You

by Austin Grossman

  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?

  Chapter Twenty-One

  For 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.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Every day, I had in the neighborhood of twenty or thirty questions for Lisa.

  Q: Hey, Lisa, can we have a pet wolf that follows you around and fights for you?

  A: No.

  Q: Why not?

  A: Pathfinding. The wolf has to follow you around all the time, but there are cases when that’s too hard to work out.

  Q: Can we have Dark Lorac cast a spell to make himself a hundred feet tall?

  A: No. Wait, does Lorac have to move around? We maybe do him as terrain.

  Q: Never mind. Can the player dig a hole in the ground and wait for the monster to come by?

  A: No.

  Q: Why not?

  A: Because what if they decided to keep digging and dig away the entire continent? Plus, changing terrain creates bad pathfinding cases. Next version we’ll do it differently.

  Q: Can the player cut down a tree?
r />   A: No.

  Q: Why not?

  A: What if they dedicated their life to cutting down all the trees in the whole game?

  Q: Exactly what kind of an asshole is this person?

  SMALL HUMANOID CREATURES

  goblin, warrior

  goblin, chieftain

  goblin, warrior, dead

  goblin, chieftain, dead

  orc, warrior

  orc, chieftain

  orc, warrior, dead

  orc, chieftain, dead

  human, farmer, male

  human, farmer, female

  human, town dweller, male

  human, town dweller, female

  human, merchant, male

  human, merchant, female

  human, nobleman

  human, noblewoman

  human, king

  human, queen

  human, warrior, male

  human, warrior, female

  human, magician, male

  human, magician, female

  human, rogue, male

  human, rogue, female

  human, farmer, male, dead

  JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.

  Friday was my first morning waking up underneath my own desk. My sleeping mind had decided that my sneakers were a good idea for a pillow. It was, let’s see, ten forty-eight. I’d been up until five doing terrain types. I sat up, but left my eyes closed for a moment and listened to somebody typing. Jared, I realized.

  “Yo,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said.

  I took a moment to think about what I might look like, then had what seemed to my tired brain to be a profound epiphany: given that I had all my clothes on, and I knew where my shoes were, things were probably okay.

  “Hey, Russell,” Jared said. “Are we doing mounts at all? Gabby says the art’s not hard.”

  “Why not? Ask Lisa if we can.”

  I levered to my feet and padded to the kitchen in my socks. I made coffee slowly, leaning against the counter. I’m already at work, I thought. Timewise, I am way ahead on my day.

  I took the coffee to my desk. It didn’t actually feel that weird. Really okay, actually. Fuck parents, fuck having a real job. Maybe this is what we do.

  Magic Items

  Some items in Endoria were enchanted. People knew how to do these things. I started the list. Magic swords I knew how to do. Rings could be magic, duh. Wands and potions. But then couldn’t other things be magic? Decks of cards, rocks with holes in them, masks?

  What caught my attention was the artifacts category. Singular items, storied, created by gods, legendary craftsmen, or powerful historical forces. On the very, very rare occasion the game generated one of them, it was taken off the list and couldn’t be generated again.

  Brass Head: A male head of noble appearance, fashioned of brass. When heated to body temperature, its eyes move in sockets and it gains the power of speech. If damaged or opened, it is revealed to contain a small amount of sand. Can recite a character’s name and details of his or her history; clairvoyant. Glaurus VI was so taken with the Head’s abilities that he gave it a dukedom and an infantry command. History does not mention a Glaurus VII.

  Dragon-Turtle Armor: A suit of plate armor evidently made of bone or shell, densely inscribed. Any damage it sustains will be distributed equally among nearby allied characters. Share my glory, friends. Share my doom.

  Hyperborean Crown: What the fuck is the Hyperborean Crown? Why does anyone want it? Even Matt didn’t have an answer to this one. It was just the ur-quest Item. Finding it means the game’s over and you won, which makes sense in a little ASCII dungeon game that doesn’t have to explain itself. But we were gaming in a realistic world at this point, and everything needed a reason.

  Idol of Arn: A small jade figurine of a grinning, Buddha-like man, quite ordinary except that it is always warm to the touch. There used to be two of them. The other one disappeared in the Second Age, around the same time the Inland Sea appeared…

  Mirror of Becoming: User polymorphs into one of the following: 40% chance, dragon of random color and size; 25% chance, giant rat; 25% chance, minor daemon; 9% major daemon; 1% chance, minor demigod. Transformation lasts anywhere between one and twenty-four hours. “Who’s the fairest now, dearies?” she hissed.

  The Soul Gem: A faceted black jewel two inches across, ageless and imperishable. It has appeared in a variety of settings over the ages—pendants, crowns, breastplates, skulls. At the end of the Third Age it returns to the beginning of that Age, along with whoever possesses it. “Take it,” the old man said. “Make a better world.”

  Staff of the Sorcerous Gentleman: All spells cast by the wielder have quadruple effect and duration. Intelligence increases. Staff cannot be discarded. After 3–4 hours, wielder will involuntarily begin moving toward the nearest body of salt water and immerse him- or herself, there to die unless sustained by artificial means. “Do you know extended underwater breathing? How fast can you teach it?”

  Unique Monsters: Liches, Daemons, Demigods

  Arch-lich: mightiest of the undead; the animate corpses of mortals too proactive to die. Being a sixteenth-level spell caster with genius intelligence was merely the price of entry. You’d need a 120,000-gp soul repository, a dream quest to the Negative Material Plane, the sacrifice of a true innocent, and the iron will to die bodily but just keep on trucking. Whenever you saw an arch-lich walking around, you saw the remains of somebody who didn’t mind having a skull for a head, if that was what it took. You may as well use its name.

  Daemon Prince. Did this mean the Devil? This is where my fantasy theology got muddled. Who were these guys, again? Did they live in hell? If so, why was there a hell in Endoria, if the Christian God wasn’t there?

  I had to be one of only a few English majors to find Paradise Lost of practical, on-the-job utility. But how did “the unconquerable Will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield” translate into to-hit and damage values?

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The black sword came back. This time it was in a test level I built in the old game to look at all the different terrain types—just a big room divided into strips of grass, marble, ice, dirt, and cobblestone. I looked away and looked back, and there was a goblin with an outsize black sword in its hand. It was a standard broadsword, but it was a flat black and had markings on it.

  It was charging straight toward me and I watched it come. It had spawned from nothing. Just before it closed to combat distance, I took my hands off the keyboard and mouse, as if the sword held a mysterious charge that might have come up through my own character and into me. My stats cratered at its touch and I watched from the remains of my default first-level fighter as it collapsed in a heap. The sword vanished. I checked; invulnerability was set to ON.

  But I knew, now, what it made me think of.

  “Hey, Matt, what happens in the Second Age?”

  Matt was in the kitchen, planted before the snack machine with the solemnity of a pagan idol.

  I no longer felt bad about interrogating Matt about the Black Arts canon. I needed to know these things if I was going to be in charge of the story, and if Matt was shocked at my complete ignorance of a large section of my job he never showed it. In fact, I gradually realized that his fundamental good nature was one of those intangibles that made it possible for the office to function. That and I was pretty sure these conversations were the best part of his day.

  “The Second Age? Well, of course, there are conflicting accounts.” He paused, maintaining a sleepy professorial air as he considered the uppermost tier of treats, the chips and trail mix.

  “But there’ve been actual games set there, right?”

  “Well, supposedly RoGII: War in the Realms, as you know. But it’s precanon, right? More what I’d call a narrative possibility space bounded by the strategic parameters of the game.” He broke off, shyly. He’d thought about these things a lot.

  “Do we have a copy?” I asked hopefull
y.

  He shook his head. “Probably not. I used to play it on the C64 way back, but I don’t think it ever got ported. I think it was a high school thing, in fact. Darren had a copy, but he probably just took it with him.”

  “Thanks.”

  The sun outside was just touching the line of trees at the back of the parking lot, so I went back to my desk and spent a little while puzzling through sample code for the scripting language I was going to be using. It was the moment, around six thirty, when the music was turned up, when anyone intent on keeping to a regular work schedule had already left the building, and anyone else still there was slacking and playing games, or else crunching on a serious deadline, or simply keeping a nontraditional schedule. People arrived as late as one in the afternoon and stayed at work until midnight or one.

  By midnight the population of Black Arts had dwindled to a couple of programmers typing in the semidark Realms pit, headphones on, and a QA guy snoring in an oversize beanbag chair. No one was watching as I stepped into Darren’s office and closed the door behind me. I pictured Adric at the unholy forge, hammering and binding the secrets of the world into the glowing black broadsword engraved in the runes of a language so obscene that the Powers themselves recoiled to hear it spoken.