Austin Grossman - You

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.”