Don: Let’s think about the goal here.
Me: King of the North.
Matt: Crown of the North.
Me: Arctic Ascension.
Lisa: Behold the Northcrown.
Matt: Crown of Ice.
Lisa: Seek Ye the Northcrown.
Don: We get it.
Matt: Crown of Frost!
Lisa: Crown of Winter!
Me: Winter’s Crown!
Fin.
Chapter Eighteen
Sometimes I’d get to the end of work and realize I just didn’t feel like going home. There were people at Black Arts, and snack food, and infinite soda, and a lounge stocked with games.
When Lisa walked by, the Heroes from Across Time were hurtling over a rocky chasm and through a tunnel, jostling for the lead in 100-cc engine-powered go-karts.
I called after her, “Hey. You know, you could play an actual video game sometime.”
She sighed audibly, but stopped, and I already regretted having spoken. “Okay, so what’s happening in this one?”
“Wellll, this is Black Karts Racing. So plainly, I am Lorac, and today I am racing against my friends.”
“Uh-huh. Where did you guys get those go-karts? Did you invent internal combustion?”
“Found ’em. And I’m crossing this bridge,” I said. “Aaaand… now I am dead.”
“And now you’re alive again,” she said.
“Right. So now I’m jumping over the lake of fire. And now I’m on fire. But I’m jumping in the water, and I’m not on fire anymore.”
“Nope.” She sighed, but she didn’t leave. With the audio off, the only sound was the creaking and clacking of the controller itself. “Why is there another Lorac up ahead?”
“That’s Lorac from the future. Space-Lorac.”
“And the Lorac you just passed?”
“That’s Dark Lorac, my evil self. And now I’m being eaten by piranhas. Aaaand I’m dead again. Not really, but I lose ten seconds.”
“I can see why this is so meaningful to you.”
“Check this out,” I said. I veered through what looked like a vine-covered rock wall and through a portal into a sparkly, purple-and-white abstract space, a bonus area, until another wormhole spat me out again at the head of the pack. “I am so getting the Paris 1938 trophy and the points bonus.”
“Awesome. Where are you going to spend all those points?” she said. She sat down on the arm of the couch.
“At the Motor Shop. Duh. Do you want to try?”
“No. I find this disrespectful.”
“Fine. You’ll never marry the princess, though.” I started another race, this time through a gleaming city in the far future. Alien constellations glittered coldly overhead.
“Where’s the princess? Princess of what? When the fuck is this happening?”
“She is waiting in her diamond castle outside of time, for one thing,” I said, trying to make it sound obvious. “Matt and I decided there’s a thing called the Ludic Age, where all these things happen. It’s not a part of history, and the characters were all summoned here by mystic forces. Or I think by an experimental drug, if you’re in Clandestine. Or a temporal-spatial anomaly for Solar Empires characters. And so then all the characters come here and you’re stock-car racing or in a giant pinball machine, depending, then you’re back to your lives.”
“But did it happen or did it not happen?”
“I think we all saw what we all saw.”
“And so now why are you child versions of yourselves with giant heads?”
“No more questions.”
“I mean, it’s not good parenting.”
“Don’t be jealous.”
“Well, you’re right—obviously I need to be doing this more. God, I’ve wasted my life,” she said. She went to get coffee.
Later, around midnight, I glimpsed her at her desk, crouched forward, her face held six inches from the monitor. Coding, she lost her nervous smile, and her rounded features took on an expression of calm, searching intensity, like that of a hawk circling above the keyboard, waiting for its prey to make its fatal error.
Chapter Nineteen
Vorpal Games announces
Clandestine: World’s End
Following his departure from Black Arts Studios, Darren Ackerman announced today that his startup, Vorpal Games, will debut with a new game in the award-winning Clandestine franchise. Late last week Ackerman closed a deal with Focus Capital to license the rights to Clandestine from his old company.
Matt read the press release aloud to me and Lisa. For some reason Black Arts had about 50 percent more desk chairs than it had desks, and the Brownian motion that governed the progress of these chairs seemed to deposit them all in my area. This, combined with the fact that my desk was on the way to the kitchen, and the fact that Lisa and Matt both liked to complain a lot, led to some impromptu meetings.
“Clandestine: World’s End will give us a whole new Nick Prendergast,” vows Darren Ackerman. “He’s the ass-kicking machine we always knew he could be. He’s not here to play. I look forward to carrying on the level of design excellence I established at Black Arts. Expect to see Nick’s new incarnation this summer at E3.”
“He’s not here to play?” said Lisa. “Is that really their catchphrase?”
“Fucker. It’s going to be just a next-gen Doom clone with a bunch of Clandestine stuff painted on top. They’re stripping all the character and storytelling stuff out of the engine,” Matt said. In his view, franchise integrity rose to the level of a moral issue.
“So isn’t that our advantage?” I asked. “That’s how we win. They don’t have story. We have actual plots. They make games, we make, you know—”
“If you say ‘interactive movies’ I’m going to hit you in the face,” Lisa said.
“But it matters, though,” I said. “Without a story you’re just jumping around on polygons.” I was getting a little heated. Why did I have to justify my own job? Lisa had an engineer’s way of shrugging off the entire field of the humanities, all three thousand years of it, as self-indulgent fuzzy thinking.
“Well, let’s think about that,” she said. “Let’s contemplate the profound wonder that is plot, and then think about how many Ferraris John Carmack owns, which is four. Whereas between us we have zero Ferraris, unless I miscounted.”
Carmack was a cofounder of id Software, creator of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom and Quake, which invented, fairly single-handedly, the first-person shooter genre. He also led the field in real-time graphics; plenty of other programmers just waited for his next game and then cloned it. Designers, too.
“Darren has a Rolls,” Matt put in.
“Well, we play to a different market,” I began.
“That’s one interpretation. The other is this: story sucks.”
“Well, I mean, yeah, our stuff is pretty derivative sometimes, but—”
“No, it’s not even that the stories we’re doing suck, although they do,” Lisa went on. “What if story itself sucks? Or it sucks for games? I mean, imagine you’re twelve years old, and you want to play a video game. Can I—” She gestured to my computer. I rolled my chair away, she rolled hers in.
Her hands crawled over the keyboard.
cd doom
doom.exe
A spray of system messages, then the familiar splash screen—towering blue-and-gold letters on a hellish red background; in the foreground, a freaked-out space marine in green armor. She whacked the Return key a few times, blasting through starting options, and the game started instantly. “Look, I’m running around moving and shooting and that’s fun because I’m twelve. Seven seconds and I’m on Mars.”
“Phobos.”
“Phobos. Now let’s do ours. Realms of Gold VI: Far Latitudes.”
cd
cd rogvi
rogvi.exe
We watched the loading screen for about ten seconds, then intro animation. Splash screen. Character selection. Another animation introducing the st
ory, this one forty seconds’ worth. Then we were in the game, walking around.
“You still don’t have a weapon. Barely know what you’re doing. No gameplay. All you’ve done is watch some animations and waded through a ton of exposition in fake medieval. Haven’t even done the tutorial.”
It took, maybe, thirty more seconds to get to the first character, a woodsman who starts to explain that while you were away, something terrible has happened in the capital. She folded her arms.
“Still no weapon. So, yeah, I’m twelve years old, I left five minutes ago. I’m riding bikes now. You see why people like Doom more?”
I remembered the IT company across the lobby. I could see into their classroom from our floor. It was just a room with rows of computers on long tables. I knew when the Doom demo came out because I could see just from standing there that a third of those machines were running Doom.
“And it even gets worse. I’m playing Brennan, but as a player I don’t know anything about him, so it’s like I have amnesia and for the first hour everybody who talks to me has to explain things like where I live.”
“Okay, okay.”
“And they’re telling me what to do, which is—here—helping these villagers, who I don’t give the tiniest fuck about. And this guy has a horse, and what if I want to just take his horse—oh, no—I can’t! I can’t do anything except what I’m supposed to do. None of these people are real and they’re all telling me—THE PERSON WHO OWNS THE GAME—what to do.”
“Okay!”
“And then when I’ve gathered twenty sticks or killed twenty rats I get a tiny bit more powerful. And then at the end of it all they tell me I’ve saved the king, the same asshole who’s been telling me what to do in the first place. It’s the opposite of play. It’s work.”
“Okay, but wait,” I put in. “Doom has a story. You’re, like, a marine. You went to Mars to figure out what’s happened to the Union Aerospace Corporation.”
“Nobody knows that but you!”
“And me,” said Matt quietly.
“And Matt! The only two people in the world who read the Doom manual! It’s Doom! You’re just on Mars and daemons are trying to mess with you and you fucking kill them. Why? Maybe at some point you feel a tiny stirring of curiosity about the proceedings. Might be cool to look into at some point! But you don’t have to read a page of text, you don’t have to stand around having pretend conversations that feel more like creating a macro in Microsoft Word. Story. Sucks!”
“Okay, wait, but this is exactly why people hate video games!” I had to stop her. I knew on some level I was right. At least I thought I was.
“Why?”
“Because they don’t mean anything. You just run around murdering things! Moby-Dick, on the other hand, has story. Citizen Kane does. Star Wars does. Until we have proper stories and characters we’re not going to be anything. We’re not going to be art.”
“Did you ever think maybe we shouldn’t try?” she said.
“And just be about shooting things?”
“Yes! If I absolutely have to play one of our video games, the first—the first—thing I do is kill everybody I possibly can—”
“But w—”
“Let me finish! Not because I’m psychotic but because these fake people creep me out, and because it’s a game, it’s supposed to be my story, and that”—she pointed at Realms of Gold—“isn’t my story.”
“I thought you didn’t care about games.”
“I said I didn’t play them. I’m not going to play an art form—excuse me—that says it’s about me, and then it’s about some patronizing, do-gooder asshole and the shiftless fuckwits who asked him for help. Who’s that asshole? Is that your story? Darren’s?”
“So what ‘your story’ do you want?”
“She killed every fucking person in the world and threw their goddamn key in the lava.”
I left work early that night, around eight, and walked to Alewife station and rode the escalator down to the platform. I tried to work the question out.
Let’s admit some things about video games. They are boring. They induce a state of focus that is totally absorbing but useless—like the ghost of work or creative play, but without engaging the world in any way. They are designed to focus attention but don’t train you to overcome the obstacles to being focused.
They are fun but don’t tend to make a person more interesting.
The rewards are false coin—they are rarely satisfying or moving. More often, they offer something like a hunger for the next game, promising a revelation or catharsis that they never quite fulfill, that they don’t even know how to fulfill. They work in a single small corner of the emotional world, stirring feelings of anger or fear or a sense of accomplishment; they don’t reach for any kind of fuller experience of humanity.
But when I thought about story, I felt I couldn’t really be wrong. Because when I lay awake at night I wanted to be in a story; I wanted it so badly it was an ache in my bones. Anything story but the story I was in, of early disappointment and premature world-weariness. I wanted to feel like I was at the start of a story worth being in, instead of being twenty-eight and feeling like my story was already over, like it was the most boring, botched story imaginable.
I used to love books in which somebody from our reality got to go to another world. The Narnia books, the Fionavar books. Isn’t that what we could do, take people into another world? If not, why not? Why couldn’t that be what we did?
The next evening Lisa came by my desk while I was playing Realms of Gold: Prendar’s Folly. It had a Gothic feel, one of those impossibly beautiful CD-ROM puzzle games. I was searching around in a graveyard, at night, naturally. The tall, grotesquely carved headstones cast wild shadows, a flashy bit of graphics tech.
“God, what an ugly hack that was,” said Lisa.
“Looks nice, though.”
“Thanks,” she said.
I cleared my throat. “So. If you could make any game at all for yourself, what would it be? I’m asking everyone.”
“I’m not really a gamer, you know? It would be just like programming, I guess. Mostly games are about taking the computer and shutting down all the interesting things about it. All I can see in this thing”—she pointed at the screen—“is, like, a dumb kind of story pasted onto the computer, which is much less interesting than the computer itself.” I had the silver skull in a bag now. They knew Prendar had turned werewolf. I was on the path that would lead to recovering the NightShard—the price of Leira’s love and the thing that would divide the heroes for the rest of the age.
“Yes, yes, honor is satisfied, thanks. But if you had to try and make an actual game that you would like.”
She thought for a long while. “Talking horse, I guess.”
“Really?”
“You could ride it around and it would be your friend. Why? What superamazing game would you play? Honestly,” she said.
“I don’t know.” I thought for a long time, too, before answering. What did I want? “Probably I’d have a gun and go into Harvard Square and murder people.”
“This is why they hate us.”
Chapter Twenty
Okay, so just a clean sheet of paper.
I tried to think it through. Was it possible to tell the story without all the baggage Lisa talked about? No conversations, no cutscenes. Just gameplay. No interruptions, no one telling you what to do.
I thought about Doom. I thought about what it’s like to grow up in Endoria at the end of the Third Age, about the forest and the castle. What does the start of a story look like?
Once upon a time…
Like a path leading into the great forest at the edge of your father’s land. You can only see a short way down, then it curves out of sight, darkly shaded by the old growth above.
There’s a field behind you, and a low castle in the distance, smoke trailing up into the chilly autumn air. Sigh. There’s something expansive and melancholy at the same time. The sun is
well into the afternoon. It’s almost too late to set out.
You can walk back to the castle if you like and see sunburned men and women bringing in the harvest. The castle feels like home, but they don’t need you there. Sooner or later you may want to leave and start your life in earnest.
Maybe it’s not that hard to begin a story. You can walk into that forest anytime. Break off a branch and walk as long as you like. Farther on, the pathway forks at an old stone milepost dating from the last empire. In one direction you hear the sound of a stream. In the other, silence. The start of a story.
There are brigands moving around in the forest. You might meet one and kill your first man in a breathless scuffle. A carriage might pass through, carrying a noble lady of House Gereint, which your father warned you against. There’s a hole in the ground where the people of that last empire mined the stone for their mileposts, but it’s been long ages since they ceased work there. Their tools lie abandoned in their places, as if they left in haste.
But what does the start of your story look like? Maybe you don’t feel like taking that path. You can see there’s also a road leading from the city out through the fields and through a mountain pass and into the town, which sits on the border between the House of Aerion’s land and the Gereints’. Caravans run through it and halt outside town at camps, where the caravan drivers tell tales by the firelight. There’s a tale that mentions your great-grandfather’s great-grandfather, and the war he fought in a frozen land, where he lost a crown. The next day there’s a brawl in the marketplace. There are rumors of war. There’s an old woman who can teach you how to find due north by starlight.
I sketched the map freehand, using a contour map of Cambridge as a guide. The mines went in at Porter Square, the deepest station in the Boston subway system. I let the Mass Pike heading east lead off toward other kingdoms, and the train lines running south became a deeply rutted cart trail.
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