by Douglas Lain
It was a casual game, but I really wanted to win. I insisted on selecting the stage for battle. I took the first port. I suggested that Dad play Robin Hood, while I played a character called RingChamp from an 80s boxing game of the same name, and then proceeded to wipe him out. I mean, on his own Dad was still a competent player, he knew basic strategy, he knew how to L-cancel and how to counter, but he was slow and his character was weak. Worse than that, he was a plodder on his own; he was predictable. Without too much effort, I four-stocked him. All I had to do was stay close, time my grabs right, and deliver a few body blows.
In the second game, when Dad chose RingChamp as his character, I chose Robin Hood, with the aim of humiliating him further. Playing a defensive game against him, always keeping just out of reach, I managed to beat him again. Flaming arrows and hip shots damaged his boxer enough to slow him down. My William Tell special move delivered the kills. I four-stocked him again, ending the set.
“You trying to shake my confidence?” Dad asked.
“I might sign up for the third bracket,” I said.
Dad put his earbuds in and then shook his head no. “I need you to watch and evaluate. I know it seems like I don’t need your help when I’m getting AI assistance, but I want your eyes on this. It’s not about video games. The application of AI performance augmentation is a life-and-death project. Do or die,” he said.
The geeks at the main table announced that the second bracket was starting and everybody competing needed to put on their Princess Teacup badges and line up under the poster of Bubble Land.
“That’s us?” Dad asks.
“That’s you,” I said. “Bubble Land,” I said. “Do or die.”
Dad started off toward the relevant poster and then noticed I wasn’t following along and turned back around.
“That’s us,” he said. It was an instruction and not a question.
“I’ll catch up.”
While Dad played and won his first set, I fooled around with Robin Hood against the CPU. I practiced my long game against Princess Teacup, and figured out how to drop a series of apples on her head, and how to deliver multiple William Tell shots. After a few minutes of this, after four-stocking the computer at the top level, I realized I’d drawn a couple of onlookers.
“Nice,” one them said.
“Yeah. I think he’s playable, really,” I said. When I beat Princess Teacup in a third game, I turned around to see who was watching.
“I think my Princess could beat your Robin Hood,” he said. I didn’t recognize the guy, this Bash champion, until he was beating me. Going by the moniker “the Bride,” Mike Berger was part of a doubles team who, while never quite reaching the number one slot, always placed in the top five. The team’s name was “Bride and Groom,” and Mike played Princess Teacup and a guy named Todd played Zorro. Of the two of them it was established opinion that the Bride was the stronger player. He did more with a weaker character, he was more creative, and he placed higher in single competition.
About halfway through my game with the Bride I managed to get my Robin Hood to the rafters without being pulled back and rolling. I sniped one stock, one kill, and had to count that as my victory because the match turned around on me.
After the game I tried to talk shop with Mike, but the Bride didn’t care for it. He wasn’t into Bash tactics and he didn’t listen to me when I explained why I’d lost to him. He didn’t even tell me that there were “no Johns allowed.” All he wanted to talk about was international politics, ICBMs, and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Bash was a distraction. What mattered were troop deployments, secret armies, the assassination of the Vice President, and all that kind of stuff.
“We’re probably already living under martial law,” the Bride told me.
In that moment politics seemed more important than video games, even though it would turn out they were the same thing.
A crowd gathered around the Bride and me. The players in the tournament were effectively ignored as we debated the likelihood of the end.
12:15 PM
When my father took on his first opponent at a GameCube station with a 13” CRT, there was no audience for his match. Nobody thought to pay attention to some middle-aged man wearing a “TACOCAT SPELLED BACKWARDS IS TACOCAT” T-shirt, and so nobody was watching when he started to win.
Before the tournament Dad told me that overall what he needed for success paralleled what the Pentagon needed if they were going to counter an intercontinental nuclear attack, and I figured what he meant was that thermonuclear war was all about the timing.
Really competitive Bash games are usually determined by response times, and the difference can sometimes be measured in nanoseconds. Reflex training is a big part of what makes a great Bash player great. Which was another reason why nobody expected Dad could win. Nobody knew about Bucky and how the augmentation of Dad’s neurology was working like a fountain of youth. It was that augmentation, along with Bucky’s predictive response algorithm, that made all the difference.
Here’s the thing, though: the augmentation actually worked too well. As Dad moved through the ranks, as he won game after game, match after match, he did start getting attention. Despite the overall lack of interest in Bash that night, despite the Bride’s laser-like focus on the White House and everyone’s developing dread around American politics—a dimension of life that most of the gamers seemed to have just recently discovered—eventually, people did notice Dad. Then, once they noticed him, they started to hate him.
Watching him at the tournament was like watching The Karate Kid turned on its head. That is, rather than finding new and greater challenges as he went along, Dad seemed to become more and more invincible with each match. The more talented the player he faced off against, the more favored they were, the more quickly he devastated them.
Dad was OP, boring to watch, and seemingly bored himself. Worse, he didn’t know how to interact with the kids he defeated, didn’t seem to care when the crowd booed him, and didn’t take any pleasure from winning. He chose his characters at random, switching in mid-match sometimes, and always used unorthodox, and often cowardly, tactics. He never let his opponent recover from an attack, but pressed every advantage. And when he found a move that worked for him, he stayed with it. He was happy to just mash the same button over and over. He’d kick his opponent in the shin, doing minimal damage, but he’d do it again and again and drain their health with a hundred tiny blows. His speed, the sheer number of times he could hit the same sequence of buttons, gave him his wins. By the third match he wasn’t just beating his opponents. He wasn’t just four-stocking them. He was playing perfect games. Nobody could land anything against him.
The AI made him efficient, but it also made him inhuman. It made him evil.
You might think I’m overstating, but everybody was rooting against him. And a rumor started circulating early on that he’d installed a cheat code for Marshmallow. Halfway through his fifth match the judges paused the game in order to inspect the GameCube. They made him switch ports. They removed and replaced the Game-Cube’s memory card, but he kept on winning in impossible ways.
I mean, it’s not like anybody sticks to all the unwritten rules of Bash. Following the etiquette too scrupulously isn’t a way to win friends anyhow. Nobody bows after a win; not anymore. Nobody waits for the other player to finish a taunt before launching an attack. It’s a more ruthless game for everyone. But repetitive play, relentless exploitation of a character’s weakness, refusing to take any risks or try any move that might open you up to a counterattack? It went against what Bash is. It went against what made the game catch on.
If Dad had been playing in a chess tournament, he would have been caught out immediately. In chess, AI assistance is a form of cheating, and it probably should be for Bash too. I think AI augmentation really ruins Bash, makes it meaningless. I doubt very many people are playing Bash in the new economy. The new economy has to have killed the game. After a decade of Nintendo trying to
end competitive Bash, it’s weird that a computer AI should do it for them. But really, why play if what you’re really doing is just acting out computer instructions?
12:32 PM
When Dad started to lose it was satisfying to watch, even though it took a player just as heartless and methodical as Dad was to take him down.
Mayday was ranked second in the world at Bash, and he was famous for winning with Robin Hood. Watching him on YouTube was what inspired me to develop my own distance game. He had the record for the greatest number of perfect games, was also a highly ranked Street Fighter player, and, worst of all, he had somehow amassed a female fan base. In other words, Mayday was good-looking, confident, and mean.
Dad played Marshmallow, and for the first minute nothing happened. Dad floated out of reach, avoiding Robin Hood’s arrows, and Robin Hood jumped into the rafters, avoiding Marshmallow’s goo attacks. They were both playing defensive games. They were both looking for openings, for an opportunity to mash some buttons, but neither side was willing to risk launching the first attack. Or so it seemed.
It was Mayday who broke the truce, coming for Dad and making him sweat. Dad had been in a haze, being moved by the tone in his ear and sort of watching the games as if from a distance, but then Mayday took a stock off of him and Dad woke up.
“Fuck a duck,” Dad said. And I remembered that winning was not just something Dad was doing, it was something he wanted. If Dad could take first in the tournament, it would confirm Bucky could overcome some of the limits of meatspace. If Dad could be the first middle-aged Bash champion, then other problems, other people, might be perfectible too. When Mayday launched himself from the rafters, fell onto Marshmallow, grabbed, and then threw him out of range, Dad let out a groan. Marshmallow floated up slowly, seeming to just recover from what might have been a fatal blow, but then Mayday followed up. Mayday’s Robin Hood let fly a William Tell, and the combo of the apple and the arrow punctured Marshmallow, letting the air out. Marshmallow fell like a stone.
Dad had lost his first stock after just two blows. Mayday had taken advantage of a weakness in Marshmallow that most players didn’t know anything about. Deflating Marshmallow? How was that even possible?
Dad changed characters after he lost the first game. He went with Zorro, a very reliable character, especially against Robin Hood, and it worked out for him. Dad won that game, but he won in a very conventional way. Dad just made sure to stay close, to use full force blows, and to shield grab whenever possible. Watching him win that way, watching him struggle, I felt kind of sorry for him because I could tell that, even though he’d won, the match was going to go to Mayday.
Dad looked panicked as Bucky failed him. He stuck out his tongue, curling it over his top lip in concentration. He made sounds, little groans and objections, and he lost one stock after another until, finally, he lost the match.
Dad didn’t talk to me in the car on the way back home and that was fine by me. I didn’t need to talk. I was content to hold his second-place medal for him and enjoy the moment. But, when he didn’t say anything to Mom when we arrived, when he left his smartphone on the arm of the couch and headed straight the kitchen to fetch himself a bottle, I figured things were worse than I’d thought.
Sally Speaks in Tongues
MATTHEW MUNSON, 544-23-1102, FACEBOOK POSTS, 04/20/17
2:21 PM
The next time I saw Sally I disappointed her. Back when we first hooked up, I hadn’t been surprised when she’d told me that she had a direct relationship with God, but when we met at Mt. Scott Park for a date, a date that I thought would give us an opportunity to sit in the grass or on a park bench and make out a little, a date that could be a mundane reprieve from the drama of Bash and the end of the world, Sally did surprise me. Apparently she was on speaking terms with God now, and he’d told her to leave her church, to run away.
“Why would he say that?” I asked.
“I think this is the end times for real,” Sally said. “What did your
Dad’s AI tell you?”
Sally had big plans apparently. She had some idea that God and the AI might be working together. That there was some unseen conspiracy working itself out, and that she needed to talk to the AI in order to receive her next instruction. It was crazy stuff, but not any crazier than the rest of her religion. The only difference was that now the craziness was completely her own.
“The first time I realized that God was really communicating with me, I was at Dairy Queen,” she said. “I mean, the first time I realized that he was talking to me specifically. Not to the whole congregation. Not to the minister and then to me, but directly and only … me.”
“Ah, that explains a lot,” I said.
She’d gotten a brain freeze while eating a chocolate-dipped soft serve, and she’d seen sparks or stars in front of the fake wood paneling. When her head cleared she found that rather than sparks, she was looking at the HELP WANTED sign in the window, and as she listened to a girl she later found out was named Brenda take a chicken strip order from a greasy 14-year-old boy in a green-and-brown camouflage baseball cap, she had an epiphany. The moment had “come together” for her, and she knew that God wanted her to work at DQ.
“That’s pretty silly,” I told her. She pulled away from me then. Not really angry, but insistent that I take her seriously about this. It was apparently okay with her if I didn’t believe that Jesus literally died on the cross for our sins, but it was not okay to doubt that God wanted her to serve soft serve ice cream and French fries to single moms and stoned teens in the Woodstock neighborhood.
“I’m not crazy,” she told me. “I might not be smart like you, but I’m not crazy.”
“Look, if God is talking to you, telling you to work at Dairy Queen or to talk to my Dad’s AI, shouldn’t you bring that up with your ministers?”
“Not them,” she said. “They want to be the ones who decide whether God is calling you. I can’t tell them.”
Sally told me that one of the reasons she didn’t talk to God when she was attending services in her super church was because she could tell when people were faking, and she could especially tell when they were faking their ability to speak in tongues. Fake glossolalia apparently sounds like English words that have gone just a little wrong. A faker will say something like “Yoosh Usta couldna fafa expost I drive como a mellow bow tie,” or something like that. Phonies are apparently easy to spot.
“I used to do it all the time,” she said. She had a history of faking herself out. When she was young, she used to participate enthusiastically in church services. She’d share prophecies that she’d make up on the spot, lay hands on her elders, and seek out evil spirits in her peers, but after puberty she stopped pretending, and for a long time she didn’t believe that she had any spiritual gifts. She even doubted spiritual gifts were real.
But all that changed once she realized she was meant to work at Dairy Queen.
We were sitting on a picnic bench, and I was looking up at the pine trees and the sky, when she asked me again.
“What did your Dad’s AI tell you?” she asked.
I told her that I hadn’t talked to Dad’s AI. I told her about how Dad had lost the tournament. She moved away from me on the bench and lit up.
She was probably having some kind of psychological thing happen at the Dairy Queen. What she described was sort of Jungian. Just a bunch of meaningful coincidences, and not very impressive coincidences either. Humans were good at recognizing, or even creating patterns.
“I can see things you don’t,” she said. “I notice things that you ignore.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like the fact that a guy with a weird beard is following us,” she said. “He’s smoking a cigarette over by the teeter-totters.”
3:10 PM
When I told her that the guy with the beard was probably with the NSA, and that he was probably one of Dad’s colleagues, she approached him. She figured he might help her, even though I wo
uldn’t. She thought maybe he would let her talk to the AI and get instructions.
She walked over to him, tucked a lock of her hair behind her ear, and bummed a toke off his cigarette. After talking to him for another thirty seconds, she’d acquired a whole cigarette. I watched the two of them from a distance, hanging out around a trash can by the jogging path, as she talked and laughed with the stranger. Sally was putting out her cigarette, tapping the ash onto the asphalt, when I finally got up the nerve to join them.
“Hey, Matt,” the guy with the beard said. He smiled at me and raised his eyebrows like he thought he was very charismatic; very cool in his red knit hat and close-fit sweater. He was used to hanging out with middle-aged nerds and felt good about himself in comparison.
“This is Louis,” Sally said.
Louis was in his early thirties, a lot younger than my Dad. He had, as I already mentioned, this long, shaggy beard that marked him as either Amish or from some gentrifying neighborhood, somewhere in NE Portland or Brooklyn or somewhere.
In the space of maybe three minutes, Sally had found out what Louis did for the NSA. He was a debugger and office boy, basically. But like most of Dad’s team, Louis knew stuff that was top secret while not knowing how to keep information to himself. These guys didn’t need a security culture because, most of the time, nobody cared what they did or even really wanted to talk to them. But Sally was interested, and when she asked him about his classified work at the NSA, when she asked him just what Dad was trying to do with the AI, Louis did the natural thing and just answered.
“We’re trying to stop a war,” Louis said.
“I knew it,” Sally said.
“How is that coming along then?” I asked. I gestured at Louis’s cigarettes but he shook his head no.
“Your dad would kill me,” he said.
“Come on, man,” I said. “It’s the end of the world anyhow.” I took one of Louis’s cigarettes, but it tasted bad and I put it right out.
