Austin Grossman - You

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. But 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.

The wandering AI heroes were decidedly a factor. Brennan reinforced troop discipline and morale; Leira, movement rate and aggressiveness. Prendar could scout and reveal troop movements, or conceal one’s own, and one time performed an assassination. Lorac’s abilities ranged from defensive magic to illusion to terrain alteration to explosions. The AIs weren’t under direct player control. They chose what battles to show up to and which abilities to use, and it was up to players to woo them however they could.

At the conclusion of the first round, five girls and eleven boys emerged from sixteen matches (one of them three-handed). Five of six RealmsCom members had pulled out first-round victories, except for Don, whose good nature had been a little bit preyed upon by a Yale-bound Hotchkiss junior. We met formally to discuss bug fixes, rules changes, features, and tweaks to game balance. The white dragon was duly adjusted. Play was suspended for a day as everyone collectively relaxed. Broken friendships were patched up, homework was done, and the camp, generally speaking, realigned itself around a new class hierarchy—the audience and the sixteen players.

I could reconstruct every single game of that tournament, and years later, when I had trouble falling asleep, I would try. But I could remember other things. We were all wobbling, sleep-deprived, and night-blind through a summer of early adolescence, some of us more functional than others. At night, we would sit up late on the porch of Senior Cabin, Simon and Darren and Gabby—the tall, world-weary Long Islander with a terrible case of acne whose parents were divorced (“Stepmom’s a bitch. It’s no biggie”)—and Lisa and me, and one night the five of us made a dash out past the floodlights to the fence and then walked a long two and a half miles in the dark down the main highway with no streetlights. I remember the brilliant stars and black, creaking pines, and screaming with laughter and dashing into the trees at any flash of far-off headlights until we hit Lanesborough’s bare quarter-mile downtown. We all watched while Gabby, four inches taller than anyone else in the group, crossed the parking lot to the pale buzzing circle of light surrounding the Quick-Stop: Food and Liquor, strutting like a gunfighter at ten minutes to noon, waiting until the very last moment to flick her cigarette into the shadows before yanking the jingling door open. We waited, hushed with the audacity of it, four and a half minutes while she stood in line, until she came out, unsmiling but radiating triumph, carrying a six-pack of Rolling Rock and a small paper sack with the mouth of a brown bottle projecting out of it, and I felt a peculiar joy, the indelible cognitive rush of living a moment for the first time, and knowing it and feeling every part of it.

And we half ran back into the darkness and huddled in a natural clearing a short ways back from the road, where moonlight showed our faces just a little, and Gabby parceled out the glass bottles, which Simon opened neatly with a Swiss army knife. We toasted and Simon had only a few sips of his. I gulped as much as I could.

We passed around the other bottle, Maker’s Mark, and he made himself take a long swig. The walk back passed in a blur of hilarity and at least one genuinely drunken face-plant over the curb and into the grass, and it was only when we were maybe a hundred yards short of the cabin that Simon and I took in, with a kind of cresting heartbreak and what must have been pride, that we were now three, that Darren and Gabby had disappeared during the walk back without our even noticing. Simon waved a kind of stunned good night to me and Lisa and waited a moment on the porch before turning in. We were still the coolest kids in camp that night, and he could hold on to that as long as he needed to. I think he knew there were things Darren was always going to learn faster than he could. That he’d always be running to catch up, if not falling farther and farther back. That in the end he’d be left behind.

Four second-round games for the winners; killers and survivors only. In the opener I got pulled into the game’s first player-on-player aerial battle, my giant eagles to the Hotchkiss kid’s dragonets. With the aid of graph paper and a few trig functions, I was the first to spot a small inequity in the turn radius. A hungover Darren surprised everyone with a rather elegant and economic victory over Lisa, steamrolling two other hapless campers in the process. The third match got replayed because an Italian camper, Val, had exploited a bug in the river-travel rules that enabled her to effectively teleport masses of troops. She won the replay as well, on a truly grisly display of high-level necromancy.