You (14 page)

(Matt and I nod, telepathically agreeing to use “Hyperborean” anyway; if they catch us and make us take it out, so be it.)

(Matt has cleared his throat.)

Fin.

S
ometimes 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.

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 story, 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—”