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“Hey there, Brennan.”

“Forward against the dark!” he said. This was one of the recorded phrases he’d say when anything interesting happened during games. His utterances were written to be vague enough to fit various situations, which meant in any given specific situation they sounded slightly nonsensical.

“Uh-huh.”

“By the honor of my house!” he cried.

“Yup.”

In person he was a little more funny-looking than handsome. He had plump cheeks, and his head seemed slightly small for his enormous, muscled body. He was big and round-shouldered rather than classically proportioned. He had a battered wooden shield, spattered with flecks of red paint and adorned with a faded yellow griffin crest, strapped to his back.

“Forward against the dark!”

There must have been someplace else to take this conversation, but I couldn’t think of it.

“For the quest!” he said. It came out with a slightly interrogative lilt.

“I don’t have a quest, exactly. I’m trying to figure out how to make better video games.”

“Aye. Seek the prize that was stolen!”

“It wasn’t really stolen, though. More like it’s been left lying around, and if I’m lucky I might find it.”

“Aye.” He sounded a little less certain.

“Why, what do you do all day?”

“Forward against the dark! For the quest! That sort of thing, you know. I pick up gold pieces that I find in chests.”

“And that makes you feel satisfied?”

“Long ago I had a backstory. It’s written in the manual but nobody reads it. My father stood against the false king, but we were beaten. If only we had found the king’s crown—the crown of the true king. The Crown of Winter! Simon knew about this.” He sighed. He seemed as disappointed as his inflexible features would allow. He wasn’t designed to look very sad.

“Yeah, so I’m going to bed, Brennan. I have to work tomorrow. I can’t just ride around looking for loose gold, like you. I have to go to work every day.”

“In sooth, thy life sounds passing strange and shitty.”

“Yeah, it sucks,” I said, climbing the stairs to my apartment. “I’d rather be you.”

“In sooth, my life is kind of better than yours. Maybe you should play more video games.”

“Aye,” I said.

I
made sure to be in the office by nine fifteen on Tuesday morning for the ten o’clock leads meeting. On my way in, Holly, the receptionist, smiled and congratulated me, then Roger in QA waved to me in a low-key but cheery way. I sat down at my computer and there it was, a company-wide e-mail about the restructuring:

We are happy to announce that Russell will be stepping up for us as lead designer for
Realms of Gold VII
. Gabby will stay on as art lead. Lisa will fill in as lead programmer.

Peter and Jared came in together around nine forty-five—they were roommates—and my skin prickled as I sat rigid in my chair and waited for them to sit down and get the news. Should I have met them as they came in and greeted them with the news? I’d hoped they would come in later—I wanted to meet them coming out of that meeting, after they’d had time to adjust to the news.

I strained to hear a reaction. I think I caught a whispered “No way!” I knew I was going to look weirder and weirder just sitting there and not saying anything, so I went around for a low-key hello. Jared and Peter shared a table side by side, among a tangle of cables and action figures (ironic? I never knew) and Jared’s trackball, which he brought from home and insisted on using instead of a mouse. I hate going to see people at their desks, because they’re always facing away from you and you
have to figure out how to get their attention, but this time Peter was perched on one of the desks and could say “Hey” to get things started. They were—how did this happen without me?—cool. They had actually competed to get into the industry instead of retreating there because no place else would take them.

They went out and (I assumed) hooked up with girls. For them, a video game job was a little like a job in film. It was actually, sincerely, cool. “So you got the e-mail?” I said. It was, in fact, up on Jared’s screen. “Yeah, congratulations, man,” Jared said, while Peter came up with some combination of “Totally cool!” and “Yeah!”

“So we’ll meet, like, eleven thirty after leads and go through some stuff,” I said abruptly. I didn’t know why eleven thirty.

Nobody had anything to do that day, and I had my first realization about management, which was that a big part of the responsibility is making sure everyone under you has something to do every second of the day.

“Right, right.”

I added, “Okay, cool. See you then.” I left them with this sparkling witticism. Troops rallied.

The leads meetings were a daily status update where the heads of different disciplines reported on progress and exchanged information. For the most part, Black Arts had a non- or antihierarchical ethos, but there were limits. The conference room was always freezing for some reason. I had only been in there for company-wide meetings, where we all crammed in and stood against the walls, or for the occasional office party, or because it was the only place to make a private phone call.

We were a revised and reconstituted Black Arts, headed by me and Lisa and Don, the old second-string players. Genius had left the building. There had been a couple of summary resignations since Darren’s announcement, and the vacant tracts of third-floor land encroached still further on our cubicle village. Lisa was the only person there.

“Hi,” she said. She looked tired.

“Hey. Congratulations.”

“It’s not that much of an honor,” she said. “Just seniority. Everyone here now is leftovers. Producers, a couple of level designers, journeyman programmers.”

“So, ah, how come you didn’t go with them?”

“Nobody asked. I’m a tools programmer; it’s not sexy. Plus, Darren’s guys, they’re kind of… assholes. I’m not sure I would have gone even if they asked me. I know them pretty well.”

“So… what exactly do you do here now?” I asked.

“Rendering and lead,” she said. She was doing her best to hide it, but for the first time since I could remember she may actually have looked pleased. “Our deal with NVIDIA is toast, obviously. I have a
Quake
-style renderer I’ve been doing in my spare time. We shouldn’t have to change the data scheme radically from what we had, so we’re going to see what it can do.”

“Did you write the renderer for the last one?” I asked, wondering what the words
spare time
meant to her.

“Some asshole in Ukraine did it. We bought it through the mail. Women don’t write renderers, not on Darren’s team, anyway,” she said, and underneath the blanked-out affect I felt just a hint of her bitterness. “Not anywhere, really. This one’s going to be first on a triple-A game.”

Black Arts was already starting to look different to me now that I was a leading player. It had its own rules and character classes that I needed to know. I realized it as Gabby, the lead artist, came in—I still didn’t know anything about her other than that she was tall and bony with frizzed red hair, and that she was supercompetent. She wore jeans and a tank top and generally had more color than the average BA drone. Artists in a game studio are their own species. They produce the showy graphics that are the only things game publishers care about. They are all, on average, cooler and sexier than the usual employee, which is also a mystery, since the last time this class of people were seen they were drawing dragons on the backs of their notebooks in biology class. Four years later, they would come back from art school with
different clothes and an attitude that told you they were only here because they had to be, which was probably true.

Gabby ran the art department as a fairly closed shop; which was okay with Don because it was also the only department that was reliably on schedule. I could see it was going to be embarrassing to have to go stand over her at her desk and explain why the green dragon couldn’t be breathing fire on the cover of the manual because, “Um in
Realms
um green dragons only breathe poison gas um it would have to be red it’s just what the rules say.”

And then, Lisa. I didn’t understand all of what programmers did, but as a game designer I knew I would have to talk to them. I was starting to divide programmers into two categories according to the two basic ways they accommodated their personalities to the weirdness of having to invest a massive cognitive load into an invisible, inhumanly intricate rule-based system that functioned on many, many levels of abstraction. To appear normal even though they spent their lives in a dark empire of strict and arbitrary rulings.

First, there are the ones who try to normalize it. They make an effort to show that this is just a regular job to them; they have pictures of basketball players and racing cars, and whatever else normative adults post, in their cubicle. They go home at five thirty in the afternoon; they’re good at scheduling, and always deliver product to spec and on time. They are typically very average programmers and mediocre-to-poor conversationalists. They simply choose not to look into the dark cognitive mirror of the machine.

Then there are the ones who in some way let themselves invest in what they’ve taken on, give a core part of their personalities to it, and embrace the damage that results. It comes with an inward depressive streak. The world of the compiler is an extension of the cursed, Chekhovian world they already live in, with the same mocking sense of humor and dour Slavic fatedness. When the world goes right, when the code compiles, it’s a brief, anomalous suspension of the rules.

They work irregular hours and make a fetish of using the slowest computer in the building. Don would send an IT guy in after hours to install upgrades without their permission, just for everybody’s sanity. I got the sense that Simon had been one of these compilers. It was a tribute to his brilliance as a coder and manager that no one ever tried to interfere with his nakedly pathological jaunts into the abyss. I was starting to suspect Lisa fit the pattern, too.

And there was me, acutely conscious that if called on to define the term
game designer
I would be at a loss. Designers straggle in from other fields, English or architecture or political science or creative writing. They work on a cluster of tasks no one else has hold of: they do interface design, story, game mechanics, map layout. How many hits it takes to kill an orc, and what’s behind the next door, and what kinds of spells you can cast. It’s not a solid science, and up to this point I’d muddled through on a knack for not offending people and an ability to imagine far-off places. I knew what a Great Designer looked like, and that was Darren—loud, brash, inventive, charismatic, never at a loss for a bigger, better, crazier idea.

“Our ship date is twenty months from now. Focus has looked at what we’re costing them monthly and they’re hoping to get one good hit out of the next-gen technology,” Don was saying. “Otherwise they’re going to sell that off and dissolve the company and recoup whatever they can. They may not even wait if it looks like we’re not getting anything done.”

“I take it they’ve never worked with a game developer before?” Gabby asked.

“Dead-on. They have no idea what they’re in for, or what games look like halfway through, or why delays happen or schedules change. That, I’m afraid, is going to be my job.” Don had three jobs, which were: first, pitch our games to publishers and retailers. Second, stay on schedule. Third, keep everyone happy. Much of Don’s job had been managing Darren, who took care of the creative and technology
leadership, the vision—whatever that meant. Now that would be Lisa and me.

Don and Lisa started wrangling about technology questions and Gabby joined them. She turned out to have a lot of technical knowledge I had no grasp of—texture sizes and resolutions, animation data structures, content pipelines. It seemed there was a lot of work that goes into taking a piece of art from an artist and getting it to show up in the game. I stayed quiet and acted like I understood.

Really I was thinking about mammoths and wolves, and snow falling into Brennan’s face as he hurries through a forest hoping to make it to a village before nightfall. I pictured him bursting into an inn and shaking snow off his cloak, drinking a whiskey by the fire, falling asleep on a straw mattress, and lying wrapped in furs picturing the miles and miles of snow-covered forest around him in every direction. I was thinking about a dragon made entirely of ice that lives for a thousand years.

T
en o’clock, story brainstorming meeting.

Place:

Conference room.

Dramatis Personae:

Don

Gabby

Russell

Matt

Lisa

Excerpts follow:

(Everyone nods. It seems true. Movies have story, and characters and emotion. And our whole goal is to make a game that’s like living in a movie. And then movies will go away, and we will reign supreme.)

(Don looks up expectantly at our silent, reluctant faces. It feels like somebody else should be doing this, but this was it.)