You

by Austin Grossman

  “So okay, note here that fire is completely procedural, like most things in the game.” The maid was now definitely on fire and had gone into her “Help, I’m on fire” response, which meant screaming and running in a random direction. “The fire will spread dynamically in the world depending on what’s near it—see the dresser there, and the drapes—degrading objects as it goes.

  “Which you’ll just put a stop to by—hang on—you can see how the short bow is incredibly effective, even at medium range… and we’ll move on to our main object… the jewel! The house will be mostly awake at this point—we track sound propagation pretty well.”

  The maid’s body was still smoldering a little. I sprinted down the hall, a little way ahead of the guards, who had oriented themselves to the maid’s shouted alarm.

  “And here’s the baron himself—we’ll see he’s a romantic at—okay, I guess he’s decided to make a stand. Very—one sec—very brave. He’s not really programmed as a combatant. The blood is just a particle system, but we save its location on the textures—spatters pretty well. You’ll see he’s dropped his inventory—gold, dagger, and… the jewel itself. Nicely done. And I see we have some more servants arriving.”

  I went to work. By now the audience was actively laughing and applauding as each innocent went down. In a moment the room was covered in blood spatter, bodies, and dropped inventory. It looked like half the characters in the entire level had shown up to make me kill them.

  In a dozen playthroughs, this had never happened. When a live press demo is blown, it’s one of the great pleasures of E3; that’s when the dull, overrehearsed corporate presentation transforms in an instant into a high-wire act, then into a riveting theater of cruelty, the hapless developer squirming, every detail of his fear and desperation called out on the video screen behind and above him. The whole room was awake and watching. I was intensely conscious of the video camera set up at the back of the room. Of Matt in the front row, appalled. I looked out at all the pink oxford-cloth shirts and Dockers and BlackBerries and thought, these aren’t even nerds. Who are these people, and why are they trying to fuck me over?

  No. No, fuck these assholes and their schadenfreude, this was all going down just the way we planned it, and I’d be damned if I’d admit otherwise. And I wasn’t going to get killed in my own demo.

  “Right. So there’s an inventory system?” I said. Using the camera, I called out a few items on the floor. “Aaaand… you’ve got a pair of shoes there, a little gold, looks like. Lots of choices for any player.”

  The audience quieted. Not out of any respect, but because there was obviously more fun to be had here. I was fatally off-script now, with no idea how to get back, but at least I knew the terrain. I ditched out the window onto a balcony and climbed back to the roof. Two guards were waiting.

  More ad-libbing. “The guards will have alerted the city watch, and in moments the entire city will be in hostile mode. We’ve put a lot of work into the AI.” This was all supposed to have taken us up to the castle. We were supposed to be getting an award from the king, and then R’yalla was going to smile at us. There was going to be a speech. We’d set it up just the way Ryan wanted.

  “Some of this is based on a real city in Scotland. You can see where—hang on, still killing this guy—you can see where there’s a northern Gothic feel to the rooftops.”

  I showed them some close-up fighting moves from the combat system—by this point in the game you’re a hardened killer, no longer the untrained naïf of the round tower and the forest. I fenced with one of the guards for a few moments just to show I could, then finished him. I still knew the combat system inside and out. I hooked a leg and shoved the other guard backward off the roof’s edge. The interface for this was a sorry, convoluted nightmare that needed fixing—underneath the podium my left hand was holding down three separate keys at once just to maintain the proper combat stance—but nobody needed to know that. It looked fantastic.

  It was only when the guards were dead that I realized I was still speaking into the microphone, addressing more than two hundred people. It looked like a few more audience members were slipping in and sitting at the back. Were people already gossiping about this? And what had I been saying this whole time?

  “… which is why the old gods never returned to the city.” That sounded wildly off-topic, but at least it wasn’t offensive. The rooftop was empty. From there we could see the whole city, which was divided by a broad canal.

  But by the time I climbed all the way down to the street, a red-and-white-cloaked city guardsman had already spotted me. The guardsmen were deliberately overpowered and more or less telepathic in their ability to coordinate and respond to citywide alarms. They had to be, otherwise players would hang around robbing the city merchants blind.

  “As you can see, there’s a fully explorable landscape. The city is a living ecosystem.” I sprinted down the narrow cobblestone street toward the canal ahead. A merchant’s wagon blocked the way.

  “Just going to—okay—kill this guy a second.” More hilarity as a merchant’s headless body stumbled and fell. What was wrong with these people? The wagon rolled a little way forward onto the bridge, but it didn’t quite line up, and one of its wheels was left hanging in space.

  “Check it out, rigid-body physics in real time,” I said limply. I didn’t know what it meant.

  I scrambled over the cart as the AI guards arrived. Why was the cart on fire? In a few seconds it had set the wooden bridge on fire and one of the guardsmen, too.

  I was running out of features to point out that were not on fire, so I stood and let them all see the caravan slowly tipping, then tumbling slowly over into the canal. It fell correctly, thanks be to Crom—I thought of the many, many rehearsals in which objects had hung in midair, or bounced like beach balls, or leaped into the sky and out of sight. The cart began to float downriver, and the fire went out properly. I hoped somebody noticed and cared.

  I checked the clock—how had this demo run only eight minutes? The palace was only a few blocks away, but that was a long twenty seconds to fill.

  “So—the, uh, Heroes of Endoria are never far. Waiting, watching. All your favorites will indeed appear in Realms of Gold VII: Winter’s Crown.”

  Silence in the room.

  “Ahem. Note how the sound of footsteps changes when the character goes from cobblestone to mud to wood. Recorded specially.”

  The palace, at last, was lit up with carriages waiting in front, liveried servants at attention. It was a fairy-tale scene and not at all on fire.

  “And you’re right on time! This invitation will get us in… and you can see that marble texture is slightly reflective. The ceremony is just beginning and they’re calling for the jewel, which is—I checked—safe in your inventory.”

  The king was speaking to the assembled courtiers and the princess herself.

  “It is our pleasure to invite whoever may come forward to redeem the grandest Jewel of Ahr, our Gem Imperial. Does anyone in this room possess it or have knowledge of what has become of… aaargh!”

  The city watch wasn’t even permitted to enter the palace, which made it so especially odd when one of them murdered the flagged-unkillable king with an enormous black runesword. It was the Mournblade bug, and it had been throwing this demo off from the beginning.

  “What—what is this foul assassination you witness? We must take our revenge,” I said in a hopeless attempt to pivot the narrative midstream. I wasn’t really a role player, much less an improv actor. I wasn’t actually sure what I said next as the king went down and the watchman began painting the back half of the presentation hall red with noble blood spatters. Then the guard spontaneously collapsed, hit points zeroed out, and the sword was taken up by the next passing unarmed AI in combat mode. I wasn’t really aware of too much that happened for the next ten seconds other than trying in vain to talk over the near-deafening levels of hilarity in the room. By the time a demented lady-in-waiting was pursuing me through
the Emerald Gallery with her cursed obsidian blade, I was hard put to pull the narrative threads together into anything passably genre-normative.

  The canal ran under the palace windows, cool and inviting. Providentially, I could see the floating cart I had tipped in the water earlier. Shortly, I was being borne away on the current through merciful calm, screams fading in the distance.

  “There’s the water. Specular highlights—see the way the flames reflect? And the moon there,” I said.

  “So at this point we’re halfway through the game. We’ve come pretty far in our quest to go find a picture of a crown for no reason other than whatever backstory there is. Does anyone even know it? You’re spending twenty hours to get a crown that doesn’t even affect gameplay.

  “Why do you want it? Do you care what happens to any of these people? I mean, Jesus, you killed your own henchman just to get a Helm of Water Breathing. Just to level up so you could get into the Thieves Guild.”

  The city drifted past, windows glowing orange-yellow against a black sky. The alarm cries of the guards paced me, then fell behind. What now? Standing on a floating wagon wasn’t exactly next-gen gameplay.

  “The river takes you through the heart of the city,” I explained. There was some time to fill. “Then down into the sewer system, farther and farther from the mess you made back in the world aboveground.”

  The bridge had stopped burning, but the screen still showed a straight line of white smoke climbing into the sky. The canal felt like the loneliest place in the world.

  We were in the sewers; no one had expected them to show at E3. No one should be seeing this part. They looked good enough; Matt had at least textured them properly. The audio system modulated background noise into slightly musical echoes. We needed a little narrative.

  “Farther from the dead guards and the jewel you lost, and the princess who was waiting for you. Farther from home, farther from your roommate, who doesn’t do the dishes, farther from your body, getting softer with each passing year. Overhead, the night sky is pierced by hard white pixels under black glass. You can see your reflection in the screen. Outside it’s still midafternoon. God, why aren’t you at work? Aren’t you twenty-eight or something? Aren’t you tired of talking to people through a conversation system that hasn’t changed since The Secret of Monkey Island came out? That was, like, ten years ago.”

  Finally, we passed out through a stone archway at the base of a cliff. The city was far above us now. The moon was starting to set. We were entering a space of open-ended wetlands.

  I cleared my throat. “Did I mention that Realms of Gold is a mix of indoor and outdoor action-adventure?”

  The wagon bumped up against mud. I got out and leaped to the shore, leaving footprints that faded in a few seconds. It was a small, low island hidden in miles of marshland. The night was quiet except for crickets and a bullfrog. At least somebody had tagged this area with the marsh sound palette.

  “The cries of panic and alarm have long since faded behind you, and the night’s gone still and silent. But in the lands beyond, the world is tilting on its axis. You know it. We all do,” I said—where exactly was this coming from? “Everything’s changing. You’re going to have to find something to hold on to.

  “You reflect on what brought you here,” I said. “The losses.” I made sure they could see the burn scars—unlike regular hits, fire damage in RoGVIII leaves a permanent mark. “The victories. The choices.” I rotated the camera until we could see the tattoo snaking down the side of Leira’s neck. It marked her as a criminal assassin back in her homeland, although they wouldn’t know that.

  I had lost track of where we were now. Some procedurally generated wilderness landscape no one ever bothered to visit before. I just wanted to find something interesting for people to look at. I zoomed the camera out from its usual close-over-the-shoulder position and upward as we approached the center of the clearing. From overhead you could see now where you were, at the edge of a circle of standing stones. Up and up went the camera.

  “The choices you made are the story you told. For better or worse, it’s part of you now, and it’s your story, not ours. Take it with our blessing.”

  As the camera kept rising, I could see an ancient plaza, light and dark stone in a pattern I finally recognized.

  “Long ago, before the waters came, there was a temple here.”

  Our character was growing smaller and smaller as the camera was rising. Now you’re just a pixelated dot in the center of an enormous rune the size of a traffic circle.

  “This is the Sign of Auric, whose temple it was. Auric, the Endorian god, patron of mercy, of late harvests and last resorts.

  “Realms of Gold VIII, everybody. Winter’s Crown. Coming this Christmas.”

  I signaled Matt, and the lights came up. Most of the audience had either left or sat staring expectantly for my next trick as if I couldn’t see them, as if I were on TV. I unclipped the mike, shut off the monitor and the computer, grabbed the CD. I wanted to walk offstage, but of course in a conference hall there’s no backstage, just a long walk up the aisle to the exit.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  I thought it best to remain in my hotel room for the next seven hours. Calls came in on the room phone, four or five before I lost count. The message light blinked and blinked while I watched movies and ate room-service pizza, then a slice of cheesecake and a glass of fairly sketchy white wine, then more cheesecake slices and more and better wines. After the first hundred dollars plus tips, it seemed easier to keep going. The staff and I were developing a cheery rapport, and there was a Cary Grant retrospective on television. I practiced an attitude of amused detachment and thought of how attractive I was becoming. This was going to work.

  Around nine thirty there was a tentative knock at the door.

  “Russell?” It was Don.

  The hotel window was one of the ones that only opens about an inch and a half. I abandoned the tantalizing smell of freedom and answered the door.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “I came to see if you were doing okay. I heard the demo was a little rocky.”

  Behind me, the bed was covered in plates and napkins and trays, except for a me-size zone in the center.

  He looked it over. “I hope you expensed that.”

  “I didn’t think of that.” Probably Cary Grant would have said that, especially if he were four or five glasses of wine into the evening.

  “Maybe we should go out.”

  The Hyatt lobby had been colonized by industry conventiongoers on their final night out, and it had become a seething pit of heavy guys in black T-shirts huddled in little clusters of three or four over gin and tonics, exchanging notes and gossip. Here and there a navy-blazered biz-dev type could be seen, generally signing for the drinks. The crowd was about 80 percent men. Like the men, the women were split between the put-together business types, with late-era Rachel hair, and the T-shirted geek tribeswomen. People threading their way through would be hailed every few steps and forced to exchange business cards before they could go any farther.

  It was staggeringly loud, but I thought I distinguished an extra buzz and scattered applause when I came into view. Certainly a detectable amount of nudging and pointing.

  As we struggled to the bar, one of the suits grabbed Don’s elbow and whispered what seemed like urgent information in his ear.

  He stopped me before I could order.

  “VIP party, room sixteen twelve. Open bar,” he said, steering me back to the elevator.

  “The demo kind of got away from me,” I said.

  “I heard. Probably we’re going to be okay.”

  “How so?”

  “A couple of people got it. You still gave a good look at the feature set. I’ve got meetings set up. And a lot of people are talking about it.”

  “I’m not fired or anything. Or am I?” I said.

  The elevator went up one, two, three floors.

  “You know, maybe we shouldn’t go to thi
s.”

  “It’s a moral imperative,” I said.

  The suite party was a smaller version of the scene in the lobby, except now most of the people had blazers on. I guessed this was by and large the management layer of things, plus a few star techies. I recognized a few genuine industry moguls—Romero, Molyneux, Spector. Far in the back, a poker game was in progress.

  Don was being glad-handed to death, so I plunged into the crowd. I’m five foot eight and a half, which is only an inch and a half below average, but for some reason everyone seemed to be over six feet tall. I got to where the bar was, more or less by mashing my face into the back of three different navy blazers. The bar was unmanned. I stepped behind it, kicking aside empty cans of Red Bull as though they were dry leaves, and rummaged through bottles until I’d united gin, tonic, and a plastic cup.

  I turned around and, surprisingly, Lisa was there. I handed her an airplane-size bottle of Jameson that she tapped against my glass.

  “Nice demo.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Seriously,” she said. “You coped.”

  “How’s the party?” I asked.

  “Peter Molyneux’s fly is open. So there’s that.”

  “So let’s get to a corner. I need to ask you something,” I said.

  “Okay.” Her lips compressed slightly and she took her distance, bracing for whatever was to come. It occurred to me that women in tech probably got propositioned a lot.

  “So look. We’re here at E3, right? You showed up for this,” I said.

  “There’s a lot of tech stuff you don’t have to go to, but I do.”

  “That’s exactly it.” Another blazered giant elbowed between us, giving me another face full of high thread count. “And I came to run the demo. I slept, like, three hours last night, and I was humiliated in front of hundreds, if not thousands, of my peers. And I would still have killed to come here. Killed. I’m not like you. I’m in a suite party at E3 and that is the center of my universe, and you’re totally unaware that this…”