But then, more doubts emerge. Couldn’t it be some sort of mimetic infection? Is it like a yawn which travels like a wave through a classroom, despite no one wanting to yawn? Do people watch because others are watching? Or is it like when someone points & our eyes are drawn immediately to what they are pointing at? Do people watch because people are born to watch? Or is it like when a dog chases an invisible ball because of his learned response of this gesture begetting that act, for which the pantomime of a thrown ball is no different from the actual? Do people watch because they’ve been duped into watching? Or does this really satiate them, even though it’s fake? Would that mean that everything at bottom is just a means to satiation, simulated or otherwise? How can it be differentiated as authentic or simulated if our brains make no distinction? Is everything just pornographies of various animal wants?
Questions like this bubble without end in Cairey’s mind. They never get him anywhere. Eventually, they pop, & disappear, until the next time they emerge. This fizzing fills his head as they walk through the crowd to its most thickly inhabited location, unconsciously drawn, as well, to the focal point, where the reflective eyes of the crowd & the cameras converge upon the most popular figure, charging it with their attention, & thus granting it a supraterrestrial form, some sort of imagined hologram composed of their innumerable vantages, crystallizing their combined attention into the ghostly illusion of a transcendent whole.
“I think that’s the one everyone’s looking at” his date says, as she points to a screen. He looks at it, even as his brain bubbles with invasive inquiries. They pop.
The figure she’s pointed to is sliding into a skintight haptic suit, like a superhero entering his spandex costume, in that halfway zone when his face is not yet covered by the mask, when both of his identities exist at the same time, in the only moment of wholeness- before one identity becomes schizophrenically subsumed by the other, turning it into a secret. If Cairey missed this moment, this figure would have meant nothing to him. He & his date would have passed it by as they’d passed by all the others. But as the crowd cheers in anticipation of this figure’s private self disappearing beneath his VR headset, the signal of immanent action- Cairey recognizes the face of this professional player & “artist in residence.”
It is Tor Mälmstrom, better known by his gamertag, Set72, which is printed on jerseys worn by a swarm of ecstatic teens in the crowd. Tor had been Cairey’s roommate his freshman year at the Youniversity, & he had not thought about him in many years.
They had not been friends exactly, but they had cohabited peacefully- sharing a few moments of intimacy over that year, such as when they’d drink & smoke together, or tidy up their dorm room on Sunday mornings. Tor had changed quite drastically since then. Back in their freshman year, he’d been just as tall & imposing a figure, but now his greasy mane & glasses had been shorn. He’s grown a beard he hadn’t had then, & he is in rather excellent physical shape, which his haptic suit enhances to a superhuman degree, as each of its heat-&-texture pads glint in the fluorescence of his cube.
His transformation makes Cairey consider how much he has decayed in the same timespan. His own hairline is receding & thinning, beginning to resemble the blonde horseshoe of his father’s balding. His skin has started to sag. His stomach now perches over his waistline, though he looks otherwise malnourished. His posture has sloped forward after so many years of deskwork. But way back then, he had still been under the sway of his boundless optimism with regard to his future prospects as a world-famous manga artist. At that time he had even pitied Tor & looked down on him for specializing, not even in video-game design or production, but in “Performative Play” as his major was called, which was the butt of many jokes by other more “serious” majors.
Cairey remembers the most impactful day of their cohabitation. It is a memory he does not recall fondly. It was a Saturday, he remembers, in the middle of a long weekend when no immediate needs constricted his free-time. Tor had been practicing for an extracurricular speedrunning decathlon. He had always been gaming during that year they’d lived together, even without such an event to justify it, but Cairey remembers this distinctly, as it was the decathlon's ruleset, which required analog consoles & outlawed emulation, that explained why in his memory of that day Tor was surrounded in their living room by so many dusty & anachronistic machines.
The rules of the decathlon were that a single iconic game from every console generation would be speedrun, in reverse order, ending on the Magnavox Odyssey edition of Tennis, which was a competitive novelty & rarity for such events, as this final duel would determine the winner & second place finisher from whatever pair finished the other nine-generations first. Tor had already mastered Pacman for the Atari2000, Super Mario Bros for the NES, Super Mario World for the SNES, & was practicing, that Saturday, various backwards longjumps in Super Mario 64 in order to shave his 16 star run into a much more efficient, but nearly impossible, 1 star run.
Cairey, on the other hand, had designated that Saturday as the perfect time to take the amanita muscaria he had traded a similarly psychonautically inclined sculptor for a few of his rare Chlorprothixenes he’d been proscribed in his adolescence before being switched over to Caraprazine. He ate his shrooms with some peanut butter, as was his custom, picking out the nasty bits still stuck in his teeth, swishing water around & swallowing all of it, so that no intoxicating bit went to waste. His plan was to walk around the city in order to find some inspiration somewhere for his end-of-the-year art-project. He had no idea for it, & generally found his inspiration by these means. Otherwise, he only reproduced themes he had drawn countless times before. What he was after was the excitement of “new ideas,” & it was these that he sought out in his psychonautical vision quests.
He had decided to leave the dorm room an hour after imbibing the mushrooms, so in the meantime, he sat on the floor of their dorm, & smoked a marijuana infused cigarette while he waited, hoping that this would spur a bowel movement, as his only anxiety on his previous trips had been having to use a public restroom, which usually entailed an interaction with a “real person” in order to gain access, & this usually gave him so much anxiety, as he was shy & poorly socialized even while sober, that the paranoia of being found out sent him on the infernal spiral of a bad trip.
Sitting there & smoking, he watched Tor’s attempts without interest, initially, but as one of these cigarettes turned to two, & a third necessitated three more to be rolled as provisions for his hallucinogenic excursion, & then a fourth was lit without any presentiments of cathartic relief, he realized that the effects of the mushrooms were already coming on, & earlier than he’d anticipated, likely, due to the fact that he’d eaten them on an empty stomach. His hands had swollen to comical size & he stared at them in wonder. With a fifth cigarette hanging from his lips, he became entranced by the way the smoke was pulled, like bands of lace, into curling geometries of knots which folded in on themselves & then dissolved into the air. He thought that maybe he could draw these miraculous forms.
His gargantuan fingers trembled as he lifted the delicate miracle of his cigarette to flick the cylinder of ash it had formed into the discarded beer can he’d been using as an ashtray. It was only after this ceremony that he became fully entranced by Tor’s gameplay. He followed the wire leading from his controller into the N64, & from there to the dusty CRT Tor had salvaged for the decathlon, & when he followed the wires back to Tor’s hands, he saw the iconic tridentine controller melt into his flesh. The flicker rate of the CRT was visible to him now, like a strobe light, within which he saw the figure of a small man emerge, lunging awkwardly backwards into an infinite staircase, over & over & over, until suddenly, he clipped into the texture of the stairs & was blasted through the flimsy set piece of his virtual reality into an infinite unrenderable abyss.
Tor muttered an expletive at this failure & lurched out of his chair to reset the console. The screen crunched into a roar of static- & the sound of this roar punched Cairey i
n his soul & lingered in his mind, looping without end. He would not be going anywhere, he realized, but to his room, to endure the rest of his trip somewhere safe & blanketed which could contain his fragile ego during what he felt to be the inevitable onset of a very bad time.
The CRT static was accepted by his fragmented mind as a revelation of Hell, a tempestuous surge of damned souls in perpetual torment, decimated into an endless war of pixels black & white, whirling in calamitous cacophonous misery. He had taken the events depicted onscreen as an omen for himself, given to him by the pernicious force that governed his universe as a way of punishing his transgression, a punishment for his artificially induced state of altered consciousness. The infinite staircase was a parody of his life, an unending climb up an inclining corridor, where progress was illusory, & when he turned around to reflect on it, poor plumber, Orpheus, he realized that he had gotten nowhere at all. This infinite staircase was lined on the right with the image of a princess, the eternal feminine, which represented bliss, & love- but on the left reigned the image of the reptile king, the dragon, the tyrant of the natural order, which laughed at his attempts to depose him. & those strange lunges, the glitch Tor was attempting to exploit, represented a turning-away from the struggle up the endless staircase of life in an embrace of the impossibility of progress- & this represented what Cairey had believed his psychonautical experiments to be- as they could propel his soul past the encoded restrictions of endless recursions in thought & in life, into a new world by methods forbidden by the programmer of his universe. But this could just as easily launch his soul, as he had just realized, into an unrenderable void where the only escape was complete severance, & a hard restart, & this was what it meant to be Damned. & he was sure that he was going to be Damned. He was born Damned.
& these thoughts repeated in his mind as his material surroundings pulsed like the internal organs of a gutted fish, hanging by a hook, drowning in the air, flopping in the throes of death. & everything in his field of view seemed to be passing him by too swiftly as he rose from the floor, his cigarette burning closer to his flesh, & he felt like he was on an escalator- & he felt as afraid of this as he had when he was a child & he had believed that his shoelaces would get caught in its machinery & tear him to bleeding pixelated bits!
It is not a comforting reminiscence to say the least. But he manages to snap out of it, before it blooms into another episode & spawns another monstrous fuckup. You’re being crazy Cairey, he thinks to himself. No one cares. I don’t care. Nothing is wrong.
His date taps him on his shoulder, & he turns to her, & she is smiling at him. For the first time he is pleased that she is with him, & that he is not alone with his thoughts. He is comforted by the idea that she is looking after him, or guiding him to some extent. At the very least she is distracting him from his interior horror. He is thankful for her company. It’s as if she has finally picked up on his wish at the ticketbooth, & that she is giving him such a sign as he’d requested.
“Do you want to keep going or?” she asks, extending the hanging conjunction with a fading vocal fry.
“I think I want to see this” he replies, surprising himself with the firmness of his declaration, “I mean, unless you don’t.”
“Oh no no” she says, “I don’t mind. I’ve never watched this sort of thing before, but my little nephew just adorrrrrrres it. It’ll give me some clout with him.” She giggles at herself. “I’m the cool aunt you know.”
Cairey smiles at this, & they share a moment of eye-contact which contains a hint of genuine warmth. Maybe, Cairey thinks, today will be better than I feared.
This thought is interrupted by the booming voice of an announcer asking the crowd: “ARE YOU READY FOR SOME VIOLENT DELIGHT?”
The assembled crowd announces their readiness with gleeful cheers, as Tor, or rather Set72, straps himself into his controller-exoskeleton, produced, Cairey guesses, by a company called Finalest, as this name is printed all over it. It looks to Cairey like a torture device from an alien planet, but to the rest, it is the most aspirational commodity imaginable.
The screen on Tor’s tower splits into three, with the top showing Tor’s corporeal body confined in the controller rig inside of his cube, the middle showing his first-person perspective on the virtual environment within the gameworld, & the bottom showing an omniscient perspective of the very same gameworld, including the one-thousand players that are gathered, from a birdseye view, in the loading zone where some stretch, some run around & practice their acrobatic movements. Set72 bounces on his knees, throws some punches, & runs toward a wall & into the sort of backflip so customarily shown in kung-fu choreography, to which the crowd cheers. Then he reaches behind his back & pulls out his weapon- a war-hammer engraved with glowing runes which appears to weigh hundreds of pounds, but in reality, as Cairey sees, peeking up to the top screen, his weapon is a steel rod with buttons & a trigger on it & could not weigh more than a curtain rod.
The countdown to the game begins, & Tor’s body is lifted into the air by the exoskeleton preparing to drop his avatar, Set72, onto the immense virtual continent that comes into view on the bottom screen. Its procedurally generated & randomized environments range in aesthetic from snowy mountains lined with psuedo-Tibetan pagodas, to megalopolitan sprawl, to wild west ghost towns, bucolic rolling hills, murky swamplands, retrofuturist 1950s highways, corrupt geigerian hellscapes, lovecraftian ruins of crumbling temples which shift & slither impossibly, to fairy-tale forests, to military bases... It represents in miniature all of the tropes of fantasy, mapped in a hyperlinked jumble in encyclopedic fashion, the very archipelago of the collective imagination- a microcosm of microcosms. & on this virtual battlefield, there will be one survivor, a master of combat in every fantastical realm, & he will be rewarded with a prize pot beyond Cairey’s fathoming, as it is an order of magnitude more than he’s earned in the course of his life, considering that his net worth is debt.
The game begins & Set72 lands at the top of the highest mountain in the land- finding an immense wrought-iron longbow which his war-hammer transforms into with the click of a button. He takes aim at another player, who is gliding toward his turf, & dispatches him with an arrow that sails into his heart. A name in an alphabet Cairey guesses to be Thai is marked dead in the corner of the bottom screen, as the unseen announcers shout, along with the cheers of the crowd: “FIRST BLOOD!”
The third camera cuts to the megalopolis where a quarter of the playerbase has dropped. Fifteen are culled in quick succession by a skyscraper collapse caused by a coordinated explosion at its foundation. Carnage is everywhere & Cairey can’t quite follow it, though he finds the spectacle riveting & immediately engaging. He only averts his eyes to look between the three screens.
He checks in on Set72 on the second screen, who is now snowboarding down the mock Himalayas, soaring off cliffs, firing arrows in an acrobatic display that could have been a setpiece in a blockbuster film. Elsewhere, on the third screen, players soar on dragons covered in chrome scales, rockets are fired from helicopters, sniper rifle shots split skulls from immense distances, trip wires set off pit traps, robot suits are melted from napalm bombs- death & triumph, victory & defeat are unfolding everywhere as the playing field shrinks in proportion to the virtual world’s remaining population. It is simply impossible to keep track of it all as it unfolds live.
Set72 survives many close calls. He is hit a few times by various armaments, but heals himself by means of the game’s regenerative health system. Players cannibalize the corpses of the dispatched in order to recharge their health & “vigor” (a stat that enables acrobatic feats like jumping over buildings & throwing trees).
After twenty minutes of unrelenting combat the field has shrank by 90% of its scope. & ten minutes later, only ten players remain in the final zone- a lake town which contains a lighthouse for some reason, perhaps a bug in the procedural generation. This lighthouse is where Set72 has made his perch, providing a highground advantage over his remai
ning competitors.
He’d dropped the bow a while ago in favor of a gold-plated desert eagle, a quote-unquote Legendary Weapon, which provides one shot kills on enemies of any armor level provided that they are shot in the head. The announcers predict his victory from this fact, as it is the strongest weapon in the game. It would be his first first-place finish, the announcers inform, despite his many top ten & top five finishes over the first season of VIOLENT DELIGHT.
Cairey had never heard of the game until today, nor had he known what a giant his former roommate had become in its community since its launch. He had stopped paying attention to such things, & had not known that Virtual-Reality-Gaming technology had advanced to the degree that it had, as such exoskeleton-rigs were still prohibitively expensive & rare. The designers of VIOLENT DELIGHT were an in-house company owned by Finalest, the manufacturers of this body-consuming controller, & only one thousand machines are in existence at the time, scattered all across the globe. Cairey has gathered all of this from the implications of certain statements of the announcers over the course of the game. He has also gathered some bits of Tor’s biography from the chatter of the crowd, & the phone-research of his date. Tor had apparently garnered a cult fanbase from his skill at a variety of games. He had been an “artist in residence” for the past two years, & it was only recently that the MEH had invested in this “Virtual Immersion” console at its launch. It had proved to be their most profitable investment in some time, as it drew young viewers to their streams, & to the Museum, more than any other resident in their catalogue. It was for this reason that Tor had been given a luxurious tower all to himself.
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