“It was a fun idea. But until it comes along, this is the latest build of WAFFLE, set to Realms mode. Did you end up taking any more programming?” she asked. As she talked she shut down what she was doing—I glimpsed spaceships drifting between planets, in orbit around a double star.
“Two semesters of C,” I told her. But we both knew I was no Simon. I could see her features harden a little. She’d have the extra work of gearing all the explanations to a nontechie.
“All right. We won’t do scripting language for now. I’ll just load a level,” she said. She ran the editor—her setup had an extra monitor with a monochrome display—and as the editor ran it showed a long series of status messages.
The editor screen appeared, split in four parts. She piloted the camera around, zooming over chasms and through walls. We passed a group of goblins standing motionless, each with a swarm of tiny green numbers hovering over its head. Time had stopped, or, rather, had not yet been turned on. There were extra objects visible in the world—boxes, spheres, cartoon bells, and lightbulbs—hidden lines of influence, pathfinding routes, traps, and dangers. I was seeing the world as game developers saw it.
“You got through changing terrain, right? Placing objects?”
I nodded. I hadn’t, quite, but I’d decided already to stop admitting things like that, to just add them to the list of things I’d figure out later. I had to just keep assuming I was smart enough for this job.
“That’s the 2-D texture library, object library, terrain presets, lighting…” She toggled through a series of windows full of tiny icons that looked like candies on a tray.
“There’s really no manual for any of this?” I asked.
“I never have time, and the spec is always changing anyway.” Did she write all this?
“This is the creature library. Just select one, then click on the 2-D map to place it. Shift-click to bring up its behaviors. Scripting, conversation, patrol routes, starting attitude.” She clicked, and clicked again faster than I could follow. A tiny dragon appeared, frozen in the 3-D window; a corresponding dot appeared in the map window.
“So is that…” I started.
“It’s a bad guy. Okay so far?”
“Sure,” I lied.
“So viewing options now. You can cycle through the four versions of the world.” She backed the viewpoint up into the sky, then whip-panned to focus on a small fort in the middle of a forest, a single round tower, and tapped the space bar.
“Wireframe.” The screen instantly darkened to a black void where the tower stood, now revealed as an octagonal tube drawn in precise, glowing straight lines, triangular and trapezoidal facets in a night-black void. “Like in Battlezone. Back when you were gaming, probably the first 3-D game you saw.”
She tapped again. “Unshaded polygons.” The glowing lattice kept its shape but became an opaque crystal formation, sides now solid, a world of pastel-colored jewels that shone in a hard vacuum. Atmospheric haze is a high-tech extra.
Another tap of the space bar and the blank jewel facets filled with drawn-in detail. The tower walls were now painted to look like stonework, expertly shaded to indicate bumps and ridges.
“Textured polygon. Like a trompe l’oeil painting, if you took that in college. Whatever you did in college.”
“English.”
“Wow,” she said, toneless. “I’m going to zoom in a little—when we get closer it swaps in a high-res texture to give it more detail,” she said. As the camera moved in the stones of the tower blossomed with moss, cracks, crumbling mortar.
“Beautiful,” I said.
“Smoke and mirrors. It looks real but there’s a million little tricks holding it together,” she said. I couldn’t tell from her tone whether she was proud of the illusion of reality or contemptuous of the cheap theatrics. “Okay, now last year’s big hack—textured polygons, but with lighting.”
A final tap of the space bar and the tower was brushed with shades of darkness that gave it definition and, somehow, the impression of weight. The light came from just above the horizon, a sunset, and the hills beyond the tower faded away into dimness.
“Didn’t it just get darker?”
“Lighting isn’t about making it brighter, it’s figuring out where the shadows do and don’t fall. It’s easy to just light everything—you’re just not checking for darkness. What’s tricky is looking where the light source is and when it’s blocked.”
In the upper right corner of the screen, I noticed the letters FPS, followed by a flickering number. It bounced around between thirty and forty, with occasional jumps into the sixties. When Lisa added the lighting effects, the number tumbled into a single digit and turned red, and the view seemed to stutter instead of panning smoothly.
“What’s FPS?” I asked.
“Frames per second,” she said after a moment. “How many times the view updates every second. When it gets below thirty, everything starts to look jerky.”
“Like it’s doing now?” I asked.
“Yeah. It’s having to draw too many lit polygons. It has to do other stuff, like update positions of objects and play sounds and do AI calculations and all that stuff, too, but graphics are always the big drain. It’s all about getting those polys up on-screen to make everything detailed and pretty. The more polys you draw the better it looks, but then the frame rate slows down. Fewer polys, higher frame rate.”
“So who’s putting all those polygons up there?” I said, intuiting the answer.
“You are. You’re a designer, you build the world they have to draw every second. So you know when you’re in a meeting and there’s a guy who’s just looking at you with this twitchy, barely controlled hatred every time you open your mouth? That’s a graphics programmer. Every bright idea you have is putting more polygons on-screen and making his job harder. Every time that number on the screen goes below thirty, everyone can see that his code is slow and therefore he is not smart.”
“Good to know.”
“That guy’s entire job is to keep that frames-per-second number above thirty and green. Every time you put in too many trees, or make a room too large, or put five dragons in the same room, it’s going to turn red.”
“Then if I’m a game designer, what’s my whole job?”
“I don’t really play games, so I don’t know,” she said. “From what I gather, it’s to keep adding stuff to the world until that number gets to exactly thirty-one.”
“I thought it was to make the game fun.”
“I don’t know what that means, though,” she said. She was watching me carefully as she spoke. As if maybe she was hoping I knew a secret everyone else had forgotten.
Chapter Five
I sat down at my desk and tried to remember everything Lisa did. Now that I knew about frames per second, I could see the number drop every time I made a room bigger or more complicated, the point of view lurching like a stick-shift car with a novice driver. That’s why everything felt claustrophobic, because every cubic foot of space meant more polygons. That’s why the player was stuck in underground corridors all the time—it was just the easiest thing to draw.
I browsed around the network directories, looking for something to do, snooping at folders. There was an Art/Assets server with gigabytes of images and 3-D models, thousands of them, and a little viewer that would show the model on the screen by itself, hanging in a starry void. I chose a file at random and opened it: a bird-headed knight on horseback. The next, a black London taxi. The third, a silver-metal rifle with its circuitry burned out. I wondered who the bird’s-head knight was. The files went on and on, thousands of them, as if a whole library full of weird stories had been shaken and these were the random objects that fell out. A wooden cross; a china teapot; a sarcophagus. I’d stumbled into the great storehouse of their toy multiverse.
I clicked and a 10′ by 10′ by 10′ cube appeared, lit as if by a candle flame. It was textured as the default plain stone wall. Click and click and you’re digging out a cor
ridor, rooms, cube by cube. Paint on textures, stone or wood or dirt or lava. You can build what you like, nothing weighs anything and it’s all infinitely strong. You can build pillars of dirt, metal, lava, water. I built a few rooms and corridors, dropped in a few monster spawners, treasure, and the rest, then flipped into game mode to see what it felt like.
Back in the game, I could see how this could get frightening. It was one thing to see a map of the place. It was another to be fifty feet belowground, down there in the dark, in a world silent except for distant running water, and… footsteps. A figure emerged from the darkness at the end of the corridor. A walking skeleton, animated by who knew what necromantic fires, ambled toward me. I stepped to the left to let it pass, keeping my eyes on it. To conserve polygons, it was built like a paper doll, a picture of a skeleton mounted on a single plane that slid around the dungeon shuffling its feet, pretending to walk. I felt bad for it. It wanted so badly to look like it was in 3-D. Up close I could see how low-resolution it was, too, just a bunch of pixels in jagged lines, like the side of an Aztec pyramid, just a graphic pretending to be a skeleton.
As if angered by my pity, it stopped, turned to face me, and clicked into a new set of animations—it was hostile! Its mouth opened and closed soundlessly. It drew its sword and made a chopping motion. The screen flashed red. It hit me! Being a game designer didn’t make me special or invulnerable.
I dove to the game manual to see how to defend myself, but it was too late: my health bar was falling away in chunks. The sword had a gold hilt and a fleck of red at its base—a thumb-size ruby mounted in the pommel. Was the skeleton rich once? Were these the bones of a king? No time to wonder; another flash and my in-game point of view fell over and dropped to the ground. I watched the skeleton’s feet, seen from behind now, walk off into the darkness in bony triumph. Someday it would be a real boy. I noted in passing that the skeleton had stolen my sword and two gold pieces. Up close, I could see that the floor was a pattern of black and brown pixels.
“Uh, yeah, you wanted to turn on invulnerability there,” Matt said, walking past.
I started again, this time working from empty space. I built a pillar, just a stack of blocks. And another pillar, then an arch connecting them, then a line of pillars. I built a second line next to it. I added more pillars, then a roof and a tower, until it became a cathedral, a cathedral to the undead god-emperor Russ’l the Dreadlord. I built a hundred traps to maul or ensnare or disintegrate passersby. Then I built the hell where Russ’l put those who defied him. Feeling a bit ashamed, I created an elaborate garden where Russ’l met petitioners seeking his blessing. I noticed it was four twenty-five in the morning, and I was crouched with my face inches from the monitor, my back oddly twisted and locked in place. I was in pain and needed the bathroom and I was happier than I could remember being for at least a year or two.
I walked home, newly unable to make sense of the world, or perhaps able for the first time to see through the trick of three-dimensional space. Three-dimensional space was not at all what I thought it was. It was just a sort of gimmick, nothing more than a set of algorithms for deciding what shapes you can and can’t see and how big they look at a given distance, whether they’re lit or in shadow, and how much detail shows. When you could write a computer program that did the same thing, it didn’t seem so special. I walked in a new reality, the airless dark 3-D world of Massachusetts, and the ultimate game seemed just a twist of thought away. Maybe I was there already.
Chapter Six
I had only been at Black Arts a week when I saw the bug for the first time. I was trying to clone a level out of a forgotten RPG (Into the Kobold Sanctum) just to see if I could do it. It was an underground fortress improbably embedded in the base of a gigantic tree. You never saw the tree itself, just its roots as they wound in and out of the corridors and chambers. At the center was a hostage, your sister, and you were racing to free her. In reality she couldn’t be killed, the suspense was fake, but players wouldn’t know that.
I was in the rhythm of tweaking a few triggers, flipping into the game, playing through the level until something broke, and flipping back to tweak again. I passed a guardsman half-embedded in a cave wall, flipped to the editor and pumped him a few grid points, then restarted.
Immediately I heard the sound of combat down the hall. Was something off? I’d run this section a dozen times. I ran down the hall, this time passing only dead and dismembered guardsmen. The halls were silent. I reached the main hall, where a goblin king should have been sitting, a bound maiden at his feet. Instead, the hall was a sea of dead bodies. The king who couldn’t be killed lay dead in front of his throne. Far at the back of the hall, I saw two figures fighting, and in a moment one was dead. The other was my sister, a black sword in her hand, and there was a moment when she turned, ready to go for me, and I felt an irrational panic, like very little I had felt before in a game. The eerie, substanceless mannequin approached, her black pixel eyes swelling to an inch wide on the screen, and all at once her death animation began. She arched her back and then threw herself violently to the stone floor. Like any dead creature in a game, she spawned her inventory, a few coins and the sword, which promptly disappeared. Before I could stop myself, I shut the computer off, all the way off, powered down.
I booted the computer back up and ran the editor. Both the king and the woman were flagged immortal. I ran the level again, three more times, with no trouble.
It was remarkable, terrifyingly remarkable, and deeply uncanny, the way a broken simulation always is; something about it suggested a brain having a stroke, an invisible crisis in the machinery. It had lunged up momentarily from the depths of the code base, a flash of white fin and gaping mouth seen for an instant, then gone again.
I was going to the kitchen to shake the whole thing off with a bag of Sour Patch Kids when Don’s voice came over the paging system.
“Could I have everyone join me and Darren in the conference room for a second?”
“Holy shit,” Matt said across the cubicle divider. “Darren’s back. It’s the new game.”
We shuffled in. Don stood at the far end of a row of tired, puffy faces, bad haircuts, a long conference table populated with Diet Coke cans.
At least half of us were wearing iterations of the company T-shirt; I could see four or five versions of the Black Arts logo. Lisa leaned against a wall at the back, eyes closed. She wore the company T-shirt, too, in a tentlike XXL edition.
Don and Darren stood at the front. I hadn’t seen Darren for at least six years; he’d started wearing a sport jacket over his T-shirt and ripped jeans, Steve Jobs–style, but otherwise he looked exactly the same—sandy blond hair, wiry build, and slightly messianic stare. I remembered being a little dazzled by him in an older-brother kind of way. It wasn’t just me; he had that quality for nearly everybody—he had this taut magnetism. I avoided his gaze. I didn’t think he ever liked me, even before I bailed on the game world.
“Thanks, everyone. Thanks. I only have a couple of things to cover,” Don said. “Darren and I want to just get everybody oriented.” For a manager, he didn’t seem that comfortable as a speaker. He was used to Darren handling it.
“Number one, we shipped Solar Empires III. It’s selling… pretty well so far, and CGW’s cover story is going to come out next week, which should give it a boost, and a little bird told me we’re a contender for the Best Strategy Game award from Electronic Gaming.” There was some cheering—people were still buzzed with whatever they’d gone through. Lisa didn’t bother clapping. Neither did Toby. He really did hate outer space now—planets, comets, gleaming battleships aloft on the solar wind like golden cities, the whole empty lot of it—but there was a much wider market for it than for fantasy.
“Second thing. Darren and I talked this week since he got back from Nepal, and we roughed out a couple of big decisions for the company.
“First off, we’re entering into a partnership with Focus Capital, which should stabilize things
a bit after last year’s rough spot.”
“What’s the next game?” Jared called out.
“Right. The market for science fiction gaming is pretty good right now…” The room went a bit quieter. I saw Matt’s knuckles actually whiten on the edge of the table. The romance of simulated space exploration had palled over three months of eighty-hour workweeks. “But we’re going back to fantasy. We’re going back to the Realms. Darren’s working out the details, but it looks like we’re back to the Third Age. Darren?”
Real cheering this time, and questions, everyone talking over each other, Dark Lorac, Endoria, conversation interfaces and hit location, something about the White City.
Darren stood up. It was the first time I’d heard him speak in years. I wondered if he knew I was there; I felt the urge to duck down. All of a sudden I felt ashamed at coming back, like I still wanted him to like me.
“Hi, guys,” he started. He spoke quietly, and everyone shut up instantly. “So what’s the Third Age about?”
He stopped and let the silence go on a little, the room completely still now; he had a knack for making eleven in the morning feel like a primal midnight. The lights dimmed a little—Matt was standing at the switch. Darren looked around the room at each of us. The screen behind him lit up, showing a series of screenshots from what I supposed were past Black Arts games: at first just a few characters and dots on a black screen, then a hypercomplex board game, fading forward to real images.
“The First Age is long gone, a fallen legend. The Second Age, a magical war that shattered the world. Now the Third Age. Four heroes battling for a thousand years, and for what? Simon’s notes don’t say. It’s up to us,” he said, and paused. Darren was good at this.
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