Austin Grossman: You

It must have been around two in the afternoon when I started to relax. Bug fixes were for the customers, the soft, lazy civilians who only got the software after it was finished and boring and safe. Real game developers worked with real software, the kind that broke a third of the time unless you knew exactly what you were doing. The next time I went to the kitchen for a bag of Skittles, I did so with just a hint of world-weary swagger. Of course the editor crashed all the time. Why on earth wouldn’t it?

College was one long series of missed cues and indecipherable codes for me. Other people followed invisible markers to their appropriate clubs and majors and activities. Other people seemed to know which dorms meant what, which parties to go to, and what to do there. The knowledge was all there for me to pick up, but other people had some faculty of observation, patience, and fluency that let that knowledge adhere to them.

Whatever long-latent cognitive ability was involved, it had perversely decided to activate for me here in the land of the geeks. It was my brain stem’s way of letting me know I was basically home.

Don instant-messaged me on the third day, well into the afternoon, as if only just remembering I’d been hired. The company had its own internal chat network, shitty and home-cooked, just like the editor. Everything you read was in yellow letters on a bright blue background, and there was no way to change it.

DON: Hey it’s Don. How are you doing so far?

ME: Fine, good. Playing with the editor.

I’d gotten to the point where I could change terrain a little, save and load files, and make primitive shapes and not crash the editor too often, but that was it.

DON: Turns out we need you up to speed for early next week, level geometry, objects, scripting and all that—sound cool?

ME: Okay…

DON: Anyway, ping Lisa and she’ll give you any help.

ME: Okay. Hey, what’s the next game going to be?

DON: That would be telling.

He rang off. I looked at the personnel web page in the vain hope there would be another, different Lisa there. There were about a hundred people listed, most with a first-day photograph showing a stressed-out grin. Lisa was listed as a tools programmer on the Solar Empires team. She had somehow avoided having her picture taken.

Just as I’d gotten my bearings I was being pushed into another, subtler test—I’d gotten myself this far, but I now had to open an unsolicited online chat with this senior employee who had never liked me anyway, to tell her I’d be ruining her afternoon schedule so she could explain to the new guy what everyone else in the building already knew.

I took a few moments to breathe, then reopened the chat program. It’s not that I disliked the people who’d known me in high school, exactly. But I didn’t feel like explaining what I was doing there. Or why I hadn’t talked to them in years. And most of all I didn’t feel like seeing them. I’d gotten rid of the person I was in high school. I didn’t want to see the people who’d known me that way.

ME: Hi. This is Russell Marsh.

I got to watch the cursor blink for about ten seconds before the reply came.

LMcknhpt: Hi.

ME: So I got hired and so I work here now.

LMcknhpt: So I know.

ME: Don said to ask you to demo some editor features for me? Sorry to bother you, I need to get up to speed quick.

Another twenty seconds ticked by, unreadable. Was she distracted? Or, more likely, was she opening another chat window to yell at Don? Or was she just marking time to indicate how annoying she found this?

LMcknhpt: Okay. Come by @ 5 and we’ll work it out.

ME: Thanks. I really appreciate this.

LMcknhpt: You’re a designer now?

ME: Yes.

LMcknhpt: See you then.

I wondered why she was even still here at Black Arts. I remembered the no-girls-allowed clubhouse feel of the arcades; it must have been hard work to find a place here.

Then again, I thought, everybody has a reason.

Lisa Muckenhaupt’s cubicle was socketed in at the far back corner of the Solar Empires sector of the office. Realms of Gold is only one of Black Arts’ three franchises. It has a science fiction and an espionage series as well, each set in its own separate universe. As I passed an invisible line in the cubicle ward, the decor shifted from foam broadswords and heraldry and other faux-medieval tchotchkes to a farrago of space-opera apparatus. A LEGO Star Destroyer was strung from the ceiling, along with an enormous rickety mobile of the solar system, its planets as big as softballs. I saw ballistic Nerf equipment and a six-foot-long, elaborately scoped and flanged laser rifle.

The decor was something other than simply childish. It was more like a deliberate, even defiant choice for a pulp aesthetic, holding out for the awesome, the middle-school sublime of planets and space stations, the electrical charge of nonironic pop, melodrama on a grand scale.

Lisa herself was the person I remembered, tiny and now in her late twenties. Lost in what seemed like an XXXL Iron Maiden T-shirt. She was vampire-pale, jet black hair pulled back in a ponytail from a broad, pimply white forehead. Her face narrowed downward, past a snub nose (her one conventionally pretty feature) to a narrow mouth and chin.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” she said. There was to be no handshake, and I didn’t know where to look. Her cubicle was unadorned, except for a pink My Little Pony figurine to the right of her monitor. Ironic whimsy? Childish? Dangerously unbalanced?

“How’ve you been?” I asked.

“Fine. My dad died. If that’s the kind of thing you’re asking about.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“It was a while ago,” she said. I’d forgotten the curious way she talked, a thick-tongued stumbling rhythm, in a hurry to get the meaning out. It suggested some cognitive deficit somewhere, but one that she’d been richly compensated for elsewhere in her makeup, a dark Faustian logic to her developmental balance sheet.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said suddenly.

“Sure.”

“Why exactly are you working here?”

“I needed a job.”

“There are a lot of jobs.”

“You know, I don’t actually have to explain this you.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I don’t have to explain how the editor works, either.”

“You remember the ‘Ultimate Game’ thing, right? That conversation?”

She sighed. “Yeah. I remember. I haven’t thought about that for years. That was a weird time for me.”

“Do you think it’s—well, I just kept thinking about it. How I was trying to memorize contract law and you guys were off having fun. How stupid is that, right?” I gave a gusty attempt at a laugh. Saying it out loud, especially to a real programmer, it sounded even more childish than I expected. I remembered how Simon had made it seem like a near-mystical quest; Darren made it seem like the chance of a lifetime.

“It was a fun idea. But until it comes along, this is the latest build of WAFFLE, set to Realms mode. Did you end up taking any more programming?” she asked. As she talked she shut down what she was doing—I glimpsed spaceships drifting between planets, in orbit around a double star.

“Two semesters of C,” I told her. But we both knew I was no Simon. I could see her features harden a little. She’d have the extra work of gearing all the explanations to a nontechie.

“All right. We won’t do scripting language for now. I’ll just load a level,” she said. She ran the editor—her setup had an extra monitor with a monochrome display—and as the editor ran it showed a long series of status messages.

The editor screen appeared, split in four parts. She piloted the camera around, zooming over chasms and through walls. We passed a group of goblins standing motionless, each with a swarm of tiny green numbers hovering over its head. Time had stopped, or, rather, had not yet been turned on. There were extra objects visible in the world—boxes, spheres, cartoon bells, and lightbulbs—hidden lines of influence, pathfinding routes, traps, and dangers. I was seeing the world as game developers saw it.