Austin Grossman: You

“Oddly enough, you find railway tracks crossing the path. Since when was there a railway line here? It hasn’t been used in a long time, but you follow it anyway. The walking keeps you warm. Oak seedlings are growing up from in between the ties. In some places you can barely find the rails among the dirt and leaves.

“Sooner or later you’ll round a bend and find Mass Ave. and catch a bus back into Cambridge and that will be that. No idea. Why, you think, did you have to play this character anyway?”

WEST

WEST

WEST

“God, you’d walk forever if you thought it would get you out of here. The tracks take you uphill, and then you see, through a line of trees, a swing set. It’s the back of an elementary school.

“And that’s when the memory hits you, the thing that’s been bugging you the whole time. It’s been years since you thought of it, but it comes back all the way, breathed in like the burnt-carpet smell of the car Darren used to drive you around in.”

The five of us as we were then. Darren, a hyperkinetic burnout. Lisa, dark, inward, wry. Don watching everybody else in the room. Simon, pale, distracted, intense in a place you couldn’t reach. He was smart, really smart, math-in-his-head, perfect-scores-without-trying smart, the way I fantasized about being. I could be valedictorian of my class—and I was—but I would never come off that way, the way he did. He just didn’t seem to care that much about it. He didn’t even take Honors courses which made it doubly annoying.

We all were friends although not in the way where anyone wanted it said out loud. Our project was finished, at least the letter-grade part of it. Maybe we kept meeting out of habit, or not wanting to go back to our respective homes again. We’d go to pointless movies or on Friday night expeditions into Cambridge or to a stupid street fair or bowling. We were too young to get into a bar or a proper rock show or anything else remotely cool.

Sophomore year, definitely, early spring. Darren held an ice cube to his ear and the rest of us waited around in his garage. It was an extremely ordinary evening, and we were wasting it in an ordinary way.

“Can you feel anything?” Simon asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if I can. Let’s just do it.” Darren’s voice trembled just a little.

“Okay.”

Simon lit a match and ran it up and down the needle. “Where does it go?” he asked.

“Just in, like, a normal place. Do it already.”

“Okay, okay.” Simon fidgeted. His hand was shaking. “Just turn your head toward me. Hold still.”

He bent close; their heads were close. A convulsive moment, and Darren cried out. “Shit!!”

“Jesus, you moved.”

“It fucking hurt! I’m going to do just one more minute.” He put the ice back on. Water dripped a little pink onto his Rush T-shirt. “Just do it right this time.”

“Don’t move.”

“It’s going to wear off!” Darren said.

Simon pushed, hard. There was a very slight popping sound.

“It’s through!” he said. Darren started to reach up and Simon grabbed his hand. “Don’t touch it it’s through it’s through. Don’t touch it.”

“Okay. Okay. Okay.” Darren shook his head. “Let me look.” He looked in the mirror and nodded. He’d gotten a beer from somewhere and sipped it, holding the cloth to his ear.

Darren’s parents’ room was above the garage and they always kicked us out around ten, and we needed to get out before they asked what was wrong with the side of his head. So we drove around for a while, but we didn’t even have a plan, so as usual we ended up at Hancock Elementary. It was still cold, but Simon spat on his hands and climbed one of the swing set’s metal legs all the way to the top, cold rusty steel burning against the palms of his hands. He hung there a few seconds, then dropped heavily into the sand, having made his point.

We climbed a low brick wall, then hoisted ourselves onto the school’s flat tar-paper roof.

“Why are we doing this?” Lisa asked.

“Life experience,” said Darren. “Shh!”

A car passed down the road at the far end of the field, and we all lay down until it was gone before climbing down.

“Jesus this is boring,” Lisa said.

“So what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know. Something… God, something that doesn’t suck.”

Go to college? I don’t know what I would have said. We looked out across the back parking lot to the chain-link fence and the woods beyond. I remembered how in the fall we’d ordered a Japanese ninja star from a mail-order house that advertised in the back of an issue of Alpha Flight . It came in a padded envelope, wrapped in plastic and stiffened with cardboard, return address a sporting-goods store in Alabama, five dollars and ninety-eight cents plus three fifty shipping. It was a shiny metal disk incongruously inlaid with a flower pattern looping around the central hole. There was a booklet showing, in sequential black-and-white photographs that seemed to date from the 1960s, how to hold it by one of its arms and hurl it with a sidearm motion. Which when Simon tried it sent it first into the grass, and then curving up over the chain-link fence and into the woods. We kicked through damp leaves looking for it until it was almost dark. It must still be there, I thought.

I honestly don’t know who brought up the issue of the ultimate game. It was just one of those topics, like whether the plot of The Terminator makes sense, or if magic can ever be real, or if it would be better to have a robot girlfriend or a real one.

But at some point we got around to the question of what would be the most amazing video game you could possibly make. It had a bunch of different names—Real D&D , the Dueling Machine, the Matrix. The word holodeck hadn’t been invented yet, not until Star Trek: The Next Generation happened four years later.

Darren jumped on the question. It would have to be in 3-D. No, maybe it would all be holograms, like they had in the chess game in Star Wars, or Larry Niven’s novel Dream Park, or maybe something weirder, like Neuromancer, wired into your skull.

“You’d do things just by doing them!” Darren said. Simon nodded vehemently, sharing the same dimly imagined picture. An electronic world springing up around us, a neon Eden.

“And you could do anything you wanted,” Don added. “You wouldn’t just follow a track. If you wanted to go on adventures you could, but you could stay home, or talk on the phone, or get a job if you wanted.”

“Why couldn’t there be a game where…” I began, and everyone started in. It was always the question—why couldn’t there be a game where you could solve problems as you would in the real world? Cut the ropes holding a bridge up, or start a forest fire if you needed to, or make friends with a monster instead of fighting it, or go out into the forest and catch a horse and tame it, and then you could ride around? Why couldn’t there be a game where you could go exploring or go into a town or be evil instead of good, or kill the king and take his place?

The conversation was edged with frustration. If only the hardware would get faster, or interfaces would get better, or graphics, or if only time itself would just go faster so they could get to the future already. At the time, even Wolfenstein 3D, our earliest crudest harbinger of real-time 3-D gaming, was nine years away.

But, Simon argued, forget about the technology challenges, the full-body interface, the 3-D display, all the inexhaustible problems of graphic detail, counterfeiting the bottomless complexity of human facial expressions, interpreting natural human speech beyond the subject-verb pidgin used in traditional text adventures. Let those problems be solved or not. It doesn’t matter. There was still and always would be the problem of storytelling. You—you in the game— should wake up in a world with total choice. Go searching for a legendary jewel, stay home and make paper dolls, or run out into the street and punch a stranger in the nose. Somehow the computer copes. In a normal game, a real game, you couldn’t do it. The world is a narrative channel, a single story that you can follow but never escape. Or maybe there’s an open world, but only a specific range of actions you can perform—you can punch strangers in the nose but you can’t talk to them; you can’t make a friend or fall in love. Or you can talk to strangers but they can only say a few things—they’re not really people, just shallow repositories of canned speech. At some point, sooner or later but usually very, very soon, the world just runs out of stories it can tell. And every time you run into that point, there’s a jarring, illusion-breaking bump that tells you it’s just a game.