You (15 page)

“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.”

O
kay, 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.

I looked at the result. Seen this way, Cambridge almost seemed like a cool place to be.

That night I thought about the game again as I was falling asleep.

Project Proposal: The Hyperborean Crown

It hovers like a cartoon logo in your head as you lie under the glossy, striped sheets you chose at the store and the heavy sleigh bed you
assembled a few weeks after you moved in. But you wake remembering it, as you listen to students talking underneath your window and skater kids rolling past at all hours. You live in a college town, though you’re no longer a student yourself, and haven’t been for a long time.

It’s raining outside. How did you get here? And how did you get to be twenty-eight?

Picture the road north to the country, where the crown is. It starts with getting out of this bed. You would get up right now, stand in your boxers and complimentary T-shirt from a theater conference two summers ago, go down the stairs, the carpets no longer showroom quality, down through the black rooms of dinner smells to the sliding door out into the backyard, the air still warm from the late summer heat. The stars are desert-clear.

You’re in one of your quiet panics that get worse at night. Around the side of the house and into the quiet street, asphalt even and warm. Where the block ends, there’s only scrubby grass and dry soil and wildflowers, now just dried-up seedpods ready for fall. You walk into the middle of the road and sit down. The street is so quiet you could linger for hours. The moon is desert-clear as well. There’s a path leading off down the hill, marked with pale amber lights mounted at ankle height, leading down through the park.

You think about your sister, Margaret. She just turned thirty-four. She’s moved into a trailer she bought and parked on your father’s land, by the house he bought in upstate New York a few years ago. She seems happier than she was. She has a small dog. She’s dating a guy ten years younger, an undergrad at SUNY Buffalo. You worry about how the trailer will do this winter.

In the middle of your life you find yourself in a suburban housing development. You’re sure as hell not going to law school, so what’s going to happen to you? I mean, seriously, what happens at the end of the Third Age? To any of us?

F
or the last week of preproduction my section of the schedule read write TDR document. It turned out this meant “technical design review,” and I tracked down the one Darren wrote for
Realms of Gold VI
and set it to print, which resulted in a stack of printouts four inches high. The TDR was the universal blueprint for the entire game, the almighty spreadsheet of creation.

It listed every object, every feature, every level, every scene, every character—everything from the Save/Load screen to the closing screen. When I was done with it, the other teams would take it for holy writ. Gabby would take it and break down every texture they had to draw, every 3-D model they had to build, every animation they had to script, and assign it all to somebody, and estimate how much time it would take and put that in the schedule. Don would take the schedule information and track everybody’s progress and figure how many people we’d need and how much money all this would cost.

Lisa would do the same thing—break down all the functionality, systems, and subsystems for the programming team, including all the process-oriented stuff—tools for the designers, the mechanics of taking raw graphics files and importing them into the game engine, etc., etc., etc.

I would do the same for the designers, who would then build the levels, spec the interfaces, write the dialogue, and place the objects, traps, and monsters.

It occurred to me to read through Darren’s TDR in case he’d listed “crazy black sword of insanity” anywhere. He hadn’t, which only added to the mystery. If you didn’t put that on a list, how did it get in the game?

At the top of a fresh legal pad I wrote:

Technical Design Review: Realms of Gold VII: Winter’s Crown

“The World Is Everything That Is the Case”

For example: What is every possible action you can ever possibly take?

For example: Walk, run, jump, crouch, pick up, drop, throw, stab, chop, slash, parry, shoot, cast a spell. Talk. Sneak. Get on a horse, get off a horse, open a door, close a door. Lock a door, unlock a door. Light a torch, snuff out a torch. Fall over. Die. Was that everything?

Next there was, oh, God, every single object in the entire world.

door

horseshoe

catapult

tiara

bucket

stone, large (4′)

stone, medium (2′)

Stone, small (1′)

Stone, tiny (1″)

Oh, God. Maybe if I worked by categories. I started with foodstuffs.

Turkey leg; pint of milk; seedcake (the contents of Black Arts’ refrigerator).

What next?

Weapons? Light Sources?

What about
Light Sources That Are Also Weapons
? A
glowing sword? A wooden club that has caught on fire?
Oh God. Could you
even contemplate an ultimate game unless you had an infinite list of possible objects? And were there by any chance foodstuffs that were also light-emitting weapons?

The sun was long down by the time I was done with every inanimate object I could imagine us needing in a fantasy universe. By then I was starting to realize I couldn’t just list nouns and verbs. I was making a system; the world was a space to play in. The objects related to each other and to the game system that ran the world; they were more like clusters of adjectives, properties. I would need to specify how much everything weighed, cost, how durable it was, whether it damaged an enemy, what it was made out of, whether it burned, floated, emitted light, harmed werewolves, drained levels, or damaged the undead.

And how much it cost! At the start of the fourth century, the Roman Empire was having a lot of trouble with inflation. Nobody understood economics back then, so Emperor Diocletian simply issued the Edict on Maximum Prices. He made a list of the prices of every possible thing you could buy in the empire and how much it could cost. An egg cost one denarius, no more. The two most expensive things in the empire could cost, at most, 150,000 denarii each. With that much money you could either buy a pound of purple-dyed silk, which no one ever needed except Diocletian himself, since the emperor was the only one who wore purple. Or you could buy a lion. Up to you. But game designers had as much luck controlling prices as a Roman emperor did. WAFFLE had its own ideal about economics and adjusted prices by the whims of its scheming elves and greedy dwarves. We had to built an “appraise” skill just so players could keep up with them.

Later that night I wandered the office trying to think of reasons to leave, to go home and get some sleep. I saw that Lisa’s desk light was on. She was playing the last
Realms of Gold
game. I’d never actually seen
her or anyone else playing it in the office. I stopped to follow the action. The game was in isometric view—not true 3-D, but as if the player is looking down at the world from above, at an angle. The characters looked like colorful, delicate paper dolls. I watched while Lisa carefully, patiently murdered everyone in the entire world.