You

by Austin Grossman

  Right now, no one knows. This is partly because many would consider the very idea frivolous. But it’s also because whoever successfully answers this question must first have answered several others.

  Why do we cry? Why do we laugh, or love, or smile? What are the touchstones of our emotions?

  Until now, the people who asked such questions tended not to be the same people who ran software companies. Instead, they were writers, filmmakers, painters, musicians. They were, in the traditional sense, artists.

  We’re about to change that tradition. The name of our company is Electronic Arts.

  Darren read it aloud: “In short, we are finding that the computer can be more than just a processor of data.

  “It is a communications medium: an interactive tool that can bring people’s thoughts and feelings closer together, perhaps closer than ever before. And while fifty years from now, its creation may seem no more important than the advent of motion pictures or television, there is a chance it will mean something more.

  “Something along the lines of a universal language of ideas and emotions.”

  He broke off and looked up at the crowd, letting them all get it, feel the hubris of it, the vision and the sheer swagger. Everyone felt like summer camp just began for real.

  For me it was the photograph that ran on the right-hand page that almost rendered the text superfluous. It said anything anyone needed to know. Seven men and one woman, all wearing black, shadowed dramatically, few of them smiling, all looking into the camera. Bill Budge of Pinball Construction Set fame wore what looked like a leather glove with metal studs; John Field, creator of Axis Assassin, held the center with folded arms and an arrogant sprawl. They were setting these unglamorous software developers up as icons, self-consciously, a bit of theater that sent a message. It said, “We’re making ourselves look like rock stars or movie stars just to show you what it would be like if our work meant as much as theirs does, and to make you imagine for a second that it can.” And once you’ve imagined it, you know it’s possible. For certain people in a certain generation it was that first moment when someone looked us in the eye and challenged US to take ourselves seriously.

  “So who wants to do this?” he said. “Who wants to make spreadsheets and plot data points and whatever bullshit the counselors want to hand us? And who wants to make something the world has never seen before? Who wants to make the language of dreams?”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  We’d already talked it over and set the outlines of the new project. The new game wouldn’t be about dungeon levels; it would be set aboveground, in the world of Endoria. And the scale would be epic. You wouldn’t be a tiny + sign at the mercy of &s; you would be a king, directing peasants and ships and whole armies of +s. You wouldn’t fight to stay alive; you would make war for a place in history, for the survival of the Elven lands or Dwarfholm. Realms II was about the grand strategy.

  We had sign-up sheets ready, broken down by general areas of interest. The ad hoc Realms Committee would oversee code architecture and control what features would and wouldn’t go in. It would also, collaterally, codify the camp’s nerd hierarchy.

  It still might never have happened if it weren’t for 1983’s rainy summer, which unleashed a downpour for five days of the second week. KidBits had laid in jigsaw puzzles, two Ping-Pong tables, board games, and a small library of worn paperback fantasy, science fiction, Mark Twain, and Faulkner, leavings from one of the counselors’ freshman American lit classes.

  Because we were trapped indoors, there was a kind of imaginative fermentation that took place in the common rooms and computer lab. Campers broke off in twos and threes, tasked with bits and pieces of the world, rules for siege warfare or cavalry charges or the interface for diplomacy or troop psychology and morale or the rules governing succession in the rare case of a royal’s death on the battlefield. They sat in circles and perched on tables or huddled at computers, each of the fastest typists and thinkers surrounded by onlookers, all rapidly conversing. Kim, a high school freshman who had revealed himself as the phantom coder, recruited a steely-eyed brother and sister to port the entire original code base into C. Hours would pass uninterrupted with only the sounds of low voices, the hollow clattering of keyboards, the occasional roll of thunder, and the steady ticktack of the Ping-Pong tables.

  On the fourteenth day of camp, the first full beta of Realms II: The Second Age debuted at KidBits. Open computer lab started at seven that evening. I drew the short straw, so it was Darren, Kim, Lisa, and Simon who solemnly took their places at the keyboards. Someone at the back of the room dimmed the lights, and the first Realms II tournament began. It would conclude, interrupted by three restarts and two full recompiles, six hours and 872 Endorian years later.

  Realms II was still unmistakably the direct descendant of Realms I, just enormously enhanced and reworked in certain directions—world simulation, multiplayer control, different viewing scales, simultaneous combats resolved en masse.

  The alphanumeric characters were replaced by minuscule tiles, twenty-four pixels by twenty-four, each one a tiny miracle of miniaturization. Like the mosaic tiles in a Byzantine church, they made a virtue of simplicity. A tiny tree stood for a forest; a tuft of grass stood for a plain. A tiny cave mouth. A knight with sword upraised. A castle with a flag bravely flying. A horse, a three-masted sailing ship, a peasant clutching a spear. (Stacks of photocopied paper, a combined bestiary, almanac, and gazetteer, identified each feature with numbing precision, detailing its capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses.)

  The tiles stood together in insane profusion—districts, duchies, city-states, nations, and continents, the Lewis Carroll chessboard landscape come to life. Years later they would remember it in color, as it was in subsequent editions, but in the summer of ’83 it was all black-and-white.

  The geography was recognizably the layout of KidBits spread to continent size, the hills become mountains, the pond an inland sea, the whole thing a quilt of small nation-states, forests, mountains, badlands, and mysterious blank areas. Players zoomed and tracked across multiple screens to encompass it.

  It was a crazy, kitchen-sink work of simulation and strategy, with a profusion of subsystems running diplomacy and AI management and a dozen other tiny disciplines.

  The effect, which might have been sterility or confusion, was one of richness, of possibility. This was a world, or an outline of a world, in which you could do anything. The tiles themselves were static but evocative; the numerical blood of the simulation engine flowed through them, giving each one life, choice, consequence, a tiny destiny. A story was going to unfold, tonight.

  The foursome had played before, of course, even sped through a game, but never in earnest, never for blood. Everyone knew the rules of the game, but they were learning at the same time what strategies would and wouldn’t work, and what exactly was going to happen when players were at each other’s throats.

  They took turns moving. By house rules, the game played silently. People in the crowd shifted once in a while; the ceiling fans rotated. Someone got a soda from the machine. Every few turns a new feature would come to light, rules for mining or applying wind direction as a modifier to naval movement, and its author would lean over his or her neighbor or camp best friend and say, “That’s mine,” or, more often, “There’s ours. I can’t believe it’s working!” The four monitors were the brightest things in the room, but from time to time the players would glance up and see the crowd perched on chairs and bookcases and desks, occasionally shifting to another side of the room to follow the action from another perspective.

  I watched from the sidelines. It was interesting to see Simon as a player and not a programmer. Whereas Lisa held a decidedly ironic distance from the action—playing the game was a systems test to her, merely an artifact of the coding process, and I was surprised she turned up for it at all—Simon played as if it mattered, and seemed always slightly surprised, as if he’d written the code but never in a million years
expected it to work.

  Simon and Lisa had the fortune or misfortune of starting out relatively close together, which might have made for a preemptive death struggle, but they lost no time in establishing embassies and trade relations through the diplomatic interface. The Second Age was founded on a human-elven alliance.

  After a few turns a rider appeared from the southeast, announcing peaceful intentions from a wizard king, and Kim’s capital appeared on the map, sequestered in a forested bowl between two mountain ranges. A good portion of the world was still in darkness. In the corner by the soda machine, Darren was working alone, four or five campers clustered behind him.

  Years flashed by. Nations grew and changed. It became apparent that the players were working in vastly different styles. Simon’s territory was expanding in steady, regular blocks of farmland, harmonious and efficient, sprouting feudal castles as it went.

  Lisa, in decidedly unelven fashion, was rapidly stripping her forests of timber, the purpose of which was revealed twelve years into the game, when a large cluster of catapults, siege towers, and elven foot soldiers appeared outside the walled city of Carn. The elf queen had brought overwhelming force, and the elves breached and overran the walls simultaneously after only a few turns of action. They pillaged, garrisoned, and trundled on.

  Kim wasn’t visibly expanding at all. Only a set of mine shafts ringing his capital—and a rapidly growing surplus in precious metals—showed what he was doing. Everyone knew there were other resources underground, though, if Kim managed to hit one.

  Darren’s people finally came into view in a series of raids on Simon’s coastal settlements. He had opted not to have a capital city at all, only a moving fleet of pirates and a rogue band of horsemen who poached caravans here and there. When Simon mustered a well-armed citizen militia, the first player-on-player battle occurred.

  The action stopped while a battle screen replaced the world map on Simon’s and Darren’s screens. The view shifted from displaying a continent to an expanded view showing a ring of seven hexagonal tiles. From viewing the world from ten miles up, we went to seeing it from five hundred feet, as though we were in a Goodyear blimp hovering over a football game.

  The terrain in each hex was randomly generated depending on its type. When viewed from up close, a plains hex was mostly level grass with a few trees and boulders. A forest hex was trees with a few paths and clearings, and so on. The troops fought it out until the battle was resolved, then zoomed back out.

  The icons representing platoons and cavalry detachments were laid out on a field of speckled tiles evoking grass. Darren’s nomadic cavalry was a collection of fearsome riders armed with spears and wicked scimitars, but Simon had prepared well for the encounter and his pikemen were formed up in neat squares. Darren’s horsemen charged the line, but the pikemen were revealed to have sky-high discipline scores. They refused to break formation, and in the end only a few bloodied horses managed to escape the encounter.

  The pattern of border conflicts continued until roughly halfway through the game, when Lisa was revealed to be holding almost three-fifths of the map and the other three players agreed to a five-year alliance. Her rapid expansion had left weak points in the frontier, and her faerie empire was broken into two sections before the former allies turned on one another.

  From then on peace never resumed. Simon poured resources into a regular navy and swept the seas clear, but even as he did so his fields were burning. Kim had poured his treasury into a motley mercenary army—northern axmen and southern archers, even a small dragon.

  Then, at eleven forty-eight, in a single turn, an enormous swath of Lisa’s and Simon’s territories converted to a scrambled, blinking wasteland of desert and lava hexes, a brushstroke of annihilation smeared through the center of the map. Hundreds of miles of fertile farmland, teeming cities, and unbreachable fortifications—not to mention tens of thousands of elves and men—were gone in a single update of the board.

  The room froze as Simon and Lisa broke the silence rule with, simultaneously, “Holy shit” and a whisper-sung “What the fuuuck…” Noise began bubbling up from the room.

  Kim cleared his throat. “It’s not a bug,” he announced distinctly. He’d found what he was looking for under the mountains, a daemon or artifact or spell. After a few moments, the room quieted and Simon and Lisa began entering their moves. The strategic landscape had been turned on its head: Darren’s horde was soon reduced to irrelevance. He formally resigned and his remaining units flipped to Simon’s control. But Simon’s economic base had turned to ash and sand in the cataclysm together with much of his royal family. A half dozen turns later, he bowed out. Lisa survived at the edges of the blighted lands, coldly rebuilding.

  It was one of the few times I saw Lisa suspended at the center of a frozen, attentive room. I knew she was nervous, because she kept looking down to check where her hands were on the keyboard. But after a few minutes I decided it wasn’t stage fright, it was something more surprising. It took a little while to grasp it—Lisa was playing. I was more and more sure that if she hadn’t before, she now wanted to win.

  Lisa pursued a Fabian strategy, ducking and dissolving her army whenever Kim’s massed dwarves appeared until she had managed to back them up to the desert’s edge, and then she revealed her hidden card. At the head of Lisa’s army stood a tiny stick figure of a man with a conical hat and a staff. A #info command revealed it to be the Archmagus Lorac. This final touch had been added by Darren and Simon. Four Heroes, powerful and nearly immortal, roamed the map: the wizard Lorac, Prendar the thief, the warrior Brennan, and the princess Leira. If a player’s conduct had appealed to them, they would lend their talents to that nation. Lorac had been called to the elf queen’s banners. This was their first appearance, the Four Heroes of the Realms. They started as essentially a couple of power-ups for lucky players, a little bonus to combat or magic or scouting that might tip a battle or two.

  (A note on naming: Lorac was Carol spelled backwards; she did the initial pass on the special-unit code; when last heard from she was doing her residency at Johns Hopkins medical school. Brennan was Simon’s old D&D character. Leira because Darren had a crush on a girl named Ariel at computer camp. They made out twice and nothing else happened, but by then the name was already canon. No one knows where Prendar comes from.)

  When Lorac, a stick figure with a grinning skull, a crown, and a wizard’s staff, took the field, his magical protection became the vital counterweight to Kim’s undead sorcerous monarch. Kim’s wizard king had died a century into the game, but his magic sustained him beyond the grave—all hail the Lich King!—and until then he had had no match on the battlefield.

  The two battle lines met, and the elves won out over a mixed force of living and dead in a grinding battle of attrition. The power of Ahr was broken. At one forty in the morning, all four screens cleared at once, then displayed the same message in block capitals:

  THE ELF QUEEN REIGNS SUPREME

  AND THUS

  THE SECOND AGE IS CONCLUDED

  The room was silent except for the two ceiling fans. No one seemed to know when to break the six-hour hush until Darren pushed his chair back to stand and it toppled over. The brazen clanging seemed to unlock something in the crowd, because they realized they could cheer what we were doing, and that we had figured out how to be awesome, together. The sound that followed sounded just like what it was, history being made. Simon and Darren looked at each other, and Simon was grinning his face off.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  There were sixty-three participating campers, and it would take a punishingly intense schedule to run sixteen official first-round matches, and four official second-round matches in eleven days (with one three-player match). The second round would produce a final four, with a twenty-first and final match on the final night to produce an ultimate winner. A grueling but unmistakable necessity. A moral imperative, in fact.

  There was no prize for winning, at least nothing tangible. B
ut there was a slightly sleazy unspoken question that hovered everywhere at camp, which was, who was the smartest. Who wrote the tightest search function; who could find the optimal shortest path between cabin, lake, and dining hall. There were people who wrote brilliant code and people who wrote workmanlike functional code, but there was no scoring system. Realms II was a contest you could win, though. Seen in this light, Darren’s easy assurance that he’d make the finals was a stark provocation, and Simon’s mouth-breathing gamer stare became a challenge. Mind to mind, who was smarter?

  You couldn’t set the question aside, because for a lot of these people it was the arena of last resort. They thought they were ugly; they thought they were losers; but they knew they were smart and it kept them afloat, and, in some cases, it kept them alive.

  I hadn’t fought for rank on Realms I; I’d ceded that fight without thinking of it. But one of us was going to win this. Realms II made me ask myself: Was it possible that I could be the best? And I was a little surprised to find myself answering, “Let’s see.” I suspected Lisa felt the same way, that a lot of us did.

  Watching the first round of sixteen four-player matches was like watching sixty-four fantasy novels in a fast-forward tabletop brawl. Nobody played the same, maybe because everyone felt that the feature they authored held the mystical key to victory—they could game the way weather patterns influenced land and sea battles or price-control laws or weapons-forging expertise or the breeding of magical creatures. A few were proven right, such as the kid who attained a first-round victory by cloaking a capital’s location until the final three turns. Darren’s highly focused assassin’s guild planted moles inside its three opponents’ ruling bodies and won the game on a single invisible signal at the two-century mark, resulting in the shortest game on record and the first flash of his pro gamer talent at work. (The longest-lasting game featured a diplomatic alliance that spanned 312 years and ended in a brutal twelve-year siege with a Masada-style finish. The traumatized victor had to be talked out of conceding.) But just as often, these strategies failed spectacularly. The game world was just way too complicated for a single strategy to rule. Lisa’s game saw a fluke roll on the wandering monster table produce a huge ancient white dragon, a great three-tile monstrosity that sent sovereigns scurrying for the corners; the remainder of the match depended on relocating forces out of its way.