. You can’t deny the bad times, but in the high of the moment, you’d rather focus on the good. Talk of terrible schedules, overblown egos, unreasonable demands, and never-ending dumpster fires can wait until later. Later almost always means never. If an unsolved problem didn’t ruin a project, then was it really a problem? The theoretical answer is yes; obviously this issue needs to be addressed. The practical answer is what you’d expect—Eh?

  Who knows? Maybe every job is like that. For all we know, on April 16, CPAs across the country pop bottles of champagne, pass around plastic cups, and do their best to leave the last four months behind them.

  “Yvonne, about what I said—”

  “Forget it, Jillian. We can hate each other tomorrow. Today, we’re alive.”

  The Fox and I reminisced, listed off regrets, and were generous with our compliments and apologies, but we never touched the sore spots. The bruises had formed during the last two years, as we fought to get Spec Ops out the door. There was no reason to sully our good memories with the bad. This was the end.

  After a few hours, we stepped out into the cold, foggy San Francisco night. I appreciated the ambiance. The best good-byes always come with a little drama, and the weather was definitely giving off a Casablanca vibe.

  The Fox unchained his bike and rolled it toward me. “Do you think you’ll move back?”

  “Who knows? They want me to, but I feel like I’ve done San Francisco. The idea of moving back feels like going in reverse. I guess we’ll see.”

  He leaned across his bike and gave me a hug. “It was good to see you,” he said. “Good luck with everything.”

  “You, too.”

  The Fox climbed onto his bike and steadied himself with one foot on a pedal and the other on the sidewalk. He looked back at me and said, “If I could give you one piece of advice, it would be this—work on your people skills. I’ve always believed you would be someone in this industry, and I’m not just saying that. People like what you do, but they think you’re difficult. So far, every developer you’ve worked with has said they never want to work with you again. You won’t go very far if you can’t get along with anyone.”

  “In my defense, no one wants to work with me because you always made me deliver your bad news. You made me play the bad guy so you wouldn’t have to.”

  The Fox’s eyes sparkled. His grin was wide and smug. “It’s true; I did. Thanks for that.”

  With that, the Fox pushed off and peddled away. He raised a hand above his head and waved, never looking back.

  “Ciao.”

  * * *

  IN THE END, I came back.

  I like making things, and my job allowed me to do that. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t ready. There were a lot of new faces in the office. Even people I’d known for years looked like strangers. Between my time in Berlin and Dallas, I’d been gone too long. During my occasional visits, my constant negativity had pushed them away. Instead of trying to reach out and rebuild relationships, I did what I always do—sought comfort in my work.

  Trying to find a new project was like going through my closet only to learn I had outgrown all my clothes. The places I’d been, creatively, had left me in a particular state of mind. To call it dark would be dishonest, because to me it never seemed that way. The people I worked with probably would disagree.

  I joined the Mafia III writers’ room for a few weeks. The game was set in a facsimile of New Orleans during the sixties. It seemed like a good fit since I was from Louisiana. It was somewhat late in the project; the writers had already worked out most of the story and characters. I was just there to help iron out the kinks, one of the biggest being the third act. The plan was for Frank, the player’s character, to take advantage of a gang war and use it to wipe out his rivals. They just didn’t know how to kick things off.

  “What if,” I said, “Frank’s rivals kill Sam, but they do it in a normal, mundane way, like shooting him in the chest? Frank knows Sam’s gang will be pissed, but not enough to fight back. So what if Frank secretly desecrates Sam’s corpse and makes it look like he was tortured? Then, when Sam’s gang finds out, they lose their shit and launch a full-on gang war that Frank uses to wipe out his enemies and take over the city.”

  The room was silent. I thought they were letting the weight of my genius settle in, but then I noticed their uncomfortable looks.

  “I dunno,” said one of the writers. “That kind of makes Frank seem like a bad guy.”

  “Frank is a heroin dealer and a cop killer. He is a bad guy.”

  “Right, but we’re not making a game about a heroin dealer. This game is about the fantasy of being a heroin dealer.”

  Clearly, it wasn’t meant to be. I wasn’t upset. Mafia III was their game, and they’d been working on it for a very long time. They didn’t need my hang-ups thrown into the mix. Besides, the idea of writing another violent game wasn’t enticing. There are only so many ways you can justify shooting people in the face; I’d pretty well exhausted all of them. It was time I took a break from shooters and tried something new.

  Firaxis had a game in the works—Civilization: Beyond Earth, the latest in a franchise of 4X strategy games. In the Civilization franchise, players grow an empire from prehistory all the way to the near future, and they do it by eXploring, eXpanding, eXploiting, and eXterminating. Hence the genre name, 4X.

  As BioShock was a spiritual successor to System Shock 2, Beyond Earth succeeded another beloved PC game, Alpha Centauri. In both BE and AC, players colonized alien worlds and built new human civilizations among the stars. The game had violence, but it wasn’t necessary. Beyond Earth and the other Civilization games pride themselves on giving players multiple paths to victory. Even if you chose the path of military conquest, it wasn’t AAA violence. No one would be gored by a giant drill or orally violated by a tiny demon. At most, you’d be looking at an animated version of the board game Risk. It was exactly what I was looking for.

  There were no story meetings for Beyond Earth. Firaxis would send me a list of prompts, and I would generate text for them. Simple, straightforward. I liked that.

  The first prompt they sent was for a quest. A spaceship crashes near the player’s outpost. Upon inspection, the player discovers the ship’s inhabitants have survived thanks to technological modifications they made to their bodies. These people are cyborgs, and they need the player’s help to survive.

  The quest plays out one of two ways. The player can aid the cyborgs by inviting them into their community, causing technological body modification to spread among the player’s citizens. Or, the player can kill the cyborgs to ensure their citizens remain fully human.

  “We like what you sent,” said a voice on my phone. “It’s well written, but it’s too dark.”

  “I mean, it’s kind of a dark choice,” I said. “We’re giving players the option to kill refugees to protect the genetic purity of their people. I hate to play the Hitler
card, but it’s a little Third Reich, don’t you think?”

  “We hear what you’re saying, and in the real world that would be true. But in a video game, the player is always good. Whatever choice the player makes is always the right choice. The script needs to reflect that.”

  Whatever choice the player makes is always the right choice.

  It was the most insightful and damning description of video games I had ever heard.

  Despite this book being evidence to the contrary, I consider myself a professional. If you pay me to write something, I will write it regardless of my own feelings. That’s how jobs work. Careers are not magical wish fulfillment where you are paid a constant living wage for only doing what you want to do, when you want to do it. This understanding has served me well in the video-game industry. Working in AAA, I never had a problem writing and designing terrible things for players to do, because it was always presented with a degree of honesty. At its core, art is emotional manipulation. If you’re inclined toward that sort of work, there’s a good chance you already inhabit a philosophical gray area. Even in BioShock, when we downplayed killing Little Sisters by keeping the death off camera and referring to it as “Harvesting,” the player was still labeled a “bad” person. If you killed a Little Sister, you could not receive the game’s happy ending. To this day, I’m still fine with it.

  So, I rewrote the quest and sent it back, expecting that to be the end of it.

  There was no call this time; just an email. “The text was still too dark,” said the words on my computer screen. The developer would write it themselves.

  That night, I couldn’t sleep. Rewriting the mission felt like I had normalized genetic cleansing. Even worse, I apparently did a piss-poor job of it. It would be wrong to say it compromised my integrity, because I did it willingly, but I definitely felt like I’d crossed a personal line.