Mark Costello - Big If

The crater was every player’s first impression of the game and, if studies were correct, the place they saw on average 6.2 times a month (the average player died that often and was reborn from the hole — this was a post — Plague War number and a happy one; in the worst weeks of the war, players died a dozen times a day and desubscribed at the rate of ten a minute). The crater was important, Jens contended, a signature tableau, the realistic scree, the ocher tones and dusty wash, a symbol of a land returned to Bible times by Revelation 21. The crater code was very nearly perfect, Jens believed, except for this: the smoky pillar, paletted in gorgeous twenty-four-bit gray, should cast a shadow in its thickest part, and yet it didn’t. Jens had written SmoShadow to track the billow’s dancing shape and local densities, a function of prevailing winds. SmoShadow would upload the sun’s position and throw a moving shadow on the crater wall, making allowances for rocks and rough terrain and the lip-horizon (because smoke in shadow, out of sun, would not cast a shadow of its own) — a complicated hack, and yet Jens had made it happen in a kilobyte, compiled.

“I have the mod right here,” said Jens, brandishing SmoShadow on the disk. “Just give me a second and I’ll get it loaded. You’ll see how beautiful it is.”

Jens had expected support from the head creative or at least the twins — they were always hot for new immersive graphics — but the twins were silent and the head creative said, “I think we need more dread.”

Reed and Reese were nodding. They claimed to be nonidentical twins. Jens, who couldn’t see a difference, suspected that the twins’ parents, fearing merged identities and unhealthy personality dependence, had told their sons, falsely, that they weren’t identical and the twins grew up believing in their difference, so they were relaxed and non-hung-up about dressing alike (baggy chinos, polo shirts) and driving the same car — vintage MG Spiders, a color called Champagne — and thinking the same way about how to sell the game and whip the competition, because they weren’t identical, they were just agreeing, like any two smart and market-savvy people.

“I’m not sure I follow, Head,” said Meredith.

Head was shaggy, fifty, ponytailed, a lamp-tanned movie refugee who kept himself by force of will on California time. Head said that Hollywood was dead, that the Web was the future of all entertainment narratives. Deep immersive gaming — this was the new movies and they should all be damn glad to be among the founding fathers, the Chaplins and the Griffiths and the Lumières, but everybody knew that Head was still in love with the big screen, still mourning the loss of the Ohm’s Law franchise, a series of high-grossing summer action pictures, Ohm’s Law, Ohm’s Law II, OL III: The Reckoning, up to OL VII due out in July. Head had co-executive-produced the first Ohm’s Law , which told the story of Joey Ohm, a tough but flawed detective, battling an asteroid. Sequels pitted Joey against other planetary threats, global warming, mass extinction, a wandering black hole, but Head was gone by then, disenfranchised of his franchise, squeezed out by his former so-called friends’ attorneys.

“We need more dread,” he said, coming forward in his chair. “We have these fucking early meetings, fine, I don’t complain, but do I have to sit here listening to dweebs talking about fucking smoke? Smoke is not the issue. What we really need is dread.”

“I agree,” said Reed or Reese.

“Absolutely,” said his brother. “We already have the best, most textured smoke in the business, and don’t say Napalm Sunday because their smoke blows.”

BigIf had two major rivals in the world of Web-based, multiplayer shoot-’emups. One was Napalm Sunday, set in the distant future. The other was Elfin, set in the magic past, an age of dragons, gorgons, castle keeps, warlocks, and bad spells. BigIf was poised nervously between them, set in the near future, a tricky time to work with — not exactly now, but also not the never-never of Arthurian romance or of interstellar war. The three games had been launched at more or less the same time, during the last game craze when every venture cap worth his or her corporate salt had at least one multiplayer shoot-’em-up.com in the incubator. Many games were started in the fad, all of them pursuing the same vision strategy: take the VC money, build a game, do the marketing, get the player loads up to a stable-profit, self-sustaining waterline, then take the baby public and everyone gets rich, a can’t-miss plan — so can’t-miss, in fact, that many game designers saw it, and thirty games were launched, more than the hard-core gamer base could possibly support, and so the can’t-miss plan was the ruin of many interactivists, and a kick in the wallets of their VC backers. Remember Scoregasm, which let you, the gamer, blast your way out of a terrorist-held junior high school? Or Red Motorcade, which let you relive the murder of John Kennedy in the role of Oswald, the Cubans, the CIA, the Soviets, the Cosa Nostra, or the Secret Servicemen playing in thwart mode? Jens worshiped Red Motorcade as a design. It had one beginning, eight middles, and sixty-four endings, the nice effect of squaring possibilities, but the teens, the target audience, were only dimly aware of the real events in Dallas and the Dealey Plaza graphics were always going down. Of the surviving games, only BigIf, Elfin, and Nap Sunday were thought to have a chance of reaching steady profit, stable loads, and the sunburst of successful IPOage.

Head said, “Nap Sunday’s in the shitter, but not because their smoke blows, though it does. They’re in the shitter, Jens, because they are dread-challenged. What can you kill in outer space? Robots? Cyborgs? Those annoying machine poodles? I am forced to yawn my ass off. Distant future, pah. Who gives a fuck about the distant anything?”

Meredith said, “Clarify.”

Head said, “We need new monsters. Hamsterman was dynamite, don’t get me wrong. Skitz the Cat, Farty Pup, Seeing Eye, the piss and toxic flatulence, all the bathroom slapstick — it worked, we’re here, and we owe it all to them. I’m duly grateful, but I sense a played-out trend. We’ve got to up the ante, folks. We’ve got to crank the dread. Our monsters are cartoons. Their life and death — cartoonish. We need human monsters. People want to shoot a face.”

“Hmm,” said Meredith. She turned to Jens. “How’s the Postal Worker coming?”

Jens said, “Naubek has the Postal Worker.”

“Naubek is a burnout,” said Jaffe the attorney, doodling furiously, straining from the effort.

“I’ll reassign it,” said Meredith.

“Nap Sunday’s got a droid that doesn’t even kill you,” said one of the twins. “If you fight it and lose, it overrides your mouse port and drags you around for an hour and you can’t logoff or close the window.”

“Virtual enslavement,” said Head. “You know, that’s not half bad.”

“The problem is time,” said Meredith. “Elfin has the past, Nap Sunday has the future. We’re stuck in the middle.”

“And Elfin’s expanding,” Digby said. “They’re launching a new time-travel feature. Click an icon and their warlocks will send you ahead in time to the day of the Kennedy assassination. They bought a lot of code at Red Motorcade’s going-out-of-business sale.”

Head said, “Time travel is so corny.”

“Maybe so,” said Meredith, “but soon the wizards will be able to send you ahead to a post-apocalyptic near future, and where will that leave us?”

“Can they do that?” Digby asked. “Didn’t we license the near future?”

Jaffe the attorney cleared his throat. He said, “We have a trademark on any game-related use of the word apocalypse and twenty-four synonyms and likely modifiers in all of the GATT languages. We own Armageddon, chaos, plague, famine, mushroom, cloud, mushroom cloud , and thermonuclear exchange . We bought toxic, ooze , and mutant from Scoregasm when they went belly up. We own belly up, bite the dust, bought the farm . We traded flog the dolphin to Sea Spawn in return for put to sleep —it seemed a better mammal-fit — and got it back when Sea Spawn choked the chicken. I’d say it would be difficult for Elfin to market a near-futuristic feature in any GATT vocabulary without running afoul.”