Austin Grossman - You

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 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.