Austin Grossman - You

I had lost track of where we were now. Some procedurally generated wilderness landscape no one ever bothered to visit before. I just wanted to find something interesting for people to look at. I zoomed the camera out from its usual close-over-the-shoulder position and upward as we approached the center of the clearing. From overhead you could see now where you were, at the edge of a circle of standing stones. Up and up went the camera.

“The choices you made are the story you told. For better or worse, it’s part of you now, and it’s your story, not ours. Take it with our blessing.”

As the camera kept rising, I could see an ancient plaza, light and dark stone in a pattern I finally recognized.

“Long ago, before the waters came, there was a temple here.”

Our character was growing smaller and smaller as the camera was rising. Now you’re just a pixelated dot in the center of an enormous rune the size of a traffic circle.

“This is the Sign of Auric, whose temple it was. Auric, the Endorian god, patron of mercy, of late harvests and last resorts.

“ Realms of Gold VIII , everybody. Winter’s Crown . Coming this Christmas.”

I signaled Matt, and the lights came up. Most of the audience had either left or sat staring expectantly for my next trick as if I couldn’t see them, as if I were on TV. I unclipped the mike, shut off the monitor and the computer, grabbed the CD. I wanted to walk offstage, but of course in a conference hall there’s no backstage, just a long walk up the aisle to the exit.

Ithought it best to remain in my hotel room for the next seven hours. Calls came in on the room phone, four or five before I lost count. The message light blinked and blinked while I watched movies and ate room-service pizza, then a slice of cheesecake and a glass of fairly sketchy white wine, then more cheesecake slices and more and better wines. After the first hundred dollars plus tips, it seemed easier to keep going. The staff and I were developing a cheery rapport, and there was a Cary Grant retrospective on television. I practiced an attitude of amused detachment and thought of how attractive I was becoming. This was going to work.

Around nine thirty there was a tentative knock at the door.

“Russell?” It was Don.

The hotel window was one of the ones that only opens about an inch and a half. I abandoned the tantalizing smell of freedom and answered the door.

“Hey,” I said.

“I came to see if you were doing okay. I heard the demo was a little rocky.”

Behind me, the bed was covered in plates and napkins and trays, except for a me-size zone in the center.

He looked it over. “I hope you expensed that.”

“I didn’t think of that.” Probably Cary Grant would have said that, especially if he were four or five glasses of wine into the evening.

“Maybe we should go out.”

The Hyatt lobby had been colonized by industry conventiongoers on their final night out, and it had become a seething pit of heavy guys in black T-shirts huddled in little clusters of three or four over gin and tonics, exchanging notes and gossip. Here and there a navy-blazered biz-dev type could be seen, generally signing for the drinks. The crowd was about 80 percent men. Like the men, the women were split between the put-together business types, with late-era Rachel hair, and the T-shirted geek tribeswomen. People threading their way through would be hailed every few steps and forced to exchange business cards before they could go any farther.

It was staggeringly loud, but I thought I distinguished an extra buzz and scattered applause when I came into view. Certainly a detectable amount of nudging and pointing.

As we struggled to the bar, one of the suits grabbed Don’s elbow and whispered what seemed like urgent information in his ear.

He stopped me before I could order.

“VIP party, room sixteen twelve. Open bar,” he said, steering me back to the elevator.

“The demo kind of got away from me,” I said.

“I heard. Probably we’re going to be okay.”

“How so?”

“A couple of people got it. You still gave a good look at the feature set. I’ve got meetings set up. And a lot of people are talking about it.”

“I’m not fired or anything. Or am I?” I said.

The elevator went up one, two, three floors.

“You know, maybe we shouldn’t go to this.”

“It’s a moral imperative,” I said.

The suite party was a smaller version of the scene in the lobby, except now most of the people had blazers on. I guessed this was by and large the management layer of things, plus a few star techies. I recognized a few genuine industry moguls—Romero, Molyneux, Spector. Far in the back, a poker game was in progress.

Don was being glad-handed to death, so I plunged into the crowd. I’m five foot eight and a half, which is only an inch and a half below average, but for some reason everyone seemed to be over six feet tall. I got to where the bar was, more or less by mashing my face into the back of three different navy blazers. The bar was unmanned. I stepped behind it, kicking aside empty cans of Red Bull as though they were dry leaves, and rummaged through bottles until I’d united gin, tonic, and a plastic cup.

I turned around and, surprisingly, Lisa was there. I handed her an airplane-size bottle of Jameson that she tapped against my glass.

“Nice demo.”

“Thanks.”

“Seriously,” she said. “You coped.”

“How’s the party?” I asked.

“Peter Molyneux’s fly is open. So there’s that.”

“So let’s get to a corner. I need to ask you something,” I said.

“Okay.” Her lips compressed slightly and she took her distance, bracing for whatever was to come. It occurred to me that women in tech probably got propositioned a lot.

“So look. We’re here at E3, right? You showed up for this,” I said.

“There’s a lot of tech stuff you don’t have to go to, but I do.”

“That’s exactly it.” Another blazered giant elbowed between us, giving me another face full of high thread count. “And I came to run the demo. I slept, like, three hours last night, and I was humiliated in front of hundreds, if not thousands, of my peers. And I would still have killed to come here. Killed. I’m not like you. I’m in a suite party at E3 and that is the center of my universe, and you’re totally unaware that this…”

I paused, and noticed again there must have been a hundred people here in a hotel room that legally allowed sixty-three, and apart from Lisa every single one of them seemed to be laughing, or shouting to make a point about video games.

“…this… rules. It actually rules. But you act like it’s a complete chore. Like you’d rather be anyplace else in the world. It makes me feel like a loser. Why do you even come here if you hate it?”

“Because,” she said carefully, “I like solving problems. And I got into this because the technology is going to be more important than the games. And for a reason I don’t want to tell you. You’ll laugh.”

“Today isn’t my day to laugh at people.”

“I wanted to make cyberspace.”

“Like VRML? That 3-D Web thing?”

“Games. Games were going to be everything. Why doesn’t anybody remember what it was like in 1984? We had TRON . We had Neuromancer . It was logical.”

“Wait. Wait. Are you saying you’re in games because you think we’re building cyberspace? Like in Neuromancer ? Like Snow Crash ? For real?”

“It was logical. Everything you do in games are things you want to do in a computer anyway. Manipulate data, change it, look at it. Early text adventures were almost the same thing as command-line interfaces with directory structures. I think real-time 3-D environments are going to be how we do a lot of things with computers.