Austin Grossman - You

“Phobos.”

“Phobos. Now let’s do ours. Realms of Gold VI: Far Latitudes.”

cd

cd rogvi

rogvi.exe

We watched the loading screen for about ten seconds, then intro animation. Splash screen. Character selection. Another animation introducing the story, this one forty seconds’ worth. Then we were in the game, walking around.

“You still don’t have a weapon. Barely know what you’re doing. No gameplay. All you’ve done is watch some animations and waded through a ton of exposition in fake medieval. Haven’t even done the tutorial.”

It took, maybe, thirty more seconds to get to the first character, a woodsman who starts to explain that while you were away, something terrible has happened in the capital. She folded her arms.

“Still no weapon. So, yeah, I’m twelve years old, I left five minutes ago. I’m riding bikes now. You see why people like Doom more?”

I remembered the IT company across the lobby. I could see into their classroom from our floor. It was just a room with rows of computers on long tables. I knew when the Doom demo came out because I could see just from standing there that a third of those machines were running Doom .

“And it even gets worse. I’m playing Brennan, but as a player I don’t know anything about him, so it’s like I have amnesia and for the first hour everybody who talks to me has to explain things like where I live.”

“Okay, okay.”

“And they’re telling me what to do, which is—here—helping these villagers, who I don’t give the tiniest fuck about. And this guy has a horse, and what if I want to just take his horse—oh, no—I can’t! I can’t do anything except what I’m supposed to do. None of these people are real and they’re all telling me—THE PERSON WHO OWNS THE GAME—what to do.”

“Okay!”

“And then when I’ve gathered twenty sticks or killed twenty rats I get a tiny bit more powerful. And then at the end of it all they tell me I’ve saved the king, the same asshole who’s been telling me what to do in the first place. It’s the opposite of play. It’s work.”

“Okay, but wait,” I put in. “ Doom has a story. You’re, like, a marine. You went to Mars to figure out what’s happened to the Union Aerospace Corporation.”

“Nobody knows that but you!”

“And me,” said Matt quietly.

“And Matt! The only two people in the world who read the Doom manual! It’s Doom ! You’re just on Mars and daemons are trying to mess with you and you fucking kill them. Why? Maybe at some point you feel a tiny stirring of curiosity about the proceedings. Might be cool to look into at some point! But you don’t have to read a page of text, you don’t have to stand around having pretend conversations that feel more like creating a macro in Microsoft Word. Story. Sucks!”

“Okay, wait, but this is exactly why people hate video games!” I had to stop her. I knew on some level I was right. At least I thought I was.

“Why?”

“Because they don’t mean anything. You just run around murdering things! Moby-Dick, on the other hand, has story. Citizen Kane does. Star Wars does. Until we have proper stories and characters we’re not going to be anything. We’re not going to be art.”

“Did you ever think maybe we shouldn’t try?” she said.

“And just be about shooting things?”

“Yes! If I absolutely have to play one of our video games, the first—the first—thing I do is kill everybody I possibly can—”

“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.”

Okay, so just a clean sheet of paper.