Life Starts Here

No Big Deal

noreply@blogger.com (Duncan) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 07:41:00 +0000

MONTCLAIR, NEW JERSEY
APRIL 1994

“I don’t think you’re stupid. That’s the last thing I think you are.
  “But you’ve been here now so many times, sitting there just like you are now, and every time I see the same thing: somebody who does not understand the gravity of his situation. You think you’re a hot shot. I get that. I’ve seen hundreds of kids like you. And I know what you think of guys like me. All I am is the nuisance, the basic fact of life that you have to deal with so that you can keep on being the kind of person that you are. You think I just come with the territory, right? A little annoyance that spoils your day, like stepping in a puddle. Thing is, you keep getting caught, so it doesn’t seem to me like you’re as clever as you clearly think.
  “This is strike three. Even you got to know what that means. Let me help you: means you won’t listen. Means you won’t change. I tried. Nothing more that I can do for you, ‘cause you’re always going to do this to yourself.”
  John Lyndon got to his feet and strode to the door, flinging it open, the doorknob striking the dent in the wall. Lyndon stood in front of the open doorway for a moment, his frame blocking out the light, and circled back around his desk to look Nate Slidell in the eye.
  “Only thing between you and the door right now is you. You want to keep being a punk out there, fine. You and I both know you’ll end up back here. And it’s only going to get worse for you.
  “Out there, you’re whoever you want to be. But when you are in this room, who you think you are means nothing. When you are in this room, you are whoever I say you are. And you will listen to me.”
  Nate Slidell shifted around in the wooden chair. “Whatever, man. I’m good. Can I go?”
  “You really think it’s going to be that easy, after what you’ve done?” said Lyndon. “You’ve been warned two times about gum chewing. You don’t come into class with gum. How many times do you need to be told that?”
  Nate sneered. He didn’t need gum to affect derision for authority figures.
  “Well, I guess we have our answer. We’re past basic detention. I hoped that this was something we could work out one human being to another. Clearly that’s not the case. I’m going to have to call your parents.”
  “Get real. You’re not going to call my parents,” Nate said, eyeing Lyndon lift the receiver.
  Lyndon leaned forward over his desk, a mocking smile on his face. “Then tell me something I want to know, Nathan,” he said, his inflection contemptuously melodic.
  “About what?”
  Lyndon slammed the receiver down. “Somebody wrote an obscenity on one of the sixth graders’ lockers. You know what I mean; you’ve seen it. The a-word. They wrote the a-word. I want to know who did it.”
  “I didn’t do it.”
  “I didn’t say you did. Tell me what you know.”
  Nate shrugged. “Whatever,” he said in a way that Lyndon took to mean the boy was receptive. Settling back into his chair, the vice-principal brushed aside the crowded pages of his notebook and clicked his pen into readiness.
  “Give me a name.”

“I can’t even figure out what I’m doing wrong. I’m going through the ship and I get up to this fight with Edward Diego and he keeps killing me instantly. I guess my character isn’t powerful enough to beat him, but I don’t know what I could be doing differently. I’ve tried using the assault rifle or the pistol or even the lead pipe instead of the laser gun, and every time it doesn’t seem to make that much of a difference; I always get killed a couple of seconds in.”
  Wringing his meaty hands together, Sean held his gaze on the concrete beneath his feet.
  “And after so many times of getting killed, I always hit this point where I’m, like, now I have to focus. I’m really, really going to beat him this time. Concentrating so much makes it worse somehow. It doesn’t matter what I do differently. I honestly don’t think there’s anything I can do. I can’t beat this guy. It’s driving me so crazy. I just need to get past that one part. This is the only new game I have.”
  Sean looked up. “I need to get past this.”
  Evan Lewis, listening dispassionately to Sean’s confession, removed his glasses and cleaned them on his t-shirt. “You want the code.”
  Sean straightened up. “I want the code.”
  “I can have that for you by tomorrow morning. It’s two dollars now and three dollars tomorrow.”
  “Five dollars?!”
  Evan groaned theatrically. “You said you wanted this. Come on.”
  “Fine, fine,” said Sean, opening up his Velcro, McDonalds-branded wallet. He unloaded eight quarters into Evan’s outstretched palm.
  “Alright. Thanks. Come back tomorrow.”
  Sean walked off across the grounds, shaking his head. Tuesday was shaping up to be a pretty good day, marred only by Evan’s having to spend the next eight hours in class. Heading off across the early morning grounds of Dearborn Elementary, past the poorly-maintained foliage and over deteriorating chalk outlines of hopscotch courts, Evan shifted the weight of his backpack onto one shoulder, in case any girls were going to look at him.
  Half-jogging up the steps to the gymnasium, Evan almost failed to notice Justin Harrell running past, an understandable near-omission given the fifth grader’s deficit of personality.
  “Hey, Justin,” said Evan, turning on a dime, “I got what you asked for.”
  Justin blinked. “Hey, Evan.”
  “Here you go,” he said, pulling a yellow Post-It note out from the pocket of his sweat pants. “Here’s the numbers of how many notches you need to pull up the sliders from the bottom. Then pull the lever. 8, 20, 23, 13, 6.”
  “Man, I could have thought of that.”
  “Well, anybody can think of something when they know it, so… pay up.”
  “I should have called the helpline.”
  “Your parents are letting you call the helpline again?”
  “No. They’re not.”
  Evan held out his hand. “You owe me four dollars.”
  “Okay,” Justin removed the cash from his wallet. “I might take a break from Myst. I want to get the new Space Quest.”
  Handing over the Post-It, Evan hiked up the remaining stairs towards the school gates, up around where the hotter sixth grade girls – meaning that they were dressed more or less like Courtney Love –pierced their ears with safety pins.
  “Did you see someone wrote ‘asshole’ his locker?” he heard one of them say.
  “Like, the word ‘asshole’? In marker?”
  “Yeah.”
  “Intense.”
  “Yeah.”
  “That’s so bad.”
  Evan walked into the gym with the self-satisfied smirk of someone who had six dollars in his pocket.

Flanked by two other kids scaling the ropes in swift serpentine motions, Evan tried to will his hand to unclench and grab at a higher point. His bare knees, locked tight against the cord, chafed at the slightest movement. If someone could convince him that in real life he was actually going to be called upon to climb a few feet of rope suspended from the ceiling, then maybe he would deign to consider this an efficient use of his time. Prying his fingers away from the rope, the grip in his other hand slipped and he fell hard onto the gym mat below.
  Sitting with the other guys at the bleachers behind Evan, Tom Donnelly started to lose his shit.
  “That is pathetic,” Tom laughed, joined after a beat in his laughter by his backup singers-slash-enforcers. “He can’t even pull himself up once. Come on. That is sad.” Evan, refusing to look at or otherwise acknowledge Tom, felt his face flush.
  The gym teacher reprimanded Tom Donnelly ineffectually, and encouraged Evan to try again with the same detached brusqueness. Tom lowered the volume of his sniggering. Still prostrate on the mat, Evan looked up to the rope, then to the ceiling, and tried to figure out why this mattered at all.

The brazenness of the affront unsettled Lyndon. It showed great disrespect not just from one student to another, but to the entire establishment, and meant that students were comfortable placing their personal vendettas above all other earthly concerns. Selfish is what it was. And then, the vulgar choice of word: ‘asshole’. Lyndon could expect phone calls from hysterical, high-strung parents the longer that this stayed up.
   He stood still in the corridor, looking for something new. ‘Asshole’: ascending diagonally across the metallic canvas, black ink, block capitals, simple calligraphy. Olivia Kennedy stood at Lyndon’s back, arms folded beneath her long, flat brown hair. Lyndon reached a hand towards the locker and clinically traced the trajectory of the ink with his finger.
  “Permanent marker,” he murmured, “whoever did this knew what they were doing.”
  “Someone wrote ‘asshole’ on this kid’s locker, John, it’s not the Goddamn Rosetta Stone you’re looking at.”
  “Please watch your language.”
  Olivia rolled her eyes.
  “There’s something missing,” Lyndon whispered.
  “What I’m missing is why this is still even up on the wall.”
  “The janitor took a personal day.”
  “You could clean it off.”
  “I don’t have time for that.”
  Olivia nodded, looking up and down the hall. “My mistake.” In lieu of further human response from the ensorcelled Lyndon, Olivia stuck her hands in her pockets and shifted her weight from her heels to her toes. “Well, quite a puzzle you have here, John. I, myself, have to get back to my class, but by all means continue making more money than me while staring at a wall.”
  “Yes,” said Lyndon, lost in thought. Olivia, having exceeded her quota for rolling her eyes at things John Lyndon said, quietly excused herself. Lyndon remained in position.
  The word ‘asshole’. On this locker.
  “What am I not seeing.”

The burden of Pamela Glaser’s disapproval hung heavier than usual in the empty room. Evan dutifully waited at her desk for her to assess his math test. Recess had just convened, and out the window Evan could see two of his classmates making animated conversation.
  “You must know that this isn’t your best work,” said Ms. Glaser, “so this can’t be a surprise to you.”
  “No.”
  “Help me understand. What do you think the reason for this is?”
  “I don’t know. I guess I didn’t study that much.”
  “You guess?”
  “Yeah,” Evan said absently.
  Ms. Glaser finally looked up at him. “This work is worse than you were doing earlier in the year. What is going on? You would be doing really well if you would only apply yourself.”
  “Yes, yeah, yeah,” said Evan, craning his neck to follow the conversation happening out the window. “I know.”
  After being admonished a few more times, Evan managed to pull himself from the room. Power-walking through the hallway, he passed by Tom Donnelly standing at his locker and furiously trying to scratch off the ink with a compass needle. Slouched against the wall, Tom’s friend Anna scowled indiscriminately at pedestrians.
  “It is so messed up that somebody did this,” she said.
  “When I find out who did it,” said Tom, “they’re the ones that are gonna be messed up.”
  Anna touched his arm. “You’re so bad.”
  Evan hurried out the door to the courtyard and tried to catch the eye of someone who owed him money.

John Lyndon’s office, with its overflowing bookshelves and yellowing world maps tended to oversell the academic element of his vice-principal role; seeming more in the province of a quaint college professor than a no-nonsense disciplinarian and Vietnam veteran. It better resembled a closet, thanks to Lyndon’s interior decorating choices and lone window that didn’t open all the way. The principal’s office, adjacent, sported two couches and half an empty wall and would definitely accommodate all of Lyndon’s books on child psychology.
  Lyndon realized that Pamela Glaser was ready for their meeting when she leaned across his doorway and slammed her open palm against his door repeatedly until he looked up from his papers.
  “Pamela,” he said, standing and gesturing for her to take a seat, “please, thanks for coming.”
  Pamela crossed her legs in the chair. “What do you want, John?” Pamela was one of the few teachers who’d been here even longer than him: nine years to his seven. That earned her some respect in Lyndon’s book: exactly two years’ worth.
  “I want,” said Lyndon, preparing to take notes, “to talk to you about Evan Lewis.”
  “Evan?” Pamela smiled oddly. “What did he do?”
  “I’m not sure,” said Lyndon, “but tell me about him: who is he, what does he like to do?”
  Pamela exhaled deeply. “Evan… Evan keeps to himself a lot. Very quiet, sort of studious, I’d say, but his grades aren’t impressive. Particularly as of late.”
  “How’s his penmanship?”
  “What?”
  “His handwriting.”
  “I know what penmanship is. I was taken aback by your question. It’s fine. I’d say his penmanship is fine.”
  Lyndon wrote something down. “Tell me about his interests.”
  “I don’t know much about his interests.”
  “Well,” began Lyndon, with the sudden suspicion that Pamela Glaser was a worthless witness, “what does he bring in for show and tell? What kind of thing does he write about for his homework assignments when he can choose his own subject matter? Free writing assignments?”
  “You know, he likes computer games a lot. He plays a lot of different computer games. Whenever he has the opportunity, he’ll talk about a new computer game he has. Last week we heard all about a thing called WarCraft. It has a monster in it.”
  “He plays a lot of computer games?” Lyndon made another note, which he underlined, twice. “That’s curious.”
  “Is it?” said Pamela, stealing a glance at her watch and the open doorway.
  “What else does he like?”
  “Sometimes movies. Something he talks about every now and then is those Back to the Future films.”
  Lyndon paused. “You know why those are interesting films?”
  “I couldn’t care less.”
  He frowned at her. “That’s not an appropriate way to speak to me. Do you talk to Jason Hayde like that?” Lyndon referred back to his notes. “Computer games. A lot of computer games, in fact. And Back to the Future.”
  “Yeah,” said Pamela. “Look, he’s good for the most part. Not an achiever, but no trouble.”
  “Do you want my advice?”
  “No thanks.”
  Lyndon dismissed Pamela, and swiveled around in his chair to stare out of his half-open window. A lot of computer games. It wasn’t adding up. Pamela Glaser’s testimony had done nothing to discourage Lyndon from his initial suspicion that Evan Lewis was an unlikely candidate to commit this aggressive an act of vandalism. Lyndon didn’t put a lot of stock in Nate Slidell’s word, but nonetheless, Evan Lewis was the only lead he had. He mulled these questions over and over in his head, letting five minutes slip by in this fashion, until he heard Olivia Kennedy’s mocking voice from outside the office.
  “Do you ever do any real work?” she chided.
  “I guess delinquency doesn’t mean anything to you,” said Lyndon. Olivia held her right hand against the doorway.
  “When do you hear back about your job?” she asked.
  “They say by early next week.”
  “I bet you have big plans to tear apart this whole place.”
  “It’s not called ‘tearing apart’, it’s called ‘reform’.”
  Olivia pushed away from the doorframe back into the hallway. “Try not to forget about us when you’re a big star,” she said.

“You get home and you only have so much time to play games before your parents tell you it’s time for dinner, and then right after that it's time for bed. Who has a television in their bedroom? I know I don’t. Those hours you have matter. And do you really want to spend those few hours frustrated at the problem that you’ve been trying to solve for days already? By the time you have go to bed, you’re nowhere. That isn’t why you wanted this game, to be stuck. You want to play a game.”
  Danny equivocated. “I should think about it.”
  “That’s fine,” said Evan, “No rush. I’ll be around.”
  Evan had made the pitch enough times to know it had done the requisite number on Danny. Even so, something as small-scale as the Sonic 3 infinite lives secret really wasn’t worth waiting around all day for Danny to change his mind. There had to be a more effective way to do this. Maybe throwing Danny a free level select code would have been a smart idea. He’d run into trouble soon enough and come back to Evan for a bailout. The mistake he’d made with Justin was that by the time he’d come back to him with the solution, his interest in Myst had already diminished. Evan was going to lose out on a serious source of revenue if Justin really did put Myst aside, and in favor of Space Quest V of all things? Even a numbnuts like Justin could plow through Space Quest V with no trouble. The only way this was going to be sustainable if he could keep guys like Justin on the line for as long as possible. There was room to be a little bit smarter about this.

How could it be this difficult to remove an obscenity from school property? Lyndon had abandoned his goal of eliminating it entirely by the end of the day, and his thoughts had turned to where he could find a bumper sticker large enough to cover up the problem. Someone in the office had a sticker for a local radio station’s morning zoo program but this was arguably more offensive. At least Tom Donnelly wasn’t the type to complain about dirty words.
  Lyndon had his black, leather-bound incident folder opened on his desk, with a lined legal pad turned to a page with the heading ‘April 12: Obscenity/Vandalism’ written in marker and underlined twice. As the day went on, he was increasingly troubled by the seeming inconsistencies in the character of Evan Lewis. If Lewis was the culprit, as Nate Slidell claimed, then Lyndon had trouble reconciling Lewis’ history of timidity with the audacity of his alleged crime. Lyndon could understand the repressed hostility that an Evan Lewis might develop towards a thug like Donnelly, but Evan couldn’t have the confidence to retaliate so dramatically.
  That was the first big hole in the Evan Lewis story. The second – not that one had anything to do with the other – was Pamela Glaser’s statement that Evan played a lot of video games. Lyndon acknowledged that he lacked in awareness of the computer and video games industry. Nonetheless, he thought, there had to be something unusual about the fact that Evan seemed to play so many of these things. Any kind of new media was at least somewhat expensive. What was a VHS tape? Twenty dollars?
  Lyndon stood up, collecting his binder, and walked out of his office, heading thirty paces right down the corridor until he arrived at the receptionist’s station.
  “Josephine,” he announced, leaning his arms over her desk, “I need to talk to somebody who has a son between the ages of eight and thirteen.”
  Josephine’s expression veered between disoriented and bored. She adjusted her thick black glasses, and Lyndon didn’t know what that signified.
  “I have two kids. You know that. My son is ten.”
  “Does he go to this school?”
  “God, no.”
  “Alright. That’s fine, then. Do you buy computer games for your son, on Christmas or birthdays? I need to know how much a new computer game costs.”
  “A new one? Around fifty dollars.”
  “Fifty dollars?! How much does a kid make?”
  “Doing what?”
  “Doing… being alive?”
  “He only gets one game a year,” said Josephine, returning to what Lyndon assumed were her filing duties, if she was filing that women’s magazine.
  “This is very curious.” Lyndon walked the thirty paces back to his office, closing the door behind him. He sat back down at his desk and opened the incident binder up again. Few students could be swimming in video games as Evan was, given the expense. He must be getting that cash from somewhere, although, Lyndon paused, maybe he was looking at this the wrong way. Of course Josephine’s son wouldn’t be living in the lap of luxury. Evan’s parents, though. Lyndon had to admit that he’d never even met Evan’s parents. Well, no time like covertly prosecuting their son for vandalism.
  Lyndon abdicated his chair again, took the binder, opened his door and walked down the corridor back to Josephine.
  “Josephine, I need to see a copy of the current sixth grade phone list.”
   “Can it wait until this afternoon?”
  “Josephine, I am trying to solve a mystery.”
  They sighed at one another as Josephine grudgingly excavated a cabinet drawer. She thrust the stapled A4 pages into his hand and turned away from him.
  “Outstanding work, Josephine, thank you.” Slotting the phone list into the incident binder, Lyndon walked back to his office, closed the door and sat back down at his desk. Scanning for Evan’s name, Lyndon found his parents – David and Maria – but only a home number, no work details. Lyndon got back out of his chair, opened the door and headed down the corridor in order to berate Josephine about this, but he could see she wasn’t at his desk, and he went back inside.
  Groaning a little bit, Lyndon held his index finger to the Lewis’ home phone number, and lifted the receiver to his ear. He dialed, thinking about he’d busted students for doing exactly what he was about to do.
  “Hello?” The voice of Maria Lewis.
  “Yes, hello,” said Lyndon, adopting an indeterminate accent that he regretted instantly, “I’m trying to get in touch with David Lewis, but I’m afraid I think he’s given me his home number instead of his office number.”
  “Oh, I can help you out there,” said Maria, and proceeded to give up her husband’s work number, not pausing to ask who he was or why David Lewis would be giving out his home number to this strange man. Maybe there was a reason why she was a housewife and not a detective.
  With the new number in hand, Lyndon closed his eyes, said a Hail Mary, and dialed the telephone.
  “Morrison, Connors and Lewis,” someone answered, “this is Karen, how can I help you?”
  “I’m sorry,” Lyndon said, holding onto the accent for some reason, “I think I have the wrong number, I was trying to reach a cook.”
  “No, sir, this is a law firm.”
  “Oh, what kind of law?”
  “Corporate law.”
  Mystery solved. A home run of a phone call. “Sorry to trouble you.”
  A partner at a corporate law firm, was it? Of course Evan Lewis would have money. If his parents were spoiling him, buying him a fifty-dollar video game every month, then what else could they afford? What else did Evan Lewis have that his peers didn’t?
  Picking up the incident binder, newly furnished with clues, Lyndon walked back to Josephine’s desk and returned the phone list.
  “Thanks for this, Josephine. I’m getting close.”
  “You can’t imagine how thrilled I am.”
  Lyndon frowned and leaned in closer. “I’m not wild about this attitude, Josephine. Would you talk to Jason Hayde like that? Do you think you’re going to be able to talk to me like that when I’m principal?”
  “Look,” said Josephine, ironically not looking at him, “I really have a lot of work to do. If you have to come and talk to someone about your mysteries, can’t you do it when you’re flirting with Olivia?”
  Lyndon blinked. “Excuse me?”
  “Oh,” said Josephine, leaning over to a stack of papers by her telephone, “you have a message. Someone threw up in gym class.” She handed him a note.
  “Well,” said Lyndon, glancing over the note, “I’ll take care of that then.”

Evan watched the shakedown unfold as he ate a big sandwich. He supposed he was relieved that Tom Donnelly and his buddies had turned their attentions to somebody else, but he sympathized with the new kid forced into the corner. Evan watched Tom press his hand flat against the kid’s chest, and in a single practiced motion used his other hand to rip the pocket off the kid’s t-shirt. Tom and his friend laughed and left the kid alone, giving him another shove for the road.
  The kid sat on the ground with his back against the wall, looking appropriately miserable, for the remainder of Evan’s sandwich. Evan walked over and sat next to him.
  “Tom's an asshole.”
  “Yeah,” agreed the kid through what appeared to be choked-back tears.
  “He thinks he runs this place.”
  He nodded. “I really hate this school so far.”
  “Yeah, me too,” said Evan. “What’s your name?”
  “Adrian.”
  “I’m Evan. Did you just start here?”
  “Yeah, my family moved here from Philly.”
  “Oh, yeah? What kinds of things do you like to do?”
  “I like computer games.”
  “Hey! Me too.”
  “I really like – do you play adventure games? My favorite is Day of the Tentacle, and Monkey Island as well.”
  “Which Monkey Island do you like better?”
  “The second one. There’s so much more to do in that.”
  “Yeah, that’s the best. And do you read that magazine that comes in the game boxes?”
  “Yes! With those Sam & Max comics?”
  “Those are amazing. Do you play a lot of adventure games?”
  “Just those LucasArts ones.”
  “Oh, cool, you could borrow some of mine,” Evan said excitedly. “Have you ever played Myst?”
  “Myst?” Adrian enthused, “no, but everyone talks about that, Myst is supposed to be great. I really want to play it. Do you really have that? Could I borrow that?”
  “Yeah,” said Evan, who was starting to feel confused without really understanding why.
  “Thanks so much, that’s really cool.”
  “No problem,” Evan said slowly. “Let me know if you get stuck.”

Turning to a new page in his binder, John Lyndon wrote out ‘Interviewed Marcus Weil’ and underlined it once. He realized that was technically incorrect, so rewrote it as ‘About to interview Marcus Weil’. Lyndon set the pen down just as Marcus Weil arrived in his doorway as scheduled, escorted by his teacher.
  “Here he is,” said Olivia Kennedy. “Please return him in the same condition.”
  “Thank you, Ms. Kennedy,” said Lyndon, a little too briskly.
  “Thank you, sir,” she deadpanned, and left him alone with the boy. Marcus shuffled into a chair at Lyndon’s invitation.
  “I didn’t do anything,” Marcus began.
  “Not everything’s about you.” Lyndon produced a Super Nintendo cartridge from his bottom desk drawer and placed it carefully in the center of his desk. “Do you recognize this?”
  “Yeah, you grabbed it from me yesterday.”
  “I don’t ‘grab’. I confiscate.”
  “Yeah, well you confiscated it for no reason.”
  “It was confiscated because in this game you can decapitate a man and see his head go flying through the air. That is repulsive.”
  Marcus shrugged. “You just don’t get it.”
  “You’re right,” said Lyndon, folding his arms across the table, “I don’t. Why don’t you tell me about it?”
  “What?”
  “Tell me why you like to play video games.”
  “They’re fun.”
  “‘They’re fun’? Give me more than that. When you get home, why would you play Mortal Kombat instead of reading a book or watching TV?”
  “I wouldn’t.”
  “Why not?”
  “You confiscated it.”
  Lyndon held his index finger to the cartridge and pushed the contraband half an inch towards Marcus. “How about we say that if you answer my question, you take this home.”
  “Are you serious?”
  “That’s not an answer, Marcus, that’s another question. That’s the opposite of what we want.”
  Marcus stared at the cartridge. “What is the question again?”
  “What do you like about video games?
  Marcus tore his gaze away from Mortal Kombat and tried to concentrate on his shoes. “I guess,” he said, “because you always get to play as a cool character; like a spy or a soldier or a superhero or something like that. Real powerful guys, you know? Not wimps or whatever. And you get to, I don’t know, escape from reality? And do these awesome things like saving the world or winning a fighting tournament. And you can watch movies about that kind of thing, but in games it’s even better because when you win, it’s actually you doing it. I don’t get to do any of that in real life, so.”
  “So it’s a chance to do something different.”
  “Yeah. Be someone else.”
  Lyndon wrote that down. “What do you do if you can’t win the game?”
  “Well, then – well, I mean you can cheat.”
  “Cheat? How do you go about that?”
  “You can get, like, a code to type into the game, and it’ll make your character invincible or faster or more powerful or whatever.”
  “And why would you need to do that?”
  “Some games are really hard, man. I guess sometimes you might think you’re okay at a game but at some point it gets so hard it’s basically impossible to make any progress. Sometimes you have to cheat if you want to get ahead at all. Not me, I mean. I’m actually good at games.”
  “Where would you get a code?”
  “There are some game magazines that have them, but they have them for free on the Internet now.”
  “Does your family have an Internet connection?” Lyndon asked.
  “No.”
  “Where could you get the codes, then?”
  “Oh, well, if I wanted to I guess I could buy them off Evan Lewis.”
  Lyndon underlined something in the binder three times.
  “Is that so.”

Evan took the shortest steps possible from his classroom to the boys’ bathroom, savoring every second. Class had broken his brain. He couldn’t even begin to feign interest in the Founding Fathers. What had they founded for him lately?
  The boys’ and girls’ bathrooms were situated opposite one another, and when Evan approached he caught the eye of the skinny, dark-haired girl slumped sullenly against the wall. They didn’t share a class, but he’d seen her before and he was maybe sixty percent sure her name was Violet.
  “Hey,” he said cautiously, “Violet?”
  She looked up. “Yeah?” Score. “Evan?” Double score.
  “Are you okay?”
  “Uh, can I ask you, like, a huge favor?” said Violet, kicking at the floor with her sneakers. “I just need to borrow like one dollar for lunch. I mean, my parents did give me money, but I had to skip breakfast because I slept in, and I’m seriously starving. I can pay you back tomorrow, I promise.”
  This all reminded Evan of some art movie he saw thirty seconds of on HBO once. “Is that all? Seriously, I can give you a dollar. Take two dollars.”
  Violet looked perplexed as Evan handed over the cash.
  “What, are you serious?”
  “Yeah,” he said, waving the cash at her face, “it’s not a big deal. Don’t worry about it.”
  Violet took it carefully. Evan thought about saying that she owed him a favor, but that would be crass, and anyway, it was pretty heavily implied.
  In the bathroom, Evan relieved himself thinking about how he really should go ahead with this idea of distributing free hints and then selling further hints in smaller increments. He knew games well enough to be able to chart other peoples’ progress. He’d know when they’d reached a peak or a valley and the idea shouldn’t be to sell cheats at the same rate but to make sure that each cheat would sustain a player’s interest so they’d always want to keep playing. Like, obviously. If only he’d thought about this stuff earlier.
  Evan exited the bathroom wiping his hands on the back of his pants. Violet was gone. Heading down the hallway back to his class, he passed Vice Principal Lyndon in the corridor, and, forced to make eye contact, he was cautious not to disrespect him, but not respect him either.
  “Evan,” said Lyndon as he walked past, “are you behaving yourself?”
  “Yeah,” said Evan. What was this guy’s problem?
  Skeeved-out and shaking his head as he rounded the corner, Evan heard someone hiss his name urgently. Evan stopped and turned around to see Lyle huddled in the stairwell. Speaking of skeeved-out.
  “Lyle? What’s going on?”
  “Hey, man,” said Lyle, scratching at clusters of dandruff underneath scraggly blond hair, “do you, like, sell video game cheat codes and stuff?”
  “Yeah.”
  “Wow, that’s heavy duty. Do you think you could get me some cigarettes?”
  Evan didn’t know where to begin. “Yes. Obviously.”
  “What brands do you have?”
  “All of them.”
  “Dude, can you get me a couple of Marlboro reds?”
  What? “Yes.”
  “Cool, how much do I owe you?”
  “Five dollars?”
  “Really? That’s awesome. I’ll hit you back tomorrow.”
  “Alright.”
  Evan hurried back to class. He was going to have to write all of this down.

Interviewed Marcus Weil. Lyndon nodded with the contented satisfaction of a job honestly and decently done. He turned to a new page: ‘About to interview Tom Donnelly’.
  Tom Donnelly sat in Lyndon’s office while he wrote, scratching at the arm of the office chair.
  “It’s regrettable that it took this long and that so many people already saw it,” said Lyndon, “but rest assured that we found an inoffensive bumper sticker that we’ll be plastering over it with. Do you listen to WNYC?”
  “No.”
  “Well, it’s more of a temporary solution.”
  Tom glanced around Lyndon’s office. Lyndon thought the bully would have been sufficiently familiar with it by now.
  “We’re close to finding out who did it, you know,” said Lyndon.
  “Whatever.”
  “Do you even care?”
  “I know who did it.”
  Lyndon leaned forward. “Who do you think that is?”
  “I don’t know for sure,” he smirked: the dead giveaway of a liar. If Tom had talked to Nate Slidell as Lyndon had, then he’d know about Evan Lewis. Lyndon could easily imagine Nate Slidell giving that up. Despite his bravado, Slidell was the consummate pushover.
  “You’re a confident kid,” said Lyndon.
  Tom shrugged: the dead giveaway of a confident kid.
  “How did you get to be so confident?”
  Tom didn’t say anything.
  “You must feel like you’re on top of the world.”
  Nothing.
  “I know that you’re thinking about getting revenge,” said Lyndon. “You must know at this school, there are rules. You must know that two wrongs don’t make a right.”
  No change in Tom’s expression.
  “I bet you think you can get away with anything,” said Lyndon. You’re not even listening to me now; that’s how irrelevant you think I am. That’s how important you think you are. All I am to you is just – what? Some nuisance that you just have to deal with as part of your day-to-day, so that you can keep being the person you think you are?”
  “No, I respect you.”
  “This is my school,” Lyndon hissed across the desk, “and you don’t make the rules. Don’t think for a second that you do. It is not your job here to punish other students. I won’t tolerate that. Do you understand?”
  Tom nodded. It alarmed Lyndon how little of this was getting through.
  “Well,” said Lyndon, “you’d better get back to your class.”
  Tom got up without a word, and Lyndon watched him leave with a frown, still clutching the pen over an empty page.

“You’re going to be back at home soon, and you’re not going to have me around, and you’re going to be sitting in front of your TV getting killed and killed by Dr. Robotnik. Think about smashing buttons for three hours, your mom yelling at you that dinner’s ready, and you wanting to throw your controller out the window. I know how you feel; I seriously do. This is why I’m here.”
  “Alright,” said Danny, searching for his wallet, “I want it. I don’t know how I’d get through this point otherwise. This is going to be so helpful, I can’t wait to play the rest of this game. Thank you for doing this.”
  Evan accepted the proffered cash. “No problem,” he said, giving Danny a genuine smile, “I hope you enjoy the game.”
  It was a good feeling, helping people, Evan thought as he walked away. He’d just made Danny’s day. This was a legitimate Good Samaritan experience. The two dollars in his pocket didn’t hurt either. Holding his head up high, he strutted down the playground even as somebody in his peripheral vision called out to him, “Hey, dipshit.”
  “Bite me,” Evan threw back without thinking. He only realized what he’d said and who he’d said it to when the back of a hand smacked him hard against his head, sending his glasses flying off his face and skittering over the ground. Evan stooped to pick them up, hoping they hadn’t chipped again.
  “Why’d you say that?”
  Evan secured his glasses back on his face. The only time that Evan saw Nicholas in any other context than getting the back of his head slapped was when Nicholas was hanging out with his friend Lyle and their similarly-dressed buddies, in an amorphous smear of denim, chain wallets, and nascent, intimidating patches of facial hair.
  “Did you just say bite me?”
  Evan tried to say yes, but the word died on the way out of his mouth.
  “Yeah, I didn’t think so,” said Nicholas. He shifted his stare to something over Evan’s shoulder. “What’s that?”
  Evan looked over, and his arm took the brunt of Nicholas’ punch.
  “See you later, moron,” Nicholas said airily, already with his back to Evan by the time he turned around. Evan grabbed his throbbing shoulder and limped away, biting his lip.

Nicholas notwithstanding, Tuesday had been a pretty good day. Evan had eight dollars come in, besting his expectations, and he could count on at least eleven more tomorrow. He had to subtract the two dollars he gave to Violet, but that was charity. What goes around comes around.
  It was six thirty sharp, meaning Evan was at the dinner table poking at some chicken and pasta dish. Evan had never bothered to learn the name of the pasta. Why would he need to?
  “I got a phone call today,” announced Maria Lewis.
  Evan looked up from the table, his mouth crammed with unidentified pasta.
  “From your principal. You didn’t even show up to your last two classes, Madeline, and from what I hear it’s hardly the first time. Where were you?”
  Maddy Lewis, sitting to Evan’s left, shrugged. “They’re making that up.”
  Maria dropped her fork and leaned across the table. “No, I think you’re the one who’s lying. To me. About where you were all this afternoon.”
  Maddy threw up her hands. “I can’t believe you’re going to listen to some teacher over your own daughter!” Her chair screeched against the polished wood floor as she got to her feet and stormed out of the dining room.
  “Maddy!” yelled Maria, standing up and following her into the hallway. “Come back here right now!”
  David Lewis continued to scrape at his plate. “How was your day?” he asked Evan.
  “It was fine,” said Evan.
  “What did you do?”
  “I don’t know. Just the usual.”
  “Good,” said his father.
  Evan chewed on a forkful of pasta as he geared up for a question of his own. “Dad, can I go on the Internet tonight after dinner?”
  “Sure,” his father nodded, “only until eight, though; I’m expecting a phone call. Do you have any homework?”
  “Yeah, some math.”
  “Well, make sure you prioritize.”
  “I definitely will.”

Evan stretched out against the leather back of the study’s desk chair, the modem dialing up, and reflected on the single page of lined notebook paper in front of him. Something on System Shock for that big kid Sean, a Sonic 3 infinite lives secret, and an invincibility cheat for Mortal Kombat. Those were good orders for a Tuesday.
  Browsing the Spoiler Center’s entry for System Shock, Evan wondered if he’d be able to get into this game, although from the basic outline he was reading he had a hard time visualizing its allure. The only thing he found for Sean amidst the walkthrough was a cheat to score the player free energy and health. He started taking it down: always carry a battery and a first aid kit. Throw the battery on the ground in front of you and use the first aid kit on the battery. Talk about obtuse.
  Evan cleaned up the rest of his list with time to spare. He wrung his hands a little over how to spend his remaining thirty minutes of computer usage, and noticed the boxed copy of Sim City 2000, the city-building simulation he’d asked to get for his birthday, lying up on the desk shelves, untouched since February. He went back and forth about whether to finally install that or to watch TV instead.

With serious reluctance and self-preparation, Evan knocked twice on his sister’s door. After identifying himself in response to Maddy’s screechy reply, he swung open the door. Maddy’s bedroom was wallpapered with posters of forlorn guitarists and a surly Juliana Hatfield. Maddy was flopped out on her bed, the muffled sounds of generic rock emanating from her Walkman headphones.
  “Hey, sis.”
  “What do you want?”
    Evan took another step into the room, closing the door behind him and lowering his voice. “Uh, can I have some of your cigarettes?”
  Maddy looked at him and pulled her headphones down around her neck. “Are you serious?”
  “Yeah, so what?”
  “No, you can’t.”
  “Why the hell not?”
  “Because you’re like twelve?”
  “Oh, so when did you start smoking?”
  “I’m so much more mature than you. Come on.”
  “Can you at least tell me where you got them?”
  “I have a cigarette guy.”
  “Someone from your high school?”
  “Please. This guy is the real deal; he goes to college.”
  “Can I talk to him?”
  “No fucking way! Get lost!”
  “Whatever!” Evan yelled, exiting her bedroom with absolutely no intention of getting lost, and he made plans that moment to come back at midnight, rummage through her sock drawer and slip seven cigarettes out of the pack she kept hidden there and then flip her sleeping body the bird as he snuck out, which is exactly what he did.

John Lyndon stood behind his desk, arms crossed, watching the sunrise to the degree that his stuck office window allowed.
  “I was thinking about what you said yesterday,” he said, not turning around to face Marcus Weil shifting awkwardly in the chair, “and I was interested in what you said about the appeal of computer games being that you get to play as somebody else. I think, though, that the appeal might go deeper than that. Any one of you kids can put on a costume and run around your living room saying they’re a cowboy or a knight, but nothing else responds to the fantasy you have in the head. A computer game is a true simulation tool. It puts you in a role and models the world around you to reflect whoever you’re trying to be. That’s why it’s more interesting than simple make-believe. There’s a full world out there that is responding to you, and most importantly, testing you. The idea behind video games is not just to be someone else, but to prove that you can be someone else.”
  Lyndon looked over his shoulder. “Don’t you think?”
  “Why am I here?”
  “You’re a good kid,” said Lyndon, sitting back down at his desk and producing a Styrofoam cup from a brown paper bag on the floor. “I got you a hot chocolate.”
  “Oh, thanks,” said Marcus, accepting it with something less than overwhelming gratitude.
  “You helped me out,” said Lyndon, pointing a finger at him, “and I’m not going to forget this when I’m principal.”
  “Okay,” said Marcus, waiting for further instruction.
  “Get to class.”
  Marcus left his chair, cup in hand, and made it out the door. Lyndon reclined and settled into a state of deep thought.
  “Josephine!” he shouted down the hallway. “I need to leave a message!”

The students, in gradually diminishing numbers, filtered in through the school gates. Evan hung around outside, checking his watch every minute as he waited for Lyle to show up. The longer the delay here, he knew, the more trouble it’d create down the line. His unfinished math homework was going to be enough of a problem with Ms. Glaser before adding tardiness to the mix.
  The crowd of students eventually narrowed to the lone straggler, leaving Evan, last he checked his watch, two minutes late. His heart skipped a beat when he recognized one of those blasé stragglers as Lyle, sauntering towards Evan at a pace not nearly urgent or covert enough for his liking.
  “Hey, dude.”
  “Hey.” Evan unzipped his backpack and gathered the seven cigarettes out of his lunch box.
  “Awesome, man, thank you,” Lyle said, and started to rifle through his pants for his wallet. Evan watched him for a second, the cigarettes still in his outstretched hand.
  “It was five dollars, right?” asked Lyle.
  “Yeah,” Evan replied, and even as he said it, five dollars didn’t sound like all that much. “Wait.”
  Lyle looked up, his hand stuck in his jean pocket.
  “How about,” said Evan, “you don’t have to pay me for this, and instead you get Nicholas to stop picking on me.”
  Lyle seemed amused. “What, you want me to punch him or something?”
  “No, you don’t have to fight him, just get him to leave me alone?”
  Lyle nodded, and took his hand back out of his pocket. “No problem,” he said, nodding, “if he knows you’re cool with me, then he’ll treat you alright.” Evan extended the cigarettes to Lyle, and after taking them, Lyle, to Evan’s surprise, shook Evan’s hand.
  Walking slowly back to class, Evan was immensely pleased at the notion that he’d just shut off the faucet of Nicholas’ constant torture for no more than seven stolen cigarettes. Nicholas was done, and it had cost him nothing. It hadn’t even occurred to him that he could do that.
  Stashing his bag in his locker, Evan opened the door to his class, where Ms. Glaser stopped him in his tracks.
  “Evan Lewis,” she said, “so glad you decided to join us.” Four minutes late! Get over it! He started to look at her with mounting resentment. “You’ve been called to the vice principal’s office.”
  “What?”
  “Get a move on, young man.”
  Ms. Glaser ushered him out of the room and shut the door behind him. Evan blinked a couple of times. The vice principal? Since… what?

The padded leather cover of the black binder slammed against the desk. John Lyndon turned to a clean sheet of paper, writing the words April 13 at the top. He set down his pen parallel to the lines of the page and crossed his hands over the book.
  “Evan,” he said, “how are you enjoying sixth grade?”
  Sitting quietly in the chair, Evan Lewis flicked his gaze around the room suspiciously until finally looking Lyndon in the eye.
  “It’s alright.”
  “That’s great to hear. It’s been a while since we’ve been able to talk, I wish I could make more time to catch up with all of you kids one on one.”
  “Yeah,” said Evan, unenthused.
  “When you were in here last time, you were feeling very upset.”
  “Yeah.”
  “Do you still get bullied?”
  Evan seemed to catch himself before actually saying something.
  “It’s alright,” said Lyndon, “you can talk to me. I can help you.”
  “No. I don’t.”
  “That’s great news. You’re doing well, then? Making friends?”
  “Yeah.” Evan fidgeted with the arm of the chair. “Mm-hm. Yeah.”
  “That’s great. What kinds of things do you like to do in your free time?”
  Evan looked utterly lost. “Uh… usual things.”
  “TV? Movies?”
  “Sure, yeah.”
  “Video games?”
  “Yeah.”
  “Tell me what you like about video games.”
  Evan paused. “Uh, I don’t know.”
  “Come on,” Lyndon coaxed. “Try and think of one thing.”
  “They’re fun?”
  “Good, that’s a good reason.” Lyndon paused to write something down, taking his time. “How are you at games? How good of a player do you think you are?”
  Evan shrugged. “I don’t know. Pretty good, I guess.”
  “Can you win games against your friends?”
  “Yeah.” Lyndon noticed Evan allow himself a small smirk.
  “I have a young nephew,” said Lyndon, reclining and smiling a little in reciprocation, “not much older than you, and he’s into games. He’s got one of the consoles, I don’t know the name of it, it’s Japanese-made and it’s got this little pad that you hold, with a cross at the left and about four buttons on the right. The game comes on a little tape that you slot into the top of the box.”
  “Super Nintendo?”
  “That’s the one. My nephew tried to get me to play this one game on it once, this is a couple years ago. Now, the name of it… you controlled this little guy and helped him jump up on top of these platforms, and jump down on these little creatures. You collect coins.”
  “Super Mario World.”
  “Yes. I try this game once, and I’m just hopeless, Evan.” Lyndon laughed. “I don’t know, me and video games… it’s not my generation. I don’t think I’m built for it. But my nephew, he sees me flailing around in this game and he looks at me like he can’t believe we’re related.”
  Evan smiled politely.
  “I could probably learn a few tricks from you,” Lyndon said.
  “Maybe.”
  “You know, someone told me,” said Lyndon, snapping his fingers together to mimic spontaneity, “this student here told me that if I’m ever stuck in a video game like I was in front of my nephew, there are these, I think they’re called cheat codes that help you get through it.”
  Lyndon observed Evan’s poker face. “Yeah?”
  “Yes,” said Lyndon, “and he also said that those cheats can be pretty hard to get normally, but they can get them from you.”
  Evan looked at him.
  “It’s alright,” Lyndon reassured him, “there’s nothing wrong with it. I just wondered if that was true.”
  Almost imperceptibly, Evan nodded his head, then flicked up his gaze to meet Lyndon’s and answered definitively, “Yeah.”
  “I guess your parents must have an Internet connection.”
  “Yeah.”
  “And, what, do you get a couple bucks for your trouble? I mean, an Internet connection’s not free.”
  Evan hesitated again before answering in the affirmative.
  “That’s fine,” said Lyndon, bending his head down to write something and to let Evan have his reaction to himself. “How much could you get in a week? Let’s say it’s a good week.”
  “Maybe twenty dollars.”
  “Twenty dollars a week?” He gave Evan an appreciative look. “You’re not hurting for pocket change, then.”
  “Yeah. Not really.”
  “How long have you been doing it?”
  “A couple of months.”
  “You’ve probably made more in that time than I have,” Lyndon chuckled. “What do you spend all that money on?”
  “Well, I buy other games sometimes, when there’s something new out that I want to play. But I also just like to save it up, you know?”
  “That’s good sense. You must have a lot saved.”
  “Yeah.”
  “Good for you. Are you the only one here that does this?”
  “I think so.”
  “Then everyone here who plays video games must be coming to you for help, right?”
  “Yeah.”
  Lyndon tapped the pen on the binder, smiling. “You know what’s different about you from last year? You’re a confident kid.”
  Evan grinned. “Yeah.”
  “How did you get to be so confident?”
  “I just think it’s… you know. It’s hard to say.”
  “You must feel like you’re on top of the world.”
  “I… kind of, I guess. Not that much.” Evan frowned after a second.
  Lyndon returned his attention to the binder. “Now I have to ask you one more thing. Do you know anything about this offensive word that was written on Tom Donnelly’s locker?”
  “No. I mean, yeah, I saw it, I know it’s there, but I don’t know who did it.”
  Lyndon showed Evan his own poker face. “Nothing at all?”
  Evan started to betray his frustration. “No.”
  “It wasn’t you that did it, then. For instance.”
  “I didn’t do it.”
  “Good. I don’t think you did either.” Every muscle in Evan’s body that had visible tensed in the last ten seconds just as visibly relaxed. “Because this is what I think. Tom Donnelly’s a mean kid. We all know that. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. He’s a bully. He doesn’t care for the people who are younger than him or weaker than him or smaller than him. Even so, within a certain circle, he’s popular. He doesn’t lose friends, and so I don’t think that that word on his locker is the act of someone who felt betrayed by him. The only real enemies he has are the people who’s he bullied or mocked or made fun of.
  “Writing that word on his locker, that’s an attack. An attack on this mean, violent kid. Now I’m thinking, what kind of person both hates and is intimidated by Tom Donnelly, but has the confidence to pull something like this off? They need the confidence to simply do it in the first place. They need the confidence to think they could get away with it. Because it’s a big deal, what they did. Not just because that person broke the rules of this school, but because Tom Donnelly, if he finds out who did it, is going to come after that person. You must know that.
  “There aren’t many kids who can take Tom Donnelly in a fight, so it would have to be someone who feels sufficiently powerful. And if they’re not physically powerful, then I’m confused about why they’d do it at all, unless they simply didn’t think it through. Maybe they thought they’d get away with it because they were already getting away with other things that they shouldn’t be allowed to do.
  “I didn’t think you would do it. You were bullied, and God only knows, Evan, you were bullied bad, and last year you came to me and that’s the way we solved it. I would think that if you were having trouble now, that you would have come to me again, like it’s supposed to work. That is, I mean, unless you felt like now you were able to handle the situation better than I could. But I don’t see how that’s possible.”
  Lyndon let his words rest, studying Evan’s face closely for the slightest reaction. “Can you?”
  Evan shrugged.
  “Do you want some advice, Evan? The way you see yourself is not the same as how other people see you. And it’s not fair, but this attitude you have… what you think you’ve become, coupled with how they’re going to see you out there… they’re going to eat you alive in high school, Evan.”
  Evan glanced down at the floor, then up at the clock hanging on Lyndon’s wall.
  “You’d better get back to class,” Lyndon said.
  “Okay,” said Evan, getting up out of the chair and out of the room as quickly as he possibly could. Lyndon watched him leave, and made another notation.
  Interviewed Evan Lewis.

Evan scribbled in the margins of his notebook while Ms. Glaser endeavored to explain the difference between a metaphor and a simile. When the lunch break arrived, Evan booked it outside in order to track down Sean and cash in on the System Shock cheat as soon as possible.
  “Hey buddy.”
  For a second, Evan was puzzled by how nobody ever called him buddy. He turned around to see Tom Donnelly looming over his shoulder and the buddy comment made more sense. Tom’s sour-looking girlfriend Anna, and another henchman whose name Evan couldn’t give a shit about, hung back behind Tom.
  “Hi, Tom,” Evan said. Caught off-guard, he let a little nervousness slip into his voice.
  “Evan, man, Evan,” Tom began, “I heard you fucked up my locker, man, what’s that about?”
  “Who the fuck do you think you are?” yelled Anna, who Evan noticed was wearing black nail polish. This was serious.
  Evan tried the same practiced blank expression he’d used on the vice principal earlier. It didn’t seem to go over as well.
  “Come on, man, own up to it.”
  Evan wondered how everybody knew this all of a sudden.
  “Did you do it or not? Is all I’m asking,” said Tom, his tone level.
  The question hung in the air for what felt like an awfully long pause until Evan held up his head and met Tom’s stare.
  “Yes.”
  “Holy shit!” Tom shrieked, spinning around to catch the others’ reactions. Choked laughter sputtered out of his mouth. “Are you serious? Who do you think you are? You think you can do that to me?”
  Evan stuttered something.
  “You little shit,” Tom hissed, jabbing Evan below the throat. “What did you think was going to happen?”
  “I don’t know.”
  “Hey, well, guess what. When school ends, you’re going to be right outside the gym, or I’m going to find you and it’ll be ten times worse. Yeah?”
  Evan broke off his gaze.
  Tom shoved a finger at Evan before leaving with the others. “Don’t fuck with me.”
  “Loser,” Anna added.
  Evan felt ill. He stood there for a minute, playing that entire conversation back in his head. He began wandering uneasily across the playground, and after a second he broke into a full sprint. Brushing past other kids, Evan skipped down flights of concrete stairs, the sound of his heart echoing inside his head, until he saw Nate Slidell sitting on a bench drinking a Sprite.
  “Did you tell him?” Evan gasped. “About the locker?”
  “What? You talking about Lyndon?”
  “Mr. Lyndon knows too?”
  “Or Tom?”
  “Yes! Tom!”
  “Yeah, he made me.”
  “What?” Evan waved his hands around wildly. “Why would you do that?”
  Nate shrugged. “Just happened.”
  Evan slapped the Sprite can out of Nate’s hand, its contents violently spraying over the pavement.
  “What the fuck!”
  “Why would you tell him? Why would you tell him?”
  Nate glared at him with either residual anger from the Sprite thing or over something else. “You’re not my problem.”
  Evan looked around, pulling nervously at his hair. He needed a plan this minute.

“Josephine,” Lyndon announced, “I need you to make three photocopies of this, please.” He removed four pages from his incident binder and handed them over the desk.
  “No problem,” she said with uncharacteristic politeness, and walked them over to the photocopy room five feet from where they stood. Tapping his fingers on the desk to the hum of the photocopier powering up, Lyndon looked around the room casually, as if he hadn’t been here every day of the last seven years. He glanced over his right shoulder, where Principal Hayde’s office door was closed. After he heard the photocopier’s initial exertions subside, he walked over to the room and stood outside the door.
  “I don’t know what it is you think of me, Josephine,” he called to her, “but it has never been a policy of mine to make a pass at colleagues.”
  A pause in the photocopying. “What are you talking about?”
  “Your accusation yesterday that I flirt with Ms. Kennedy.”
  “I didn’t mean to say that you flirt. God forbid.”
  “Then why bring it up?”
  “I meant her; she can’t keep her eyes off you.” Another pause. “You didn’t realize that?”
  Lyndon considered that a strange statement. “I’ve never even… looked at her that way. That’s unprofessional.”
  “Again, John, we’re talking about her, not you.”
  “It’s unprofessional of her, then.”
  Josephine sighed. “Oh please. What do you think life is about, John? Wait, I don’t even want to know.”

Evan gripped the sides of his desk and settled into his chair. The oldest, lousiest, most bargain basement wooden chair in the world had never felt less comfortable. Two and a half hours until school let out. Eyes glued to the classroom wall clock, every move of the second hand felt like another reason to panic.
  “Next question, question seven, an example of personification.”
  He was trapped in this room.
  “Hey,” a voice from behind hissed at him urgently, “what did you write for that one?”

Josephine emerged from the copy room, shuffling the sheets of paper as Lyndon waited. “Three copies, collated and stapled. You didn’t ask for staples, but I know that’s usually what you want.”
  She turned the copies around to face the correct side up, and glanced down at the page.
  “Is this kid in trouble or something?”

Alone in the hallway, Evan splashed his face at the water fountain. He knew people did this to calm down, like, on television, but it wasn’t doing anything for him other than getting his face wet. One more hour and Tom would be out there already. He couldn’t even ask himself if he was prepared for this since the answer was so immediately obvious and pathetic.
  The clock running out on Evan’s bathroom break, he reluctantly walked back to class. He stopped in the hallway by the double doors, looking out through the glass and checkered wire to the deserted playground. He could just go, he figured. He could go outside, avoid the windows, and run in the opposite direction from the gym. There was a bus that went past the 7-Eleven five blocks from the school. If he ran, by the time Tom Donnelly started to wait for him, he’d have almost made it to the bus stop, and all he would need to do from there is get on the bus and he would be home. All he had to do was make it to the bus stop on time.
  Evan urged himself to take a step forward. He told himself all that he had to do was reach out his hand and open the door. To open the door and run, that’s all it would take. Why was this so difficult?
  “Evan?”
  He jumped.
  “Evan,” said Sean, “do you have my System Shock cheat codes?”
  Evan could have murdered him. “Sean, seriously, I am so in the middle of something.” He turned back to the door.
  “But you said you’d have it for me today,” Sean whined, “and it is today. I already gave you two dollars. That’s a lot of money.”
  “I…” Evan pressed his hand to the glass. “Do you want your two dollars back? Is that it?”
  “No, I want the cheat.”
  Evan screwed up his eyes in frustration and hit his forehead against the glass. Please, he thought, leave the video game cheat codes out of it for one moment. He needed badly to focus on finding a way out of this situation. A real life cheat code, that would be helpful.
  Pulling away from the glass, Evan looked back over his shoulder. “Hey,” he said to Sean, “have you ever been in a fight?”

At his desk, Lyndon separated the photocopies into piles to distribute to the relevant people, collecting them all in the binder. Making a note of the time and folding the binder under his arm, Lyndon headed out the door to go and pull Evan Lewis out of Pamela’s class. Turning the corner left out of his office, he almost immediately collided with a clearly alarmed Olivia Kennedy, who took a step back and laughed.
  Lyndon shook off his surprise. “Shouldn’t you be in class?”
  “Do you have one second?” Olivia asked.
  Olivia was smiling. Bright teeth, thin lips, freckled skin, brown hair, shoulder-length. He’d never even thought about her in those terms before, and never intended to, but in the short span of time since Josephine opened her mouth, he couldn’t see her in any other way. How old was this woman, even? Was this a practical match in any way?
  “I think so,” he said, “what is it?”
  “I wanted to ask you about something you said yesterday.”
  Lyndon’s office phone rang.
  “Were you serious when you told me that…”
  “Can you hold on one second? I should answer that.”
  “Sure.”
  “You can come into the office, though, you don’t have to wait out here in the hallway.”
  Olivia followed Lyndon into his office, where Lyndon made a grab for the phone on its fourth ring.
  “John Lyndon speaking.”
  “John, this is Stuart calling.”
  “Stuart, hi.” Lyndon held up his index finger at Olivia and edged his way around the desk.
  “Listen, thank you again for coming in last week and interviewing with us. Now, I just have to say, we’ve thought long and hard about this, but ultimately the Board has decided to go in another direction.”
  Lyndon frowned. “I’m sorry?”
  “I assure you it was a difficult decision, John.”
  “No, what I – can you just clarify what you mean?”
  “The Board has decided to go with another candidate for the principal role.”
  “I don’t think I understand,” said Lyndon, setting down the binder on the desk.
  “What is it you’re not sure about?” asked Stuart, not unkindly.
  “I’ve been at this school for seven years. I’ve served as the acting principal. I’ve literally done that job.”
  “I know, and we took all of that into account, but we just chose another candidate. Again, it was a really tough decision, John, you’re a great vice principal and we really value you in that position.”
  “I only…” Lyndon paused to collect himself. “I only wish I was more clear on exactly what areas in which the Board found that I was lacking. Because I don’t understand it.”
  “John, it’s not a case where we see you as lacking.”
  “Clearly it is.”
  Lyndon heard Stuart sigh over the receiver. “There were areas… there was a concern, I think, about your focus. There were some who thought that you often didn’t look at the bigger picture and got tied up in minutiae. And you know as well as I do that principal is a big job, and you have to be attentive to so many things. The Board was not, I suppose, fully convinced that you were right for the position in that respect.”
  Lyndon slouched into the chair. “What else.”
  “Well,” said Stuart, “based on our discussions… it isn’t necessary to go over this.”
  “Tell me. I want you to tell me.”
  “The Board was concerned about whether, as principal, you would be able to command the respect and confidence of your colleagues and your students, which is absolutely vital in that job. Leadership. We were looking for leadership, and we didn’t see… we were not sure that…”
  Lyndon tightened his grip on the phone. “I went to war for my country, and then I taught in public schools for more than seven years, what exactly is it that I haven’t done to gain respect?”
  “We’re sorry, John, we value your service, it’s just based on the evidence we don’t think… we think that there was a more qualified candidate for the position.”
  “Are you telling me that I don’t have the respect of the students here? Of the teachers?” Lyndon lowered his voice. “If that’s what you’re making your determination on, you’re wrong about that. If you talked to more… if I could show you… I know that I can do this. I don’t know how else to say it to you.”
  “John, we’ll be thrilled if you’d continue on with your responsibilities as Dearborn vice principal.”
  Lyndon closed his eyes.
  “Thanks again, John. Goodbye.”
  Lyndon let the receiver go limp in his hand. Even with the dial tone, he could hear the faint sounds of Olivia’s breathing, and then a sharp knock on the door.
  “John,” said Josephine, “I got a call from downstairs, there’s a bulimic girl who won’t come out of the bathroom. Can you take care of that?”

“Look…” called Lyndon, leaning against the wall outside the girls’ bathroom. “Violet, you can’t stay in there forever. You haven’t done anything wrong, you won’t get in trouble, but you have to come out.”
  “I don’t want to come out!” Violet shrieked from behind the door.
  Standing opposite him, Olivia gave Lyndon a look. Lyndon scratched at his temples. He couldn’t summon the energy for this.
  “Violet, you have to come out,” Lyndon said again, laconically.
  “I hate myself!”
  “It’s only me and Ms. Kennedy out here, you won’t be embarrassed, you won’t be…” He trailed off, and let the pause linger.
  “For God’s sake, John,” Olivia muttered, and burst past Lyndon into the girls’ bathroom. The door flung back from her push and shut with a thud.
  “Violet, please look at me,” he heard Olivia say.
  “I don’t want to!”
  “It’s okay, sweetheart, it’s okay.”
  Violet burst into loud, racking sobs. Lyndon craned his head back against the outside wall of the bathroom. His legs went slack and he started to sink down to the floor.
  “Violet,” Olivia said, “you don’t need to change anything about you.”
  Violet kept bawling. Lyndon pressed his hands against his forehead.
  “Please come out, honey, please come out. It’s okay. There you go. Don’t cry. It’s okay. There you go. Come here. Come here. Shh. You’re okay. You’re okay. It’s okay.”
  Lyndon closed his eyes.
  “It’s alright.”

Twenty minutes remaining until Evan was expected outside the gym. There were so many things that could go wrong with this plan. Could he even count on Sean? Who was Sean? Evan looked at the clock, clawing at the underside of his desk. Twenty minutes. He had to get out of this.
  Evan raised his hand. “I need to go to the bathroom.”
  Ms. Glaser looked over at him. “You just went.”
  “I need to go again.”
  The class tittered. What was making the whole thing worse was the fact that he genuinely did need to go to the bathroom.
  “Fine,” said Ms. Glaser, “be back in two minutes or I will come and get you.”
  Evan took a breath in the hallway, as the classroom door shut behind him. Over the past hour, he’d etched the escape route in his brain: left down the hallway, down two flights of stairs, exit the building for the courtyard outside, sticking close to the walls and avoiding all the windows, take a right turn around the edge of the building to the larger courtyard and sneak through the west gate out to the street. From there, bolt. Forget about Sean, he thought. This was better.
  Urging his shaking legs into action, Evan started his walk down the corridor. He walked at an agitated, stilted pace, a compromise between wanting to get out of the school as fast as possible and trying to stifle the echoes of his footsteps. He eased open the door to the stairwell and looked at his watch. Nineteen minutes left.
  After creeping down the stairs, he burst past the door into the courtyard, deserted and soaked in mid-afternoon sunlight. There were two other kids heading for the exit, he noticed, looking like they’d been sent home for dental appointments or nosebleeds. Evan thought he could pass for one of the nosebleed kids. Quickening his step, he passed by someone he thought he recognized, though he couldn’t put a name to the face. Shrugging it off, he kept walking until a hand clenched his shoulder and shoved him around. Evan looked up, his heart seizing in his chest, and looked into a sneering face: the face of Tom Donnelly’s nameless, silent enforcer from earlier in the day.
  “You really trying to get away?” The enforcer grabbed Evan’s left arm above the elbow and bent it hard against his back, nearly pulling it out of its socket.
  “Ah! Fuck!” Evan gasped for air.
  “Shut up.” The enforcer’s other hand went over Evan’s mouth, and he forced Evan around. Evan watched, over the enforcer’s meaty fingers, the west gate disappear from sight.
  “You thought you could get out of this? Come on.”
  As Evan acquiesced into a stumbling walk forward, the pain in his shoulder intensified, a searing feeling like his muscles being ripped apart.
  There were stairs to climb. Pushed along the path back to the gym, Evan felt he would pass out from the pain. He wished he would. He tried to get out a scream. Struggling against the tight hand on his mouth, he couldn’t even pry his lips apart. The enforcer gave Evan’s pinned arm a sudden, excruciating jolt, and then shoved him forward, prompting him to pick up the pace.
  Why was nobody seeing this? Evan clenched his eyes shut and then opened them again sharply when the enforcer squeezed Evan’s cheeks together to make him pay attention.
  He couldn’t say how long it took them to arrive outside the gym, with his arm on fire and consciousness drifting in and out. The enforcer released Evan abruptly, unleashing a horrible surge throughout his arm that sent him to the ground and made him need to throw up.
  Taking rapid, shallow breaths, Evan brought himself to his feet. Arching his head up, he saw, to his utter lack of surprise, Tom Donnelly smirking.
  “See, not even you think you’re a tough guy.”
  Evan smudged his wet eyes with the back of his hand as he straightened up.
  “What do you want?”
  “What do I want? You called me an asshole in front of the entire school. You put that shit on my locker. You fucking came at me. I’ll kill you for that.”
  “Don’t.”
  “No? How about you fucking apologize to me?”
  “I’m sorry.”
  “Say it again.”
  “I’m sorry.”
  “Seriously,” said Tom, “of all the people I thought could have done that to my locker, you were the last person on my list. I guess you hate me, whatever, I get it, but I really didn’t think you would have done that.”
  Evan glared at him.
  “I honestly thought it was Anna for a second, ‘cause I thought maybe she’d found out about that girl from Montclair High that I kissed. At least that would have made more sense. But I guess it was you. I don’t really get it.”
  Tom looked down at Evan. “I can’t figure out. What made you decide to do this? Try not to piss yourself.”
  Sniffling, Evan looked back and forth between Tom and the enforcer.
  “I…”
  Tom leaned forward. “Yeah?”
  “I, I was selling cheat codes. For video games.”
  Tom blinked. “What?”
  “I was selling cheat codes for video games to other kids,” Evan said, wincing as he did so.
  “And that’s it?” yelled Tom. “Holy shit, Evan! What the fuck is wrong with you?” Tom spun around in hysterics. The enforcer laughed.
  “Jesus Christ, Evan,” said Tom, “you are, I mean you are…” He shook his head.
  “You are the worst kind of nerd. It’s one thing for you to play video games and act like you’re a super badass in a fucking fantasy world, but now you play video games and actually think you are a badass in real life. Don’t you see how you’re out of your mind?”
  Evan couldn’t think of any response.
  “I don’t think you’re a badass, Evan,” said Tom. “And you called me an asshole, but you did that to me so I think you’re the asshole.” Tom crossed his arms. “Say it.”
  Evan looked up at Tom helplessly. The enforcer gave him another shove.
  “Say it!”
  “I’m an asshole.”
  “Say you’re a loser.”
  “I’m a loser.”
  Tom shared a glance with the enforcer. “Get a load of this. I don’t think that’s enough.”
  Evan raised his head.
  “What do you want?” Tom and Evan followed the sound of the enforcer’s voice to where, in the otherwise abandoned courtyard, thick, big Sean was approaching them.
  “Sean?” said Tom. “Get lost.”
  Sean shook his head as he neared them, looking utterly distraught.
  “I’m sorry,” he said to Tom, “I really need those System Shock cheats.”
  Tom frowned slightly and Sean struck him in the stomach. Tom recoiled and gasped for air, the enforcer taking a shocked step back.
  “Take that, shithead!” Evan screamed, watching Tom go down.
  Staggering, Tom lunged forward and haphazardly grabbed Sean around the neck in a headlock. Sean struggled as Tom tried to pull him down, and their fists flailed around, smacking each other in the back. The enforcer seemed completely lost without Tom’s direction. Evan’s heart raced. Stumbling, Sean threw his elbow up toward the sky and hit Tom in the nose with a nauseating crack. The sound sent a shudder through Evan’s body. Sean released his grip and Tom dropped to the ground. Evan’s initial glee vanished as the steady trickle of blood from Tom’s nose accelerated until it gushed down to his neck.
  “Tom, are you okay?” Evan asked.
  Tom pressed his hands up to his mouth, trying to stem the bleeding. Sean took a step back, looking pale. Evan’s heart started racing.
  “Tom, are you alright?”
  Tom drew his hands back and, collapsing to all fours, coughed specks of blood over the concrete. He coughed again, and again, flecking the ground with more blood each time.
  “Evan,” said the enforcer, “what did you do?”
  “I didn’t…” said Evan, “I didn’t…”
  Tom shivered and ran his wet hands through his hair and over his clothes, bloody trails streaking through both.
  “Help,” Evan whispered.

Lyndon rocked a pen back and forth between his thumb and forefinger, staring out the stuck window at the rear of his office. The only thing he could even see from that angle was part of a fence.
  “It’s important to follow the rules, even if they seem unfair. You have to believe that things will get better with time. If it doesn’t seem like it’s working, if you’re having trouble, you still have to believe that, because if you don’t…”
  Lyndon turned around and looked down at his desk.
  “You can’t sell these video game codes anymore,” he said after a moment. “You can’t keep taking money from your classmates.”
  Head hung low, Evan nodded. “I know.”
  “It’s not right.”
  “I know.”
  “Acting the tough guy, Evan, acting the boss…” The words, rote, fell unceremoniously out of his mouth. “Cheaters never win. If you go through life cheating then you haven’t actually gone through life. You don’t learn anything. When you get challenged, and you will get challenged, you’ll fold. You’ll fail.”
  Evan wiped away a tear.
  Lyndon tapped the pen against the desk dispassionately. The black binder rested in front of him, its cover closed.
  “It’s important, Evan,” he deadpanned, “that you work hard, if you learn things, if you are dedicated, if you are a good person, if you follow the rules and if you treat others with kindness… and if you live your life that way, the hard way, then eventually, in the end, that’s how…” Lyndon rubbed at his temple.
  “You will be rewarded,” Lyndon said flatly. “That’s how you’ll be rewarded.”
  Evan shook his head. “I don’t even get what the point is. It doesn’t matter what I do, it doesn’t matter how I act differently, there is always… Tom is always going to be more popular than me. He is always going to tease me. He is always going to…” Evan broke off. “This is so unfair.”
  Lyndon, drained, propped up his chin with his hand. “Do you want to know what I think?”
  Evan picked his head up. “Yes.”
  Lyndon looked at the shaking twelve year old. “You know what’s interesting about Back to the Future? In the first movie, Marty McFly has a miserable family, his uncle is in jail, he doesn’t have the money to take his girlfriend out and his band can’t pass the school audition. When he travels to the past, he manages to prevent everything that would go wrong for his parents over the course of their lives. He goes through a huge ordeal, and when he comes home at the end, his parents are beautiful and thin and rich, his dad’s a successful science-fiction author, the school bully washes their car, and Marty has his own car, his dream car. That’s the happy ending.
  “Do you see what’s wrong with that? It’s superficial. It’s a happy ending only because Marty has more money. Now, in the second and the third movies, what Marty’s fighting to change is himself. He’s an impulsive guy, he’s proud, he’s arrogant and he has a temper. In the future, that’s going to get him in trouble. That pride is going to get him into a car accident that’s going to cast a shadow over the rest of his adult life. What Marty does in those last two movies, by going back into the past and having these adventures, is resolve this unhealthy part of his personality. He overcomes it, and so in the future, instead of being insecure and trying to be tough, he can just let it go. He lets it go, and he moves on. That’s how the movies end, with Marty a better person That’s the ending. Do you understand?”
  Evan dried his eyes on a tissue Lyndon provided.
  John Lyndon remained seated at his desk after Evan left and the door closed. Outside the building, the lights went out one by one as the sky turned dark, leaving only the light from Lyndon’s half-open window.

In the city, en route to his usual diner and his usual dinner of coffee and steak, Lyndon saw something up ahead on the side of the road that caused him to pull over sharply, the drivers behind him bleating their horns in response. Stepping out of his car and locking the door, Lyndon walked north, his shadow jumping about erratically as he passed under the streetlights.
  The first thing that caught Lyndon’s eye as he entered the arcade was the Mortal Kombat cabinet, as it brandished the same garish colors and logo on the cartridge he’d confiscated. Lyndon opened his wallet and fed the machine some loose change. It sprang into garish life and instructed Lyndon to move his character – a stocky, pale gentleman with a crew cut – around the screen and to defeat a overly-muscled opponent. Lyndon tugged at the joystick and mashed the buttons at random, none of which had any direct effect as far as he could tell. After scoring a few hits and, more frequently, seeing his character reel back in blood-soaked defeat, his turn ended and he was prompted to insert another coin.
  Lyndon obliged, pushing a few coins into the slot. The machine seemed to jam as he did so, and after he shook it a little, his coins cascaded out the return slot. Lyndon tried it again and gave the machine another shake.
  A lanky, teenaged arcade staff member wandered past. “Do you need help?”
  “No,” said Lyndon, “I can do it.”

“Shoplifting!”
  In the police station parking lot, Maria Lewis opened the door to the family car and roughly guided Maddy Lewis into the backseat. Maddy, with smudged eyeliner and tousled hair, toppled into Evan’s lap before regaining her composure. Evan pulled his notebook closer towards his window, where he squinted and hoped to catch a little more light on the page.
  Maria Lewis crouched against the open door. “This is unthinkable. Shoplifting. I can’t believe you. I am going to go back inside with your father and then I am coming out and you and I are going to have a talk.”
  Maddy made a dismissive gesture with her hand.
  “I am at my wits’ end,” said Maria, “I don’t know what to do with you. Why can’t you be more like your brother?”
  Maria slammed the car door and stormed back inside the station. Maddy glanced over at Evan.
  “Are you doing your homework?”
  Evan shrugged.
  Maddy rolled her eyes. “Honest to God,” she said. “Live a little.”

Hell

noreply@blogger.com (Duncan) — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Very carefully, he outlines the idea for her. As a visual aid for the story, he pries a damp napkin from underneath a plastic cup of scotch and coke and unfolds it over his tray table. As he talks, he illustrates the premise of the game to the best of his ability. Using a ballpoint pen on an alcohol-soaked tissue, the results turn out about as lame as he had expected.
  In breaking down the concept of the game, he begins with the absolute basics, like the idea that there is a person sitting in front of their television or computer monitor with an input device in their hands. He has no idea what she knows. So far, though, his decision to actively condescend to her looks like the right choice: she appears to receive all of this information with interest.
  When he gets into specifics, he starts telling her about how the players of his game have the option of either playing it by themselves or in a cooperative mode with a second person. Most other games, he says, stressing the word “other”, when faced with that sort of situation, will add that two-player functionality as an afterthought. It’s exactly the same as the single-player game, obviously designed as an experience to be had by one person, alone, but there’s now an extra man clumsily present in the mix. He emphasises again just how imaginative his team wants to be with this. The conventional two-player solution, he says, is too transparently video game-y. That belongs to an arcade cabinet from the eighties. He thinks realism is important. He thinks immersion is important. He steals a glance at her to make sure that she is listening to this.
  What they’re doing is recognising that two separate people will be sharing the same experience. They’re going to have the game periodically send private messages to each individual player, telling them a secret about what the other person is doing.
  He asks her to imagine that the two of them are playing this game, and that he has an opportunity to take down an enemy who has the drop on her. In the chair, he slides his arm back, forming the shape of a pistol with his hand, and bumps his elbow hard on the armrest they share. What happens then, he says, is that for whatever reason, he doesn’t take the shot: he lets her get hit, and the game informs her of his treachery. Or the game tells her that he’s been hoarding ammunition instead of sharing with her. The game is going to inform the other player about all of your moment-to-moment moral lapses and errors in judgment. When you’re told about how the other player neglected an opportunity to help you, you become less inclined to help them, and, indeed, when you choose not to, that gets reported as well.
  Players can’t kill or outright betray one another, however, and they have no choice but to collaborate with one another since the enemies are too powerful to be defeated by anything less than their combined efforts. The idea is simply to challenge the camaraderie that naturally develops between the two players through cooperation and survival. He intends to subvert that relationship, and in so doing, hopefully create an experience far more memorable than the alternative.
  At that moment, her hand is locked under her chin, her index finger extending diagonally over her lips.
  He leans back, abandons the napkin sketch and tells her what the real problem is. Despite the fact that each player is being warned not to trust the other, in the end, nothing happens. The reason for that is because both the single- and two-player versions of the game tell the same story, and his team has to adhere to the ending in the single-player game. That’s already been written, and of course it makes no mention of a companion who you may or may not trust. Either the narrative device peters out completely (best case scenario) or it makes no sense at all (worst). In the situation he’s found himself in, he can’t change the game’s substantial conclusion. The ending as it stands has nothing to do with psychological intrigue. It’s about blowing up a silo. What he can do in the two-player game, at most, is add a couple lines of dialogue or something equally cheap and innocuous. The two players can say something to one another at the end. How, he wonders aloud, given those restrictions, can he pay off the escalating conflict between the two players? It should lead somewhere, or there’s no reason to do it all. Where in this established framework is the satisfying conclusion to this new dynamic?
  She keeps her head down in what appears to be deep thought, and it’s the first opportunity he’s really had to stare intently at Katherine Peyton without seeming a creep about it. She’s sitting next to the window, where the glare of the afternoon sky backlights her face. It lends her a kind of celestial authority that draws him in, his heart catching in his chest a little bit. He scans her face, quietly looking at her brown eyes flicking back and forth across his napkin diagram. He zeroes in on her lips, cracked and progressively dehydrating from the airplane air. He thinks about whether it would be polite to offer her some Chapstick or something, but not wanting to step on her inevitable answer, he says nothing, and waits.

Scott Stephens feels the same surge of inspiration looking at Katherine Peyton as he did when he sat in his London office’s conference room six weeks ago; the least likely place, he had come to recognise, for any kind of inspiration to occur. There were two kinds of problems in game development, he had decided by then, his tenth month in the profession. The first were the entirely inevitable, small-scale errors that would emerge naturally throughout the process, like technical bugs and balancing issues. These tended to be fixed fairly easily, contingent on there being sufficient time and resources available. These were the problems that he had to solve, or at least obscure and hope nobody would notice. It took about ninety percent of his effort as a game designer to bring a game to the point where it was simply functional, and the remaining ten percent he got to spend on implementing his actual ideas. In that ten percent was where he found the other kinds of problems: those that he brought upon himself in an attempt to make his game worthwhile.
  He loves new ideas, he loves overcoming challenges, he loves throwing around suggestions that will improve his game, and if he didn’t love all those things, he thinks, what then would be the point of him being in game design at all? It’s difficult to make great ideas work. There’s no question in his mind that it’s difficult. He believes adamantly, however, that there is always a way to solve anything. If you think that an idea can’t work it is because you are not smart enough to figure out how it can. This is how you distinguish dreamers from creators. And you’re not going to be remembered for anything that you dreamt about. This wasn’t meant to be insulting. Most people are not geniuses, and do their best within their own limitations. Everyone has a brilliant idea in his or her life, but the number of those brilliant ideas that are actually put into practice are few and far between, because the majority of us lack the capacity to think of how to realise them.

Six weeks ago, Scott sits with his hands folded together in his lap in boredom-induced paralysis as his boss explains to the room what the lead design brain trust has decided today. To date, their company’s second video game has evolved from being a shooter with a strong multiplayer component to an entirely online experience with a persistent world and character progression, to a base retail game supplemented by episodic expansions to be steadily streamed online, which was then scaled down to a single-player game with aggressive plans for extra downloadable content. Every phase of this design metamorphosis left behind in the current product some element specific to each of those incarnations, laying down what Scott had named the trail of failure. The only part of the game that had remained at all consistent – other than a total lack of vision – was that it was about a lone government agent infiltrating a secret factory, because clearly that was just gold from day one.
  At that meeting, Scott’s boss had an exciting new change in direction to present. Scott’s boss was the same man sitting next to him right now, on the opposite side to Katherine Peyton, having dozed off and occasionally threatening to plunge into Scott’s crotch. His boss had announced that they would be implementing a new gameplay mode for co-operative play, which Scott was thrilled by in the most sarcastic possible sense of the word. His immediate assessment of the co-op was that it was merely the latest gameplay trend that his company invariably pursued in the hope of finally hitting upon that one magic selling point that would endear their middle of the road shooter to the rest of the world. Sometimes these meetings were like a parody of themselves.
  The thing about co-op, Scott thinks, sitting back at his desk, the disappointment swilling around in his head, is that if they were going to do it, then it shouldn’t be the obvious situation where it was a second player hanging out in the exact same game that they’d already made, without any story or design acknowledgment of that second presence. Maybe they weren’t making this game to be remembered, he admits to himself. Regardless, he thinks, it should be reasonably self-evident that if you were trying to design a great co-op experience, you should have in your head the idea that it was going to be shared by two people. It was more difficult in their case, he knows, because, through no fault of his own, they were coming late to this. They’d already built so much of the game and couldn’t now afford to spend another year making another version of it in which there were two secret agents to whom everyone in the game world responded to realistically. The only way this was going to be believable was if the story was about player one and his invisible sidekick who, during major plot events, nobody really notices.
  Although, Scott reasons with himself, there’s nothing inherently wrong with limitations. The Rolling Stones, thirty years after evading tax collectors and recording in the basement of a castle, earned themselves a position where they can do anything in the world that they want, and they’ve become total garbage.
  Maybe it isn’t the worst thing in the world. You’re telling a story that focuses on one hero, and nobody notices the player standing beside him. How do you explain that as anything other than a reality of cost-effective game design? Nobody sees player two. What does that make player two? He’s a ghost. Well, he thinks, that’s stupid. Wait, he thinks later, no it’s not.
  Okay, so maybe player two, as part of the fictional conceit of this game, is actually a ghost. That’s why nobody says anything to him. Or – this could be even better –he is a hallucination. Scott just saw Shutter Island. That doesn’t work, he realises, because this ghost-slash-hallucination is nonetheless able to shoot people and kill them. A ghost doesn’t do that.
  That’s it, though – a ghost doesn’t do that. The second player doesn’t do that. The second player can’t shoot at all, and he has different abilities that the first player lacks, thereby – Scott shoots a fist into the air – thereby emphasising the need for co-op play. Player one shoots a guy while player two opens a door or something using a ghost power. Whatever a ghost power is. There’s no such thing as a ghost power. He checks Wikipedia. There’s no such thing as a ghost power. But whether a ghost or a hallucination, the second player needs to have some unique mechanic – the only issue being that there aren’t currently any situations in this game that can be resolved in any way other than shooting things.

Scott never had a phrase to describe his creative process. He had been asked this – to describe his creative process – in his job interview. He’d always been comfortable with the notion of creativity being random and chaotic, and never thought that he needed to ascribe reason to it. Times like that were the worst: when for once it really, truly mattered what he had to say and in that moment his mind went completely blank. He had begun to speak, paused, veered in and away from the honest answer and finally settled on his impression of what a successful candidate for a game design position would say: something about systems and logic, to which his interviewers nodded.
  His creative process hit a wall, however, with the question of what a ghost could do in their video game. The way he chose to deal with this was to read gaming forums and straighten out paper clips, both of which failed to produce the flash of genius for which he was holding out. He forced himself to return to the ghost idea, failing to progress with it each time, and it only added to his mounting frustration that his breakthrough concept had since become a token of his artistic impotence.

Today, Scott’s boss slouches in liquor-induced repose. It’s a grotesque display that threatens to detonate Scott’s cachet with Katherine Peyton. Six weeks ago, he sits in his office, sober, hearing out Scott’s ghost concept. The concept is still unfinished, although Scott thinks that its benefits should be obvious nonetheless. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with a game that has a generic co-op option. Scott knows this. To him, though, it’s emblematic of a game that has mediocrity stamped all over it. What’s important to him is the way he feels whenever he sees a poster for a new romantic comedy with Gerard Butler in it. That can’t be his video game. He can’t have his name on that.
  If it means taking sole responsibility for figuring it out – which is what his boss proposes, because he’s not convinced of the virtues of Scott’s idea and isn’t going to invest the team’s collective time in it – then, fine, Scott thinks, because what isn’t worth shipping a better game? He ignores this directive immediately when he leaves his boss’ office and asks the other designers to imagine that the second player is a ghost, and start thinking of practical things that they can do differently. Scott values collaboration. At least, at moments like this one, he does.

In the weeks that followed, Scott spends his days struggling around in the hole he’s dug himself, and his nights watching episodes of 30 Rock on DVD. He thinks about how much more gratifying it would be to write episodes of that show than work in game design, where you spent at least two years on your life on a single idea. His colleagues point out to him that if the second player can’t shoot anybody, who’s ever going to choose to be the second player? Scott’s retort is to say wait until you see what a ghost can do. Probably something amazing.
  Scott’s day-to-day is eventually drowned out by all of his American friends on Twitter going on and on about how much they’re looking forward to the 2010 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and what panels they’re going to be speaking at and so on. Scott thought that the whole purpose of Twitter having a 140-character limit was eventually you start talking about other things. Nonetheless, he starts to wonder if that isn’t the answer. GDC is idealism central. If there’s anything that’s going to get him excited about making video games again, it’ll be the best and the brightest minds in the industry temporarily all taking up residence in the same city block. That’s how he justifies the trip – an eleven-hour flight and eight days away from work – to himself. He pitches it to his boss slightly differently, framing it as an opportunity to learn from the experiences famous international designers have had in implementing co-op play. His boss goes for this, eventually. The rest of the staff aren’t going to GDC, and Scott assumes that there’ll be some jealously at his own sudden exemption. But he’s not going by himself, or with Emily Blunt, he has to go with his boss, who nobody in the office respects creatively and all wish would just die but also continue to bankroll the studio from his personal finances.

Katherine Peyton, Scott learns an hour into the flight home, is a professional singer. She was in San Francisco to visit her family, and is returning to London where she studies at some music school whose name Scott forgets in his rush of excitement at finding out that he’s sitting next to a singer, a profession that he is obviously aware exists, but has never encountered personally. He’d feel the same way if he were sitting next to an air traffic controller, but, like, a hot one.
  There has to be more to singing for a living than opening your mouth and vocalising, Scott thinks, but probably not a whole lot more. Imagine an entire life focused around a singular talent that depends in large part whether or not you were genetically gifted with a pleasant voice. When her voice goes, so, presumably, does her career, but that’s all she needs to ever be concerned about. Taking care of her voice. She is completely self-contained, her own instrument. Without a computer, Scott isn’t worth anything.
  Scott tells her that he’s a writer, a lie he commits to immediately before even thinking about his answer. He retreats slightly, admitting that, in truth, he used to be a writer, a journalist covering the video game industry, for two years before he recently made the switch to game design. He doesn’t know why he continues to emphasise the writer part so hard. He left that job for a reason, after all, there being a professional ceiling on writing about games for hobbyist magazines and websites. He’d reached a point where his only options for career advancement as a game journalist were to move to other places with worse reputations, at which point he declared it self-evident that it’d be far more interesting and lucrative to switch from critique to creation.
  He might have mentioned it because he assumes she’ll find the idea of him being a writer more interesting and relatable than being a game designer. At least as a writer, even a writer about video games, he gets to exercise lyrical flourishes and metaphors and all these devices whose value and sophistication is immediately understandable, as opposed to, well, whatever goes along with being a “designer.” He explains what his old job was in an effort to compare himself favourably to whatever writer a woman his age would probably be into. Who is that, even? The guy who wrote Girl with a Dragon Tattoo? Bridget Jones? Not a real person.

The Game Developers Conference is everything Scott remembered it to be: big conference rooms, big ideas, and a tote bag full of a big lot of shit that he throws out immediately. He sees a lot of faces that he recognises, and deliberately sidles away from his boss as he reintroduces himself to friends he hasn’t seen for a year. At the end of his first night, he goes out with some of his American colleagues to a bar, and, six hours later, stumbles back to his hotel room and collapses over his bed in the prayer position. Maybe, he thinks, the darkened room spinning around him, an altered mental state is what he needs to solve this. Some of the greatest artists in the world were drunk or stoned when they produced their best works, like the guy who wrote the song about his car.
  The next day, Scott eats lunch with a bunch of people who talk a lot about Portal 2, Valve’s sequel to the most ingratiating hit game in modern memory. The conversation is spurred by Valve’s recent marketing campaign that announced the game’s existence: an elaborate mix of surreptitious game updates, images encoded in audio files and getting gamers to dial up ancient BBS systems. Valve might as well exist in another dimension, Scott thinks, given its seemingly limitless wealth and autonomy. It wasn’t so long ago that they’d only made one game in their lives, kind of a hit, but nothing that would hint at their eventual level of success: something like a ten percent stake in the entire gaming industry. Scott hears stories about Valve hiring neuroscientists and comic book artists and armies of playtesters to refine their games to their purest possible state, and he wonders if Valve has a booth at GDC and whether it’s hiring.
  The notable thing about Portal, Scott thinks, sitting by himself on the third floor of the Moscone Centre and browsing his Twitter account on his iPhone, is how well they used the unreliable narrator, a well-established literary device that was rarely, but always memorably, deployed in video games. The path that Valve took should have seemed so obvious in an industry where management overspends on outsourced pre-rendered cutscenes to tell a story. All Valve needed in Portal was a voiceover. It was a continuous, real-time soliloquy that made for a better narrative than almost any other game in existence: low budget, high quality.
  Right now, Scott has a situation where one player is a real dude and the other is a ghost. Or a hallucination. Not final yet. What would be really cool, though, he thinks, is that if you started to work in an unreliable narrator, and the game was trying to convince each individual player that they were the only one that actually existed inside this fictional universe, and that the other was a ghost, or a hallucination. That’s fucking gold. The player is constantly being reminded that the world around them is not necessarily real.
  The only problem, he realises, is that they’ve already programmed and designed the game to react exclusively to whoever happens to be player one. Player two is never going to believe that player one is a ghost if everyone in the world is talking to player one. What’s the solution to that? First-person cutscenes. There you go. Whenever there’s a cutscene, the character talks to the camera instead of player one’s avatar. That way, each player believes that they are being addressed, while remaining doubtful of their companion’s in-game existence. There you go. Fucking A.
  The only issue with that, Scott realises, is why would you ever think that the other player is a ghost if he’s killing real enemy troops? It wouldn’t make sense. Nonetheless, the idea that the game is getting you to distrust your partner seems interesting, Scott thinks, and there has to be a way to make that work. What if – yes – what if – and forget the whole ghost idea –each player is a secret agent infiltrating this military base, and instead of the game telling you that the other is a ghost, it’s telling you that the other is a traitor. Forget this ghost shit. The two players are equal, but they can’t trust one another. You are being told that your friend is a traitor. How do you define a traitor in pure gameplay terms? Nobody is necessarily going to start this co-op game thinking that they’re going to betray their friend. Maybe this is where the unreliable narrator comes in, since the only way anyone will actually lose trust in their friend is if they put all their faith in this computer voice. Say that player two picks up a super-powered assault rifle from the corpse of a slain enemy, and the game sends a message to player one telling him that player two did this, even though player two already has a better arsenal. Player one, if convinced, thinks that player two’s series of actions depict a pattern of pure self-interest or intentional sabotage.
  Scott doesn’t even listen to the three GDC lectures that occupy the rest of his day. He already feels so fucking good about himself. He’s solved a design problem. He’s making a co-op game about spies-slash-players who don’t trust each other. Talk all you want about emergent play and intentionality. Three rows back in the lecture hall, Scott’s already a genius.
  He arrives at the hotel that night only slightly drunk, and that small act of restraint makes him feel even better about himself. Settling into his single bed, across from his boss who appears to have passed out long ago, he scans his email on his iPhone. There’s a message from one of his colleagues back in London, sent about nine hours ago. It explains to Scott that they’ve figured out what extra powers a ghost player can have in contrast to a “real” player, and started to program those extra powers in the game itself. The ghost – the second player – can move through walls and mark targets for the other player to see, silhouettes lit up in red that player one can figure out how to take them down before he busts down the door. Scott reads this email and his heart sinks. These players are spies now. Neither of them are ghosts anymore. They’re both real dudes. Why can one of them move through walls?

If asked, Scott would define “chaos theory” as such an intrinsically indefinable term that it’s not worth his time to explain it in detail. Chaos theory, according to Scott, is not a consistent process. It’s the picture of inconsistency. Chaos theory is random flashes of brilliance. When you dream about game design, most of those ideas seem perfect, but nonsensical bullshit when you wake up. The other days, you have dreams that, when you wake up, don’t seem so facile. They seem practical. A kind of providence.
  Scott’s colleagues, back at the London studio, could explain just what, mathematically, chaos theory actually is. They’d start drawing a diagram on a whiteboard, and it’s at that moment that they’d lose Scott’s attention. He’d wish that he were back in journalism, if that was still a viable industry.

The only issue with Scott’s spy concept is that the plot has already been designed to respond to one character. The game still follows the same path as it ever did. The player locates the bad guy and blows up the base. The villain delivers a monologue. Fine, but there’s no second hero in this scenario. The mounting distrust between player one and player two never actually amounts to anything. And the critical path that already exists isn’t variable. It’s been made. So how much money would it take to alter the co-op mode to have the story react to individual players’ decisions? There isn’t even enough money, he knows, to fully implement his (already pared down) “duelling spies” mechanic. What they can do is tell player two that they can’t trust player one, and vice versa. Verbatim. Will they even take the game seriously when it says that?

Scott is drunk again. He wonders if this will solve his problem. Is there some part of his brain that he can’t access when he’s sober? Is he too scared, too lacking in confidence to blurt out, other than in a fit of chemically enhanced creativity, the solution that will fix their game?
  The next night, he’s not drunk, but he falls asleep with his earphones in. He listens intently to the music, hoping for the dull parts of his brain to synchronise with the chord progressions; waiting for his thought processes to start moving in accordance with an already-established creative rhythm. He keeps his eyes closed for a long time and thinks about what he will eventually need to admit to his boss.

Boarding the return flight, Scott knows that he’ll be sitting next to his boss: that fat, slobby frame that dozes off after one drink of anything. The girl sitting on Scott’s right is a surprise, however. From the way she’s put herself together – dirty blond curls, the brown leather jacket, eyes that dart around him and a wide-mouthed smile – he needs no convincing that there’s something unusual about her. In a life typically bereft of any kind of sophistication and glamour, she ranks as astounding. This, Scott thinks, is what he was looking for this whole time.
  What else could he even try? He’s tried working this situation through. His boss is an idiot. He can’t talk about it with him. The suggestions that his colleagues send through only make things more complicated. What he has in his mind is a situation that is ninety percent the way to completion.
  He believes in serendipity. He looks at her when he sits down, fastens his seatbelt, and smiles and nods politely. He can’t imagine that she was made a presence in his life simply to sit next to him on an airplane trip. She has to be something more than that.
  This, he sees now, is how the story will go. Scott Stephens stands at his own talk at the Games Developers Conference next year, and he’s asked how he came up with such an amazing idea for a video game. Well, he will say, it’s funny. We can’t always work out these ideas by ourselves. You can’t even imagine the process through which an idea will come together in the end. In this case, it’s because of a girl that you’ve never heard of.
  Scott explains the problem to Katherine Peyton at length, and once he's done, he waits on her answer. And he waits. There are things about her that he hadn’t yet noticed, now that he looks closely. In her silence, he has time to wonder if he’s not misread the situation, and whether instead she represents something new altogether.

The Education of Nadia Heller

noreply@blogger.com (Duncan) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 08:00:00 +0000

1987

There was a story on the local news, being broadcast on the television bolted to the wall of the hospital lounge, about a mother whose teenage son had recently committed suicide. It was questionable how good an idea it was really to have an unfiltered conduit of potentially very affecting stories and images piped directly into a place where you are at your most emotionally vulnerable, like the PA system at an airport departure lounge having some of the more maudlin Simon and Garfunkel songs on an endless loop.
  The hospital television was even encased in plastic to prevent, in this case, Jack Heller from changing the channel on the brutal human tragedy that happened to be playing out right after the tender, touching birth of his daughter.
  The victim’s bullish mother didn’t seem particularly distraught, however, as she was on the television calling for the President to investigate the violent video games that allegedly caused the death of her son. An avid role-playing gamer, he had been immersed for years in dark, violent imagery that, she said, contributed to her son’s mental collapse. Video games were, she continued, an unchecked menace to the youth of America, one demanding a federal intervention.
  Whatever special compassion parents were supposed to feel for other parents hadn’t kicked in for Jack yet, who found himself only contemptuous at the sensationalistic tone of the news piece. His disdain increased with the arrival of another set of parents – his wife’s – who were only now making their appearance. Both of them were dressed like they had abruptly left an opera at intermission, despite Amanda having gone into labor the day before. Whatever the explanation for this was, Jack was pretty sure it would be stupid.
  Jack directed Elisabeth Addison to the private room down the hall in which her daughter was sleeping. As his wife took off, Robert Addison sat down on the couch next to Jack and looked at the television, where the same news story was inexplicably still in progress.
  “Look at this,” Addison commented on the report after a minute of silence between the two men. “Look at the world we’re living in. You know, I pass by an arcade sometimes on my way home and you wouldn’t believe the caliber of child hanging out in that garbage pit. High school drop-outs. I see them there playing the arcade cabinets; I see them outside drinking and smoking. With their tattoos and facial piercings and all that. What a lifestyle that is.
  “And don’t think I don’t know,” he said, “about Dungeons and Dragons. That thing’s just loaded with Satanic images and messages. I heard that if you play a Dungeons and Dragons game backwards, you hear a message instructing you to shoot a police officer with his own gun.”
  Jack fought the urge to call his wealthy father-in-law a jerk-off.
  Addison leaned in close to deliver what appeared to be a man-to-inferior man talk. “I will never understand,” said Addison, “what it is you see in these games exactly. And you listen: if only for the sake of my daughter and yours, don’t lose yourself in some late night Dungeons and Dragons game and forget you have a family to provide for. You have a child now. This isn’t one of your pen-and-paper characters, you can’t mess her up and start again.”
  “Yeah, you know,” said Jack, nodding, “I’ll definitely give that a lot of thought.”
  Elisabeth Addison returned from her daughter’s room, where Amanda was still asleep, and asked to see the baby. Jack led them down the corridor; the in-laws following behind, where, he would bet real money, they were exchanging knowing and obnoxious glances at his expense.
  Their baby was in a room with the other newborns, and behind a glass window, sleeping peacefully – for the moment – in a microscopic cot. She was wrapped in a pink blanket and her face tilted to her left; wrinkled nose and open mouth. Jack pressed his hand up against the window.
  “This,” he said, “is Nadia.”
  Jack looked over at his in-laws and the expressions on their faces seemed almost like pleasant surprise.
  “What,” said Jack, “did you think I was going to name my child after some monster from Dungeons and Dragons?”
  He could tell from their reserved reactions alone that this was the case. He narrowed his eyes.
  “Get the hell out of my maternity ward.”

1988

Nothing felt natural to Jack about talking to someone who couldn’t understand what he was saying at anything above the most basic level. It made heart-to-heart conversations almost impossible. His everyday interactions with his baby daughter were often marred by long stretches of self-conscious awkwardness that Jack supposed he should have outgrown when he reached parenthood. This anxiety ceased to exist, though, when Nadia inexplicably burst into hysterics at something he said or did, and that was when the love between parent and child felt at its most unconditional.
  That night, holding Nadia on his knee, they watched St. Elsewhere in the living room while she waved her arms around ineffectually slapping at Jack’s shirt. During the commercial break, he was disturbed to see one of the anti-Dukakis ads that the Bush campaign was running, something about the candidate handing out weekend passes for convicted rapists and murderers who spent their Saturdays doing much of the same thing. Jack wondered if it was possible for him to watch television with his daughter even once without her seeing something coldly manipulative or horrifying. At least she wouldn’t remember this.
  “What do you think of that?” he said. “Eww. Gross.”
  Nadia burped.
  “You’re not going to grow up to be that terrible, are you?” He probably couldn’t get away with having his daughter up this late at all were it not for Amanda being out of the house visiting with her parents. “Of course not. You’re the best.”
  Jack gently held Nadia’s hand in his. “You probably don’t pay much attention to this, so I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a lot of people out there telling you to be scared of things. I’m not going to be one of those people, okay?”
  Jack looked back at the television. “And some things out there are scary. I can’t even imagine what you think is scary at your age. I guess taking a bath. My point is that there are things that people say are scary, but are actually pretty cool and fun and important.”
  He lifted Nadia up onto his arm and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I know you’re not going to understand this, but this is mainly for me. So many people are going to tell you that video games are stupid or something to be afraid of. I can’t do anything about that, but I think that I’m the only one who will ever tell you that games are something to celebrate.”
  Reaching down to the coffee table, he picked up a Nintendo controller and guided her hands onto the buttons. She giggled.
  “Let’s get started.”

1989

Pulling together a briefing on the uptake of tax rebates by senior citizens, Jack Heller’s mind was, remarkably, not entirely focused on the task at hand. This was the day that Prince of Persia for the Apple II was released, and this being a weekday meant that Jack was stuck at his actual job imagining local punks blitzing every electronics store in San Francisco, smashing windows with bass guitars, cleaning the city out of his most anticipated game of the year. Then running over all the copies with their skateboards. It was terrible.
  On his lunch break, Jack power-walked to the store, cutting across the street where possible, and when he arrived his apocalyptic vision proved not to be the case. In the placid, deserted store, Jack made his way to the game shelves where four pristine copies of Prince of Persia waited for him. Jack picked up a box and clutched it carefully on the walk to the counter, where a surly teenage clerk rang up the purchase.
  “I hear this is supposed to be good,” Jack said hopefully.
  “Fuck you.”

Although Jack couldn’t play the game at work, he still felt compelled to tear open the shrinkwrap to see, at long last, what was inside this box. Even holding the diskette would have given him a charge. This was an artifact that represented such personal desire and potential of experience, that it made him feel like a different person just to look at and hold it.
  So strong was this upswell of emotion, his lust to get home and play this, that when his colleagues invited him out for a drink after work, he almost turned them down. Jack, at times, had to remind himself to be sociable.
  At an enthusiasm high, Jack attempted to explain Prince of Persia to the guys over a beer at some sports bar. After twenty minutes, he began to feel that he was having difficulty conveying his enthusiasm to the others.
  “No, you’re not getting it,” he said, putting his glass down on the table hard, “let me start again. There was this game called Karata… Kerata… caretaker… and it had such great animation… it’s the same guy.”
  Initially, the guys had politely acknowledged that this piece of entertainment from a medium they had no interest in might theoretically be cool, but at this point couldn’t hide their disinterest. The conversation moved onto ranking the Kiss studio albums from best to worst. There was a consensus that Destroyer was first.

When Jack arrived home later that evening, he walked into the kitchen to find his wife sitting alone at the table in the mostly dark room, and reading The Bell Jar. Jack kind of wished Amanda would dial down the portentousness every once in a while.
  Jack kissed her on the forehead while she kept her eyes glued to the page. “Hey,” he said, a little giddy, “I got Prince of Persia today. Finally.”
  “That’s cool,” she said absently, “I’ll get dinner ready in like an hour.”
  Jack pulled off his coat and tie and threw them blindly over the nearest item of furniture. In the living room, Nadia was leaning over the coffee table, illustrating wildly on a large sheet of paper. When she saw Jack enter the room, she dropped the felt-tip pen and applauded loudly. “Daddy!”
  Jack slumped down next to her against the front of the couch, reaching an arm over and tousling her hair.
  “Do you want to hear about Prince of Persia?” He took a shot.
  She nodded.
  “I haven’t played it yet. But from what I’ve read, it takes place in ancient Persia and you’re this prince who is imprisoned by an evil vizier. A vizier is like… he’s a bad guy. A really bad guy. But you’re the good guy. And you have to find your way out of the prison to rescue the beautiful princess. She’s good, too. How does that sound?”
  “Good, thank you,” said Nadia.
  He smiled. “Do you want to watch me play it?”
  Nadia clapped for him again.

1990

Jack thought about how he could get drunk as quickly as possible at this dinner party without raising any eyebrows. Jack and Amanda were hosting the Addisons, including Amanda’s intense younger brothers, and Jack wasn’t sure how his life got to the point where exactly zero of his family members were willing to show up to one of these debacles.
  “And of course,” said Elisabeth Addison, standing in the dining room with Jack and the rest of the Addisons, “he shows up wearing a t-shirt under his dress shirt.”
  That was a joke? Jack thought. “Ha ha ha ha ha.”
  Jack had a glass of white wine in his hand, but with Robert Addison’s glassy stare fixed upon him, he was scared to sip it for fear of judgment.
  Amanda entered the room holding Nadia’s hand, Nadia wearing some kind of Maria von Trapp-esque dress in a toddler size. Jack had no idea.
  “Oh, sweetheart,” said Elisabeth, “you look very pretty.”
  Amanda tugged on Nadia’s hand. “Say thank you.”
  “Thank you.”
  Amanda handed Nadia a plate of appetizers and asked her to offer them to her grandfather. Addison selected something and thanked Nadia, calling her darling, like the Southern gentleman he completely wasn’t.
  “Granddad,” enthused Nadia, “I’m going to show you my Prince of Persia.”
  “What’s that, darling?” said Addison. Amanda gave Jack a look.
  Nadia took a step back with her left foot and then plunged herself forward across the room, landing deftly on the other foot. The Addisons seemed to find this cute, although inexplicable.
  “Now,” said Nadia, “I attack.”
  Waving her hand around in a pantomime swordfight, Nadia stabbed at Robert Addison’s leg three times.
  “Oh no,” Nadia yelled, “spike trap!” She instantly dropped to the ground and stayed there. All in all, the performance was, Jack thought, remarkably faithful to the animation of the game itself.
  The Addisons looked at Jack, under the presumption that an explanation was forthcoming. Jack threw back the glass of wine.

1991

“‘Well, actually, that’s why I’m here on Scabb Island. I’m on a whole new adventure.’”
  Jack read this in his most convincing hero voice to Nadia, who was seated on his lap in front of the computer desk. Since having a daughter, it was noticeable to Jack how his gaming routines had changed, although not in any anticipated way. Invariably, any time he brought home a new game, he’d ask Nadia if she wanted to watch, and she always jumped at the chance. Jack would have to slow down his pace of play because Nadia wanted to follow along, but there was no activity they could participate in together that he enjoyed more than this.
  “What does Scabb mean?” she asked.
  “Do you remember when I explained to you what a union buster was?”
  Jack and Nadia had been playing Monkey Island 2 for a full hour, and past Nadia’s bedtime. Nadia seemed so excited about the game that he couldn’t bring himself to send her away. Part of him wasn’t sure whether this was because she liked computer games or because she liked shiny things. He liked to think it was the computer games.
  At the end of the hour, for a good ten minutes, Jack found himself clicking everything, unable to progress, slightly frustrated, not sure what he was missing, and decided that this would be a good time to send Nadia to bed, before he flipped his lid.
  “Maybe we should call it a day, honey.”
  She jabbed at the corner of the screen with her fist. “Make a mousetrap.”
  “What?”
  “Make a mousetrap to catch the rat.”
  Jack looked at her with the kind of sweet, uncomprehending condescension he normally afforded to four year olds, and then it made sense to him. He had a stick, he had string, he had bait. And there was a box that could be opened right next to where the rat was hanging out. Who knows what having a rat would be good for, but it would be something. Putting all the pieces together, he set up a trap for the rat and had Guybrush Threepwood yank the string, securing the rat within the box.
  “Hey!” yelled Jack. “You did it.” He kissed her on the back of her head.
  Nadia shook him off. “Daddy, read the voice.”
  “Oh yeah.” Jack looked up at the dialogue text flashing across the screen and adopted different voices for each character. Nadia responded enormously to Jack’s gruff, aging pirate voice. Jack didn’t even know he had this particular talent in him.
  Amanda came in to the room and told Nadia it was time for bed. Though privately heartened by Nadia’s angry protests, Jack pushed her off his lap and told her to listen to her mother, saying they’d keep playing tomorrow. Nadia walked out of the room to brush her teeth, and Jack couldn’t help grinning.
  “She really likes this, you know?” he said.
  Amanda smiled. “She wants to make you happy.”

1992

Jack Heller crawled into bed in the jeans he had changed into after coming home from work. He never fully understood why his wife cared so much about maintaining, washing and wearing a dedicated pair of pajamas every night. At least, Jack thought, Amanda didn’t yet consider him a lost cause and was still lecturing him to follow suit. He turned on his side in bed and felt a folded-up piece of paper stretch the line of his pants.
  “Oh yeah,” he said, pulling the paper out from his pocket, “Nadia gave me her Christmas list today.”
  “Didn’t you want to get her that puppy?” she asked, sliding up against the headboard.
  “I did, but you said he had a sad face.”
  “He did.”
  “Well, yeah, but adorably sad, like Marlena Dietrich.”
  “Read me the list.”
  Sitting up, Jack unfolded the sheet of floral notebook paper and held it before his and Amanda’s eyes.
  “‘Dear Santa Claus,’” he read. “‘For Christmas this year, I would please like a Super Nintendo and a beautiful diamond boat. If you can’t get both of these, just a Super Nintendo would be fine. Thank you. Nadia.’”
  “My, what a canny little girl you have raised.”
  Jack looked over at Amanda, who had slumped back on her side. “What do you think?”
  “I don’t really want to encourage Nadia to spend any more time in front of a screen.”
  “But why not encourage her interests?” Jack said. Amanda rolled back over to face him. “I know she likes this stuff. What if she wants to do this for a living?”

1993

From behind her desk, Nadia Heller watched, with lack of interest, her twenty-something teacher wrestle a cardboard-mounted map of the world into position against the whiteboard. Kate Taylor turned and exhaled slightly from the embarrassingly real exertion. She stuck out her arm and indicated a position on the map.
  “Who can tell me the name of this country?”
  Nadia raised her hand. “France, Miss Taylor.”
  “Yes. Very good. Can anybody name something that comes from France?”
  “French fries,” volunteered some kid after a collective moment of silence.
  “That’s true.”
  This is all? Nadia thought. She put up her hand again. “Napoleon Bonaparte.”
  “That’s also true,” said Kate. “Who was Napoleon Bonaparte, Nadia?”
  “Well, he was the leader of France.”
  “Yes.”
  “I play this game called Civilization with my dad, and you can play as Napoleon Bonaparte, and you can do all these amazing things. You make France grow really strong, and make the annual income and GNP and literacy all better because you listen to your advisors, and make lots of new buildings, and use diplomacy, and make the people really happy, and research new technologies like writing and gunpowder. We made France one of the top countries in the world.”
  “Yeah,” said Kate, glancing at the clock and blindly indicating another point on the map, “and who can tell me something about this country?”
  The class continued its unenthusiastic identification of random countries and their exports until the day ran out. Kate asked Nadia to stay behind for a moment, and she remained seated while everyone else filtered out.
  “Nadia’s going to hell-er.” Pre-teen giggles echoed down the hallway.
  “Nadia,” said Kate, “do you know what precocious means?”
  Nadia shook her head.
  “It means nobody likes you.”

1994

There was a war on video games. It was only on violent video games, technically, but as Jack explained to his wife, those were all the good ones anyway. The Senate, prodded into action by Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, had launched federal hearings on violent games. These hearings, and the quality of testimony they attracted, personified video games as a bloodthirsty, sexist sociopath that inured children to the sight of blood and whispered in their ear to start fires and disembowel clergymen. The characterization caught on with the news media, and Jack quickly came to feel like he was under suspicion from every normal, hard-working adult American. Jack despised the idea that because he played games, he was, de facto, a gamer: a nascent class of offender capable of every type of hate crime.
  This all explained how thrilled he was to be summoned to his daughter’s elementary school for a parent-teacher meeting, the teacher brandishing Exhibit A: a confiscated copy of the game Ultima VIII: Pagan, whose cover art was emblazoned with a large, fiery pentagram.
  Jack sat in a chair before the teacher’s desk, his legs crossed with complete contempt. Amanda looked pissed too, although probably not for the same idealistic reasons.
  “This,” said Sharon Stewart, tapping the game box, “is a pentagram. This is titled Pagan. These are satanic symbols. When we ask our students to bring in items from home for show and tell, we are not asking them to show off smut.”
  “It’s not smut,” Jack protested. “This is the sequel to Ultima VII. That’s a classic.”
  “To Kill A Mockingbird is a classic.”
  “Look,” said Jack, attempting reason and laying his elbows on the teacher’s desk in a gesture of down-home solidarity, “my daughter likes games. They can look dark or frightening from the outside, I admit. But this game is about as disturbing as Tolkein. Or Star Wars. It’s all high fantasy adventure. It’s completely innocent.”
  Sharon Stewart stared over the rim of her glasses. “I think Senator Lieberman would see it differently.”
  “We’re sorry she brought it in,” said Amanda evenly. “What exactly is the problem?”
  “This is the problem. Computer games. I’m following closely what’s being said in the Senate hearings. Have you got a copy of Mortal Kombat in your house, Mr. Heller? Do you have Night Trap? That masquerades as a computer game when in reality it’s a training tool for the systematic rape and murder of young women.” Sharon gave Amanda a calculated look.
  Jack couldn’t understand how this woman was ever permitted entrance to the city of San Francisco.
  “Lieberman is scared of what, as an old, old man, he doesn’t get,” Jack said. “Games are harmless. All that’s going on in the Senate right now is that it’s video games’ turn to be a bogeyman. Just like rock and roll, and comic books, and rap, and skateboards, and music videos, and Nick Nolte, it’s just video games’ turn to be the thing that ignorant people are afraid will corrupt the youth of today.”
  “Well,” said the teacher, “as it so happens, I have a sister who is a staffer for Senator Lieberman, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want your comments to get back to him.”
  “What, are you seriously threatening me? Is Joseph Lieberman going to get me fired?”
  “You have no idea what he’s capable of.”
  Amanda was clearly exhausted with this bullshit. “Look. Again, we’re sorry that Nadia brought something into class that might have been upsetting. We are. We’re sorry. We’ll be more careful about this sort of thing in the future. Is there anything else?”
  Sharon leaned back in her chair. “Nadia spends too much time talking about computer games, and she’s the only one. I’m worried that she just isn’t getting along well with others. She’s sad all the time.”
  “My daughter is not sad,” snapped Amanda. “She’s adorable.”
  “Like Winona Ryder,” said Jack.
  “It’s not me that you have to convince,” said Sharon. “Tell this to the other kids in the class. She isn’t relating to them. She isn’t making friends. The other children find her too competitive, too aggressive.”
  “Those are good qualities!” said Jack.
  “She won’t pay any attention to current events, or sports, or literature. She doesn’t do well in gym. She is only interested in computer and video games. I have been in the school system for twenty years and I have never seen anything like this. What are you teaching her at home?”
  This was too much for Jack. He got up from his chair and pointed a finger at the teacher’s unimpressed expression. “You know what?” Here was the most debilitating insult he could immediately bring to mind.
  “You’re a jerk-off.”

1995

Flanked by two other girls, Nadia Heller sat at the very back of the bus. It was only because the older kids were on a field trip that they could get away with this. Nadia was slightly nervous about a teenage skater with a backwards cap showing up with his burnout, bleached-blond girlfriend – maybe there was a nose piercing somewhere in there as well – and demanding that the girls shove it. On Nadia’s left, Teri removed a piece of chewing gum from her mouth and stuck it to the back of the seat in front of her. This was unreal.
  There was an unusually glamorous quality about Teri and Lydia, Nadia thought. Something about them felt exclusive, like a Babysitters’ Club that only had two people and wasn’t stupid. Since meeting them recently, they had both taken a liking to Nadia, and although she wasn’t fully clear on the reason, she naturally assumed that they were responding to her warm, charming personality. Nonetheless, she was desperate to impress, and so was bringing them to her house this afternoon.
  Teri asked Nadia to rank the guys from Friends, to which Nadia had to admit she had never seen the show. Lydia patted her on the shoulder and assured her that it didn’t really matter as long as she put Matthew Perry first. Nadia thought the correct answer was ‘who cares’, because boys were awful. Her mother teased her about this attitude, calling it an age-appropriate stereotype. It was nonetheless borne out by the actual boys in Nadia’s class, one of whom that day had tried to burp the Star-Spangled Banner. The Friends discussion seemed weirdly adult to Nadia, although marginally less boring than her parents’ definition of adult, which included watching legal dramas at 10:00 PM, frosty dinner parties and debating whether the new Beatles song Free as a Bird was any good or not.
  The girls made it off the bus with their cool kid status undisturbed. Playing the hostess, Nadia escorted Teri and Lydia through the hallways of her house and into her bedroom. The room, whose only wall decoration was a poster of someone on a motorcycle, most prominently featured a small television on the dresser, hooked up to a Super Nintendo.
  “I have Chrono Trigger in there,” said Nadia, pointing. “That’s such an amazing game.” The Super Nintendo sat next to a stack of Electronic Gaming Monthly issues.
  “Let me show you what else I have,” she said, and found a game box that she held up proudly. “Oh! This is King’s Quest. This one is so great. You get to be this beautiful princess who goes on this really cool adventure. It’s totally like watching a cartoon.”
  Nadia indicated the motorcycle poster. “That’s from a game called Full Throttle. Made by the guys who did Monkey Island. It’s so awesome.”
  “That looks like something boys would be into.” Lydia had palpable disdain in her voice this time when she said ‘boys’.
  “Well, maybe,” said Nadia, “but I really like it too because it’s such a cool story, and it’s really funny and there’s this really cool girl in it.”
  Teri surveyed the room. “Why are you so interested in all this crap?”
  “What?”
  “Video games,” said Teri, giving Nadia a disbelieving look. “My dorky older brother plays these and nobody likes him. You don’t have to waste your time with these.”
  “What? Why not?”
  “Because, you know,” said Lydia, trying to convince her, “you’re really pretty.”

1996

It was the very first time that Nadia Heller had been handed a note in class; a moment she had anticipated her entire elementary school career. ‘You have a secret admirer’, is what she had expected. ‘Do you like Ryan? Check one: yes/no’, would also have been welcome, if predictable.
  In fact, the note, passed to her by the girl sitting to her left, though its origins were a mystery, read: ‘Hey, I heard you like video games. I do too. Meet me after class across the street outside the parking garage.’ Nadia had never conceived of a note exactly like this, but she was delighted nonetheless. After a full day of tuning out the teacher and never raising her hand, she straightened her posture with a smile on her face, and volunteered to answer the teacher’s next question. She got it wrong.
  Nadia waited outside the parking garage as school let out, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. It was worth it, she thought, for her mom to freak out by not returning home immediately after school, if the result was meeting a potential soulmate, or someone who had a PlayStation she could use.
  Left foot to right foot.
  She was alarmed by the sight of a group of surly kids spilling en masse out of the school gates. Not that she was a detective or anything, but this clearly meant that even the students held back for detention were getting to go home now.
  Right foot, left foot.
  A custodian locked the gates. She didn’t even want to check her wristwatch at this point.
  Nadia slouched down on the pavement.
  This sucked.

In the living room, Amanda read one of her grown-up books; something in small print and was about thirty-year-olds with office jobs and mature relationships living in apartments or something dull like that. You wouldn’t catch a Final Fantasy character in a mature relationship, Nadia thought, as she lay out on the couch, plying a hairpin apart. Amanda had her favorite Velvet Underground album on the CD player; although when Nadia was in the room, Amanda would only ever let the song Sunday Morning play, and then keep that on repeat. To Nadia, then, the Velvet Underground was just the band that did that pleasant, soothing song about Sunday mornings.
  “What do you want to do for your birthday party?” Amanda asked.
  “Nothing.”
  “You’re turning nine years old, Nadia; you can’t do nothing. What kind of cake do you want?”
  “I told you, I don’t want to do anything.”
  “Well, I know that when Marie’s daughter has her birthday party next month, everybody’s going to have a sleepover and have pizza, and then go and see Harriet the Spy.”
  Nadia bent the hairpin so far back that it snapped. “Other kids are stupid.”

Nadia left class for lunch and as she walked across the playground she saw Teri sitting with a couple of other kids that she only recognized as the heirs to the junior prom throne. Teri wasn’t in her class anymore, and she thought it would be polite to at least say hi to her as she walked past.
  “Hi, Teri.”
  “Hi, Nadia.”
  One of the girls, Allison snapped to attention. “Oh wow, Nadia? You’re that girl who’s like obsessed with video games?”
  Nadia stopped walking. “I play them. So what?”
  “What’s your problem?” asked Daniel, another prom scion. “Do you not like normal things or something? Do you, like, not watch TV?”
  “Not really.”
  “Teri told us how your room is like stacked with that video game stuff,” said Daniel. “Do you spend so much time in all these fantasy worlds because you don’t have any friends? You know you’re a loser, right? I mean I just want to make sure that you know.”
  Nadia looked at Teri, who shrugged.
  “Fuck you,” said Nadia, to everybody.
  “Whoa!” said Allison, “she’s so hostile! Calm down. Hey, you might not know this because all you do is play video games, but it’s not really cool to be all bitchy and violent.”
  Nadia couldn’t think of anything further to say, so she just said swore again and ran across the playground out of their sight. Finding a vacant space behind a stairwell, she sat down and buried her head in her hands. Her eyes stung and she pounded at her legs in frustration.
  “Hey,” said an unfamiliar voice, “do you like video games?”
  Nadia looked up, more pissed than ever. It was some boy whose name she didn’t remember, looking at her with guarded interest.
  “Yeah,” she said cautiously.
  “Me too.”

1997

The grounds of Nadia's school were divided into three large outdoor courtyards. During recess, the southern courtyard was typically occupied by the school's younger children; establishing a sort of hierarchy through which the older and cooler you became, the further north you moved. Nadia accepted it was not a coincidence that the southern courtyard was where she and Evan usually hung out; at the periphery of the home of kids several grades their junior.
  Evan had in his hands a cloth map of Brittania, the world from Ultima VII. Drawing an invisible path on the map with his finger, Evan recounted his recent adventures in the game to Nadia, who silently judged his playthrough against her own experience. Nadia had lent Evan her copy of the game as part of her ongoing campaign to wean him off two-dimensional platformers and train him on long, cerebral role-playing games. Although this finally seemed to be working, Nadia was pretty bored of hearing about Ultima all the time.
  “I'm so over Ultima,” she announced. “I'm really getting into more sophisticated games like this new one Fallout. I’m going to make games like this when I grow up. It's so intense. It's like Ultima but you get to shoot people's heads off and there's all this swearing. It's totally adult.”
  Evan reminded Nadia that his parents only bought him one game a year and weren't likely to go for something that was ‘totally adult’. Nadia said he could borrow her copy.
  “Hey,” someone called out, “look at you two sitting together!”
  Daniel had become much more openly abrasive after being abruptly cut out of his circle of prom friends, for reasons that Nadia couldn’t care less about.
  “Leave us alone,” Nadia said.
  “What? I just wanted to know when you two are going to get married.”
  “Get lost.”
  “You’re probably going to have to,” Daniel continued. “You don’t have any other friends.”
  Nadia had been hearing this kind of thing way too often. “We’re not getting married.”
  “What? Why not? Evan, you’re spending so much time together, you want to marry her, right?” Evan was avoiding eye contact with anyone. “Do you want to kiss her? Go on, kiss her. You know he wants it, Nadia.”
  Nadia felt her cheeks flush. She thought that she was more angry than embarrassed; or, she was a little embarrassed, and that made her furious.
  “I guess he’s not into you. What are you reading, Evan? Let me see that.” Daniel made a grab for the cloth map and didn’t even try and pretend it was an accident when he tore it apart.
  “What is this, anyway?” He inspected the map pieces. “Some weird video game fantasy world? Grow up.” Daniel threw the map back in Evan’s face. Nadia gave him her best looks-could-kill glare.
  “You’re a dick,” she added for emphasis.
  “Seriously,” he said to Nadia, ignoring her, “why do you play these things all the time? Get a life. Maybe if you did other things you’d have more than one friend. Instead, you’ve just got this gay kid over here.”
  Nadia said nothing. She heard the sound of her ragged, hot breath echo throughout her body. Her vision, previously fixed on Daniel’s pro wrestling t-shirt, waved in and out of focus.
  “You know where you’re going to end up, playing video games all the time?” Daniel asked Nadia. “You know my dad works with your dad? He says he’s a total loser.”
  Nadia lunged forward off the seat and, throwing her fist, hit Daniel in the face. Daniel reeled back, as Nadia kept her stance and stared him down. Daniel glanced around, considering what just happened, then looked back at her and laughed.
  “Jesus,” he said, “that didn’t even hurt.”
  Nadia immediately punched him again, harder, and this time Daniel’s hands flew up to cover his face.
  “FATALITY!” she screamed so loud that it silenced the entire courtyard.
  Daniel dropped to his knees, and as he did, his hands fell away, her punch having spun open a faucet of blood that poured out over the concrete.
   Nadia realized that this would need to be explained.

1998

Immediately upon opening the door, Amanda Heller broke out into a fit of delight. “Oh, sweetheart. You look beautiful.”
  Grace, the neighbor’s daughter, acknowledged Amanda’s adulation with a tight-lipped smile. She stood in front of her beaming mother.
  “This is such a wonderful costume,” cooed Amanda, running her eye over the pink and white silk of Grace’s princess costume. “Did your mommy make this?”
  “No,” said Grace, “it was thirteen dollars.”
  “Oh. Well, come inside, please.” Amanda ushered Grace and her mother inside. “This is so nice of you to take her out, Lisa, Nadia really appreciates it.”
  “No problem.”
  “Nadia will be on her best behavior.”
  Jack rounded the corner. “Hey, Lisa, Grace. What a great princess costume.”
  Grace smiled again.
  “Hey, you’re Princess Grace,” Jack said, this just occurring to him. “Don’t get in a car tonight, honey.”
  Amanda looked at her husband like he was mentally damaged.
  “Nadia,” called Jack down the corridor, “Grace is here, do you want to come out?”
  Nadia reluctantly emerged from behind her father into the foyer. Her long brown hair was tied back in a pigtail, and she was wearing a teal tank top and khaki shorts fastened by a large black belt.
  “What are you, Nadia?” asked Lisa.
  “I’m Lara Croft,” she said. “She’s a tomb raider.”
  “Oh,” said Lisa, endearingly, “is that a character from the Simpsons?”
  “It’s a character from a series of action and exploration-focused video games,” said Jack.
  “How wonderful,” Lisa deadpanned.
  “Nadia wants to make video games when she gets older,” Jack said.
  “Why don’t you ask Nadia what she wants to do?” said Amanda, her tone dripping with level hostility.
  “What do you want to do, baby?”
  “Make video games.”
  Jack smiled. “See?”
  Amanda stared at Jack evenly. “Nadia, go and play with Grace for a minute. Lisa, come and have a glass of wine with us.”
  Lisa looked like she’d rather be anywhere else, but was irresistibly enticed by the prospect of a free drink. Jack filed away that little observation for future reference.

Grace followed Nadia into her room, complaining as soon as she was out of her mother’s earshot. “I wish I could have a badass costume like yours,” she said bitterly. “I’m eleven. I don’t want to be a princess.”
  “Why are you then?” asked Nadia, sitting on her bed.
  “My mom made me. You’re cool. Your parents let you do whatever you want.”
  “I guess so.”
  “What are you dressed as again?”
  “Oh, it’s Lara Croft,” she said, getting to her feet. “she’s this video game heroine. I think she’s awesome. She’s an adventurer and she fights guys and saves the world and all that stuff. It’s so cool for a girl character to be like that, I think. I’d much rather be a tomb raider than a princess. How strong do you feel being a princess?”
  “It feels like I’m here for some guy to save me,” said Grace.
  “Yeah. Exactly. Lara Croft, though, she does the saving.”
  “That does sound cool.”
  Nadia flicked through the jewel cases lying in a disorderly pile on her computer desk, and finally produced the second Tomb Raider game.
  “Here it is. Look at that.”
  Grace took the case from Nadia. The three-dimensional render of Lara Croft on the cover was dressed more or less like Nadia, albeit equipped with handguns and other crucial distinctions.
  “Look at her boobs, though,” said Grace. “These are huge. Like, stupidly huge.”
  “I guess.”
  “I mean, you were talking like this should be a role model for girls or something, but this is just something that was made for guys to look at. Right? How is this better than being a princess? I don’t look like this. Nobody looks like this.”
  “Well,” Nadia paused. “It’s very complicated.”

1999

Nadia realized far too late that the worst thing she could have done the day after the attack was to show up at school as if nothing had really happened. When they first heard the news, it was surreal but somehow, however inappropriately, okay. The story broke when a girl in Nadia’s class got a call from her parents asking that she come home immediately. It was not because she had any relation to the event, but rather all-purpose parental protectiveness that would quickly become overbearing. When the details emerged later that day, the room settled into a collective unease even as the teacher tried to continue with the scheduled lesson. Nobody cried or said anything, but Nadia quietly gripped the edge of her desk and thought about what a weird feeling it was to be safe only by virtue of being unimportant and uninvolved.
  That evening and the next day, images and theories about the shooters began to propagate. It didn’t even occur to Nadia, who was simultaneously wrapped up in and repulsed by the unfolding human drama, that it was a horrible time to be disaffected.
  In general, Nadia couldn’t find much reason to put up with the world – or at least the adolescent world, after all the shit she’d had to endure for the past four years. Although she was human and was always going to care about what other people thought of her, she’d stopped making a show of it. She’d started dressing all in black, wearing black nail polish, even dying her already dark hair a couple of shades darker. She wanted her new look to advertise her complete lack of interest in what was considered to be popular or social. It was an almost-goth-but-not-quite kind of vibe, because even she thought that looked a little gross.
  Nadia had heard, like everyone had, that the killers were aggressive, antisocial, unlikable misfits, and because naturally she didn’t like to think along these lines, it didn’t click for her until the day after the shooting that that was her type. She was that type. And she was used to kids teasing her, mocking her, and that was never cool with her, but the day after was something different. She noticed the stray looks, she caught the whispered conversations, and this time it wasn’t mockery. It was suspicion. Before, you never had to wonder whether somebody was capable of an attack like this because it was incomprehensible. They were thinking now, Nadia could tell, about whether she was capable of that. Whether she would do that. And the thought that anyone would ever ask that of themselves made her sick.
  In the girls’ bathroom, alone, she furiously tried to scratch the black enamel from her fingernails and rubbed her face with tap water to wash away the makeup until the skin around her eyes turned red.

That night, after dinner, Nadia was called from her room. Jack walked her in silence to the kitchen and took a seat next to a sober Amanda. He gestured for her to sit.
  Amanda cleared her throat. “We’ve been hearing,” she said, “about what happened at the other school. Those… killers, those horrible people, didn’t get along with anyone. They listened to violent music and watched violent movies, and, yes, played violent video games.”
  Nadia rolled her eyes, expecting her father to do the same.
  “Listen to me, young lady,” Amanda continued. “You’re all dressed in black, you don’t like other kids, you don’t want to go out or do anything except stay in your room. We are worried about you. We are worried about how you have been acting. You are surrounded by violence.”
  “Come on! Mom! I am not a freak.”
  “You don’t like other kids,” Amanda repeated.
  “They make fun of me. I hate them.”
  “Do you understand that what those boys did is wrong?” Amanda asked.
  “Oh my God!” Nadia threw up her hands. “Leave me alone!”
  Nadia jumped up from the table and ran back to her room, throwing herself flat onto her bed. Amanda appeared in the doorway seconds later, followed by Jack.
  “Do not walk away from me, Nadia Rose Heller. Look at what you spend your time with.” Amanda pulled a random game box from Nadia’s shelving; it turned out to be Tomb Raider.
  “She’s holding guns in her hand. Is this what you think is cool?” She dropped the box on the carpet.
  “I don’t even like her anymore,” yelled Nadia, lifting her head up and matching Amanda in her rare display of brazen antagonism.
  “What about this one? Fallout? Half-Life? More guns, Nadia. You cannot have this be your life. You cannot.”
  “They are not real,” said Nadia, whose throat was starting to constrict, “don’t treat me like a freak.”
  “Playing these is one thing, Nadia,” said Amanda, “your father used to play these, but you are hostile. You are moody and you are angry and I do not understand it. I will not let you be like this.”
  “I’m sorry I’m not obviously so perfect like you are. People hate me and now you hate me. I hate you. Get out. Get out of my room.”
  Amanda glared at her now openly weeping daughter. “This conversation is not finished.” She turned and left, leaving Jack in the hallway.
  “Dad,” said Nadia, crying, “come on. You can’t think I’m like this.”
  “Nadia,” said Jack softly, “I don’t understand why you don’t have friends. I don’t know why you choose to be so angry.”
   “Why does it matter? I’m not a psycho. Why can’t you understand that?”
  Nadia buried her head in a pillow. “Please leave me alone.” She heard Jack close the door. She picked up the Tomb Raider box that her mom had left on the floor. Lara Croft looked so content, so happy, Nadia finally saw, with being a natural born killer. The hero was a hero by virtue of killing hundreds of people. Lara Croft looked so uncomplicated, and Nadia had never been more pissed off with her before. She put her foot through the box.
  Nadia turned the television on and lay there on the bed watching legal dramas and local news and David Letterman until she drifted off to sleep.

2000

It was the first day of the new school year, and Nadia didn’t give more than a second’s thought to what she would wear. She pulled on the old, red Atari t-shirt that used to belong to her dad, as if it were a t-shirt like any other. Not that Nadia was keeping track, but the wardrobe choice completely went without comment for what was almost the entire day. After school, she waited outside the gates for her mom to pick her up. She was standing there next to Alyssa French, one of the new girls in her class, someone she would probably never talk to ordinarily.
  “This is no good,” said Alyssa, waving a hand up and down Nadia’s chest. “An Atari t-shirt. That’s so retro, and not in a good way. Don’t get offended; I’m just trying to give you some advice.”
  Nadia shrugged. “I really didn’t think there was a problem with it.”
  “There’s no problem exactly,” Alyssa winced, “but it’s not particularly fashionable. It’s not au current. Personally, that retro, cliquey look is not what I would be going for. You have very delicate features, you should be styling yourself in something classic. Something timeless. An Atari t-shirt? That’s not very timeless.”
  Alyssa indicated her pants. “Like these. White, low-rise jeans. This outfit is very chic. Something to learn from.”
  Nadia reviewed her own dark denim jeans. “Maybe you’re right.”
  “Take it from me. You want a look that lasts.” Alyssa set her hands on her hips and looked off into the distance. “Anyway, I can’t spend any more time on you. I have Smash Mouth tickets."

2001

Nadia never thought for an instant that the weekend could lose its appeal. Here she was, though, clicking her heels and sitting quietly in her dad’s new apartment. Jack and Amanda had been separated since November, and Nadia thought it was very considerate of her parents to wait for a whole two months after the biggest national tragedy in their lifetimes to announce they were divorcing each other. She supposed the separation had technically begun earlier than that; Nadia just not having picked up on the subtle clues like her parents sleeping in separate rooms.
  The city apartment, Jack’s first ‘permanent’ set-up after the hotel room, was remarkably neat and spacious, with stairs leading up to a bedroom and bathroom. As Nadia was getting used to thinking of her parents as individual entities, it was becoming clear to her that her dad actually made a lot of money.
  “Hey,” said Jack, coming down the stairs, “have you worked out what you’re going to do for Christmas?”
  “I think Mom’s family is getting together for lunch. We’re going to Grandma and Granddad’s place.”
  Jack’s non-verbal reaction to that demonstrated that he had finally found the silver lining in no longer being married to his wife. Nadia thought it was the first time Jack had been honest with her about the separation.
  “Maybe I can come round Christmas morning,” Nadia offered.
  “Yeah. That would be good.” Jack made his way to his new en suite kitchen. “Do you want some hot chocolate?”
  “Okay.” Nadia pulled open one of Jack’s still unpacked boxes, containing stacks of CDs.
  “What are you listening to these days?” Jack asked her, noting this.
   “I’m not really listening to anything at the moment.” Nadia flicked through Jack’s excessive Billy Joel collection. Despite not listening to that much music anymore, she still knew enough to know that even one Billy Joel album was in itself an excessive collection.
  Jack sat down at the table with a mug of hot chocolate for Nadia, which she happily accepted because sipping it meant she wasn’t expected to talk.
  “How’s work?” she said anyway. This was something Amanda used to ask.
  “Good. Yeah. We’re working on a new project. I’m actually going to be up in Seattle for a week in January, at a meeting.”
  “Oh, okay. Should I write those dates down?”
  “I’m not sure of the specific days. I’ll email them to you later.”
  “Okay, cool.”
  She sipped the hot chocolate.
  “What did you do at school this week?”
  “Uh, well, English and Social Studies were fun. I liked those. And we’re studying for an algebra test. It’s kind of difficult. I don’t know.”
  “Oh, I can help you with that. Yeah. Bring your textbooks over next weekend and I can go over that with you.”
  “Alright. Thanks.”
  Nadia took another sip. Jack was looking like he wished he had something to drink. It wasn’t that she loved her mom more than her dad, Nadia assured herself, but at least Mom was still at the house, which had a room for Nadia to escape to.
  “Oh,” she said, “have you played GTA 3?”
  “Yeah, I have actually,” said Jack. “It’s very good.”
  “What do you think of all the controversy about it?”
  “It’s basically the same old story. The media’s sensationalizing and exaggerating everything.”
  “That’s what I thought.”
  “Though it is definitely violent and you shouldn’t be playing it. But what’s surprising about the game, I think, and what’s getting missed in the mainstream, is just how good it is. It’s actually significant. The 3D open city thing is such a revelation, and so well handled. They really brought it to life, and now that they did this it’s so obvious that this is where games will be going.”
  “I wish more games had picked up on that thing of having this huge, immediately accessible game world, like Fallout had or something.”
   “Yeah, rather than that more siphoned-off, linear mission structure kind of thing. It’s hard to do, I’m sure, but when it works like it does here, and when you get to explore it in three dimensions, it’s, just, I mean, wow. It’s perfect.”
  “Yeah,” Nadia nodded enthusiastically. “I bet.”
  Jack nodded and waited for her to say something.

That weekend, the first one Nadia had spent alone with her father, Jack had given her his copy of the new PlayStation 2 game Ico, along with his highest recommendation. It was, he said, just as important and potentially influential in its own way as Grand Theft Auto III, and not being age-restricted, it was something that she could play without Jack feeling like a bad parent. Nadia played it on the console hooked up to her bedroom TV over the rest of the week. This was the same week that Amanda took up part-time work and Nadia came home to an empty house after school each day. Her father was right: it was a great game, though so far it had failed to elicit the kind of emotional response it obviously had in Jack.
  It was a short game, too, and on Wednesday night, after Amanda cooked dinner for the two of them, she returned to her room for Ico’s final stretch. The end of the game was unusual amongst video games in that it was not especially intense or frustrating. Lying on her bed, Nadia figured out the solution to Ico’s final challenge quickly enough, and passively moved her thumbs around the controller to complete it. The final non-interactive movie that concluded the game was relatively downbeat as video games go. Nadia acknowledged emotionally that it was sad, but nothing prepared her for the uncontrollable, racking sobs that abruptly overcame her and lasted throughout the game’s entire credit sequence. She wept with her palms covering her face, and Amanda paused in the open doorway.
  “You’re crying at a video game?” she said, bemused. “You see something new every day.”

2002

Tyler was Nadia’s date. Jack forced himself to keep that thought in his mind if he had any hope of dealing with this sad new reality. Tyler was Nadia’s date. Tyler was also in Jack’s apartment, waiting patiently at the kitchen table while Nadia was in the bathroom upstairs getting ready. Jack swore that Nadia was taking about twenty minutes longer than was necessary to ‘get ready’.
  Tyler was a shaggy-haired dude with glasses. He was either fifteen or sixteen, and a student at Nadia’s high school. It was their third date, but Jack’s first time meeting him. He did not consider this to be a match made in heaven. The thought of Nadia becoming the future Mrs. Tyler briefly crossed his mind and nearly made him vomit.
  “Do you want something to drink, Tyler?”
  “Oh, no thanks, Mr. Heller.”
  Jack leaned over the kitchen counter. He guessed that he had an obligation to make conversation. He thought that while he had Tyler here he might as well ask him something he was legitimately interested in.
   “Hey, what do you like about Nadia?” he asked, genuinely curious.
   “Oh, uh,” Tyler looked unsure of what to say. He seemed like he was about to say he didn’t know, but realized saying that would be a mistake in front of Nadia’s father. “She’s fun. She’s really fun.”
  Nadia came down from the stairs, and for a minute it was like some movie where the glamorous-looking woman silences the crowd as she descends the spiral gold staircase. This was the closest Jack had ever seen his daughter to being made up. She was wearing a long blue dress and eye shadow. Eye shadow! Jack thought. This was a bad sign.
  “Hey,” said Nadia, taking Tyler’s hand, “are you ready to go?”
  Tyler stood up. “Yeah, wow, you look great. Bye, Mr. Heller, nice meeting you.
  “Bye, Dad.”
  “Okay!” said Jack, waving lamely, “bye! Have a good time! Be safe!”
  Nadia and Tyler closed the door behind them and Jack flopped down on the couch with the strongest urge he’d ever had to drink massively.

Tyler had taken her out for dinner at some Italian place where they struggled for things to talk about other than the latest high school drama. They agreed that the Social Studies teacher was attempting to conceal a pregnancy and that Jessica Booker was a bitch. The meal was basically okay, she thought, and she didn’t have to pay for it either. She’d noticed Tyler wince when the bill came, and this made her crack up on the inside.
  Tyler had parked outside Jack’s apartment, and as Nadia thanked him for dinner, he asked her to wait, because he said he had something to say.
  “You’re so fun to be around,” said Tyler. “I don’t know how explain it more than that. I think you’re fun. You’re really fun. And you have really attractive eyes and your voice is beautiful. I just think that you are so impressive and I want to spend more time with you. There’s something addictive about you. It’s something that just makes my heart beat faster. When I say you’re fun, I mean… compelling. Other girls don’t have that. Some girls are really pretty but it’s all flash. But with you, you’re really pretty, and there’s some, uh, something special that you have that makes me want to be around you and hold you and keep coming back to you.”
  Tyler stared into her deeply.
  Nadia glanced around, equivocating. Maybe this was as good as it was going to get. She looked back and Tyler and arched an eyebrow. “Can you take off your glasses at least?”
  “Yeah,” said Tyler, pulling them off, “definitely.”
  Nadia sighed and leaned across the seats, sensing the heat of Tyler’s gross sweat as she came closer. She shut her eyes tight and kept them that way as she pressed her lipstick-smothered lips against his.

2003

Under the hum of the blow-dryer, Nadia sang into the mirror at a carefully calculated level that her father probably wouldn’t hear.
  “We’re the kids in America,” she vocalized to the backing track playing in her mind. She helped sweep back her blond-streaked hair with her free hand. “We’re the kids in America. WHOA-OH!”
  At that last part, Nadia closed her eyes and twirled, her outstretched arm sending a bottle of mouthwash flying to the floor.
  “Everybody live for the music go round.” Leaning closer to the mirror, she put in gold earrings, then pulled a pink jacket from the hook on the bathroom door and tried it on. Checking out her reflection, she came to the conclusion that this looked awesome.

“What, are you going to a costume party or something?” asked Jack as Nadia came down the stairs.
  “No, Dad. It’s a look.”
  “People didn’t actually dress like that in the eighties, you know. I would remember.”
  “Then they were missing out.”
  Nadia cracked open a bottle of water at the kitchen counter and checked the clock on the wall. “Do me a favor, Dad, when this guy shows up, don’t call him a jerk-off. Actually, stop calling my dates jerk-offs period. When you say that, sometimes they leave right then.”
  “I was doing you a favor with that last guy. He was a jerk-off. I understand if you want to go out with someone who’s into games, but you can afford to be a little more selective than that.”
  “So what if he doesn’t have your perfect critical taste?”
  “At least don’t go out with somebody who’s obsessed with one console over the other. That gets creepy. That’s just a weird sort of possessiveness that you should know, from playing video games, to stay the hell away from. He used the phrase ‘GayStation 2’. That was not a healthy relationship.”
  “It wasn’t a relationship. We went bowling.”
  Nadia took another swig from the bottle and looked at the clock. Thirty seconds until he was supposed to knock on the door.
  “Anyway, please don’t call this guy a jerk-off, otherwise it’s over. But, let me just warn you,” she said quickly, “and please don’t overreact to this, but he is kind of very pro-Sony and, yeah, he really hates Microsoft, and spells it with a dollar sign and

2004

Amanda Addison had changed her hair. Jack not having seen her in three months, Amanda’s dark, choppy bangs were new to him, and he had to admit they were flattering. Jack ran a hand through his hair self-consciously. Jack and Amanda sat next to one another on green plastic chairs arranged in the middle of Nadia’s high school auditorium. The room was steadily filling up with other proud – but preemptively board at the prospect of a two-hour-plus ceremony – parents.
  “I’ve been reading a lot about separation anxiety,” announced Amanda. “I think overall I’ve been reasonably lucky. I missed out on postpartum depression, and even you didn’t manage to screw up my life too badly. But separation anxiety… maybe I’m overdue for something to destroy me.”
  “Yeah, I wonder what it would be like to experience some sort of separation anxiety,” said Jack.
  “She’s suddenly not going to be there in my house anymore. My little daughter’s going to be gone forever.”
  “I also can’t imagine what that would be like.”
  Amanda turned to Jack. “You’re only going to be seeing her a couple of times a year. Doesn’t that bother you?”
  “Of course it bothers me. But it’s not like she’s going to the Sorbonne, she’s going to Stanford. This isn’t the eighteenth century where we send her away on a passenger ship and the next time we see her she’s married to a sea captain and has two children.” Jack paused. “At least, she better not be.”
  Amanda shrugged. “I guess.”
  “On the upside, though,” said Jack, “Stanford University! Our little girl is going to Stanford University.”
  “Yes. It’s very heartwarming.”
  “Don’t overdo yourself on the emotion, you ice queen. Remember that time when Nadia’s teacher called us in for a meeting and told us how bad she was at everything? Stanford University! Man, I wish I could see her fat face now.”
  Amanda checked her watch. “What did you get Nadia?”
  “For graduation? As a gift?”
  “Yeah.”
  Jack stared blankly. “What did you get her?”
  “That new cellphone she was asking for.”
  “Oh. Okay, good.”
  “What did you get – wait, jeez, I wonder if I can possibly guess. Jack, did you get her a video game?”
  “No.”
  Amanda looked truly shocked. “No?”
  “I wrote her a letter.”
  “A letter?”
  “Yeah.”
  “What did you write in it?”
  “None of your business.”
  “Fine.”
  “Also,” said Jack, grudgingly, “I got her a video game. But the letter was the main thing.”
  The school’s teenaged, volunteer sound technician approached the podium on the stage and checked the microphone levels.
  “I’m not so sure about what she’s got planned for Stanford, though,” said Jack. “Media studies? English literature? I mean, after all this talk about video games I was kind of hoping she’d express an interest in computer science or art or music or something more overtly connected to game design.”
  “Oh, get over yourself.”
  “What?”
  Amanda raised a single condescending eyebrow at him. “She is a young woman now. For the love of God, you have to stop living vicariously through her. Let her decide what her own interests are.”
  “Nadia likes video games.”
  “She doesn’t, though. She likes you. For reasons that elude me.” Amanda gave him the saddest, sweetest smile he’d ever seen. “All your life you acted like playing video games was how you made Daddy happy.”
  “That’s not true.”
  “Yes it is. And it’s fine if you didn’t mean it that way. But don’t pressure her anymore.”
  The lights in the back of the auditorium dimmed, and a student pulled the back doors shut.
  “Get ready to applaud our daughter,” said Amanda.
  “I’m going to applaud louder than you.”
  “Like hell you are.”

2005

The inevitable drawback to a life of playing and collecting video games, Nadia discovered, was moving to Stanford and having to reduce all her possessions to the contents of five cardboard boxes. Getting good boxes was a task in itself; high-quality storage boxes proving themselves as valuable a commodity as cigarettes in prison. Nadia had forced herself to dispassionately cull her game and console collection, eliminating everything but the titles she knew she’d want to play again, and consoles that she thought would be most worthwhile for the final year of their lifespan before being phased out completely. Halfway through the drive from San Francisco to Stanford, Nadia realized she didn’t even know if her dorm room had a television, and she nearly started clawing at the windows.
  Nadia’s box of games and game paraphernalia sat partially unpacked on the dorm room floor, some cases strewn out on her new bed alongside approximately two thousand dollars worth of film, English and history textbooks. In the process of moving in, she only briefly met her roommate, a blonde named Emma Hadley, who instantly had to disappear somewhere, leaving Nadia in the cramped double room by herself without either of them having formed an impression of the other. It was just as well, Nadia, thought, since she’d become slightly self-conscious about revealing her game-playing habits to a total stranger, and if this particular stranger didn’t react well then it would be all the worse. She wasn’t sure how she’d be able to hide this part of the life from Emma, and, as evidenced by the GameCube sitting prominently on her bedspread, she wasn’t really trying anyway. Nadia had been bracing herself for the moment where her roommate would glance over her game collections, look at Nadia, and either silently or very loudly wonder what was all this garbage.
  Emma flew through the door, as Nadia stood awkwardly by the bed. She cast an eye over the whole room and looked at Nadia.
  “Hey,” she said, the second sentence of hers that Nadia had heard, “my friends and I are going out for a drink, you should come.”
  “Uh, yeah, okay,” said Nadia, “I’m eighteen, though.”
  “So what? Come on.” Emma grabbed Nadia’s hand and pulled her out of the room. Nadia, pulling the door shut behind her, still had no idea who Emma Hadley was, but thanked God for her speed-of-sound socializing.

Nadia and Emma, who were in many of the same classes, ranked all of their professors on a scale of who was most likely to sleep with one of their students, get fired for it and write a novel about the experience. Their film studies professor, they agreed, was currently coming third. One time, after he asked Nadia to speak to him after the class ended, he skyrocketed up the list.
  “Nadia,” said the professor, speaking to the shifty college girl at the front of an empty auditorium, “I know that you’re into video games, and I thought you should know that if you wanted to incorporate that into your essay, that would be great. Games are an exciting new form of media that have lots of interesting connections with film and theater and literature, and if you wanted to do an essay that explored those connections, I think that would be very interesting.”
  Nadia blinked. “How do you even know I’m into video games?”
  “You’re wearing a Double Fine t-shirt.”
  “Oh. Okay. Well, thanks, but, I mean, I’ve played video games all my life and I didn’t necessarily come to college to study them more. I’m kind of more interested in learning about things that I’m not already super familiar with.”
  The professor furrowed his brow. “You’re a very strange girl.”

Nadia slammed Erik against her dorm room door, running her hands down from his shoulders and dragging her wet mouth across his lower lip. She felt him adjust his back against the whiteboard that had ‘Emma + Nadia’ written on it within a platonic heart. She fumbled blindly behind Erik for the door handle, pulled it open, and they fell back into the room. Friday night had began with happy hour cocktails at some absurdly impressive hotel, and five hours later Nadia found herself in some pitch black club downing her second-ever shot of tequila, having had her first about thirty seconds earlier. Stumbling through the floor of the club in an all-new zenith of inebriation, she decided that there would be no better end to the evening than to grab the hottest-looking guy to make eye contact with her and pull him into a dance.
  The dorm room was dark, illuminated only by the moon and the adjacent building that seemed to be a lightbulb factory that arranged all its display bulbs in the window and shone them at full power across the street. Nadia fucking hated that building. She lead him by the hand into the room and pushed him onto her bed, assuming that she was aiming right and he wasn’t going to crack his head open on a bookshelf. Nadia somehow resisted the inhumanly powerful urge to blurt out how fucking drunk she was.
  With Erik lying prostrate on the bed, Nadia climbed over him and they kissed again, Nadia awkwardly sliding her legs under his. Totally uncoordinated, her hands were alternatively pulling her hair back from her face, grabbing at his shirt and hooking into his belt. Erik broke off the kiss and sat up abruptly, his right hand canvassing the area of the sheets under his back until he produced a game controller.
  “What is this?” he said.
  “It’s a WaveBird. Take your fucking pants off.”
  Slapping the controller from his hand to the floor, Nadia arched back from Erik and pulled her black sweater over her head, swinging it across the room.
  “What is that?” Erik brushed the back of his hand across Nadia’s chest.
  “What?” She looked down. “This? It’s a Half-Life 2 t-shirt.”
  “No, I mean your necklace.”
  Nadia, who by this point had completely blacked out what she had chosen to wear that morning, held up the pewter necklace closer to her eyes. “It’s one of the Tetris pieces,” she said. “It’s the S-shape. In silver.”
  Erik’s eyes darted to the edge of the room. “And what is this huge stack of video games over there?”
  “What do you mean?”
  Erik sat up, sliding his legs out from under Nadia. “I’m sorry. This is too weird. I feel like there’s something not right here.”
  “What?”
  “It’s like you have a shelf of stuffed animals. I’m sorry, I really have to go.” Erik got up off the bed.
  “What? Where the fuck are you going?” called Nadia.
  “Sorry, Natalie,” said Erik, opening and closing the door.
  Nadia, still on her knees, stared over her shoulder at the door in utter disbelief, before falling onto the bed and pounding the shit out of a pillow. “Fuck! I hate video games! Fuck video games, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! God dammit! Fuck!”
  She collapsed utterly and face first into her bed, and lay there for a minute until a thought occurred.
  “Hey, Emma?”
  No response.
  “Yeah?” said Emma, after a while.
  Nadia paused, her voice muffled by the pillow. “Goodnight, Emma.”
  “Goodnight, Nadia.”

2006

The weekend before Nadia had an important Philosophy essay due, Emma brought her along to the apartment warming party of a couple of her law school friends. Nadia figured she could structure the essay in her head as she socialized, and begin writing the paper on her arm if necessary. To get herself started, she wrote the word ‘introduction’ on her left shoulder and ‘conclusion’ on the back of her hand. Emma was greeted with cheers as she came in the door, and she pointed to Nadia and introduced her to the room as Nadia, who likes video games. Nadia waved meekly.
  “You don’t have to introduce me as Ms. Pac-Man,” Nadia hissed at Emma.
  “They know your interests now. I’m doing you a favor. Get in there.”
  Nadia negotiated her way through the living room looking for a drink, and was called over mid-search by a big guy in a sleeveless t-shirt.
  “Hey,” he said, raising his voice over the Green Day song, “do you play Gears of War?”
  “No, I haven’t yet.”
  “It’s the fucking best game.”
  “Yeah, what do you like about it.”
  “Man, it’s like playing football with chainsaws. Slicing up dudes in multiplayer, it’s, oh, it’s so awesome. The chainsaw goes like this.” He held out his hands and mimed the decline of the chainsaw through its imaginary victim. “NGGGHHHHHHHHH, squirt. Fucking A.”
  Nadia smiled thinly and insincerely.
  “Hey,” he said, “do you have a 360? Give me your Gamertag.”
  Not having any paper, he held out his hand for Nadia to write on. She wearily obliged, writing down a phrase that was one letter removed from her real Gamertag. Moving on, she found a beer in the kitchen, opened it, and then spilled it on her chest when she turned around to see some girl standing six inches away from her face.
  “What kind of baseball game should I get for my little brother?”
  “What?” said Nadia, startled.
  “He’s nine.”
  “What kind of baseball game?”
  “I went into the store and there were like twenty of them.”
  “Oh. Uh. I don’t really know. I don’t play them.”
  “Well, think about it and get back to me.”
  “Yeah. Okay.”
  Shaking her head, Nadia moved back into the crowd with half of her drink in hand. She was looking around for Emma when another guy stopped her.
  “Hey, Nadia, right?” he said, “So you’re into games, do you have a PSP? Or a DS?”
  “I have a DS Lite. Yeah.”
  “Can we take a picture of you with it?”
  “For what?”
  “It’s for our gaming website.”
  She shrugged. “Why do you want a picture of my DS?”
  The guy shook his head. “No, it’s a picture of you with your DS.”
  “What? Why? Doing what with it?”
  “Well, holding it, and, like, licking it.”
  “What?!”
  He narrowed his eyes. “You know.”
  “Get a life!” Nadia emptied the remainder of her drink over his shirt, and took off in the opposite direction.
  “Bitch,” he shouted after her.
  Moving through the crowd, Nadia spotted a face that she recognized, a guy with DiCaprio-ish hair and glasses standing alone, and called out to him.
  “Hey, are you Mark? Are you in my Political Science class?”
  “Oh, yeah, I’ve seen you there. Nadia, right?”
  “Yeah. Hey, let me ask you. Out of all the candidates in the race right now, do you think there’s any Democrat who has a chance of beating Clinton for the nomination?”
  “Yeah, I think some of them have a chance.”
  “I think you’re wrong.” Nadia glanced around. “I’m going outside,” she said to him, tugging lightly on his sleeve. “Come and talk to me.”

Lying on her bed, Nadia plumbed the depths of Emma’s iPod while her roommate was out at a class. She managed to entertain herself for hours, far beyond her expectations, until Emma reentered the room and threw her bag onto a chair.
  “I’m loving these Pavement songs,” Nadia told her. “Boys are dying on these streets!” She faked the drum part with her eyes closed.
  “Yeah, they’re really good.”
  “And while you were gone I listened to this Radiohead song Creep like twenty times in a row. How did I never find out about this stuff before?”
  “You might also like Yo La Tengo,” said Emma, “they’re kind of like a nicer Velvet Underground. Like, if the Velvet Underground sang about summer instead of heroin.”
  “They sang about heroin?”
  “Yeah, and S&M and shit.”
  Nadia stared at her in disbelief. “They did what?” She scrolled through the iPod to find Emma’s Velvet Underground songs. “Holy shit.”

2007

This was the week of student presentations in Nadia’s film studies class. Nadia, selected at random, had been lucky-slash-unlucky enough to give her dissertation on Mulholland Drive in the first timeslot. She’d since checked out for the remainder of the week, and on Thursday, Nadia was sitting through the third ten-minute presentation at the back of the lecture theater, her bored head resting in her bored hand. Jamison, one of the students, stood in front of the podium, reading off his notes, the projector not having kicked in yet.
  “It’s one of the most highly-regarded pieces of work in the medium,” he read. “Prominent industry critics like Gamespot and Gamespy called it one of the most important, seminal video games ever, and if you look at the third-person action games that have followed its release, you can see that its influence is keenly felt. You’ll probably find a consensus amongst video games fans that Gears of War’s accomplishment within its medium is comparable to that of Citizen Kane.
  “Its significance comes from how it subverts the action game genre. While it’s fast-paced and action-packed, it’s very smart and melancholy and personal. When you delve into the game, you’ll see that it’s really the story of a ruined world, and about the emotional toll of death and war. I’m going to show a clip now, this is from one of the game’s trailers.”
  The projector flickered into life, and ran a Gears of War trailer, which coupled footage of the main character walking through the desolate city, curiously caressing the face of a broken statue, with the slow, piano-backed, misery-in-overdrive Gary Jules cover of Mad World; a song that existed to accompany every high school boy’s first break-up. An appreciative hush fell over the room.
  Nadia recalled her first and last time playing Gears of War online, the mic channel broadcasting prolonged silence, intermittently punctuated by coughing and then a slow, sustained orgasm noise. It made her especially uneasy when the other participants started talking and revealed themselves to all be nasal thirteen-year-olds. Nadia had started another game without the headset, but this ended up making her feel like the kind of dude who would protest that he didn’t know that that girl was fifteen.
  The trailer received light applause. The girl sitting to Nadia’s left leaned over and whispered how she never knew video games were this sophisticated. Nadia rolled her eyes.

Nadia critically adjusted her blouse in her wardrobe mirror while Emma lounged on her bed reading an issue of Vogue.
  “I forgot to tell you,” said Emma, “my sister and her kid are hugely into the Wii. Her husband, too, and when my parents go over to her house, they get everyone involved in that thing, what’s it called. Wii Sports. They eat that shit up.”
  “That’s nice,” said Nadia, putting in her earrings.
  Emma looked over the magazine. “Where’s he taking you?”
  “Don’t know.”
  “Just, you know, be safe. Do what comes naturally.”
  “Get out of my life!”

Following dinner, Greg parked the car outside Nadia’s dorm and sighed as he turned off the ignition.
  “I feel though as this is the most revolutionary date I’ve ever been on. It’s so easy to be superficial where you’re concerned. People I know just think you’re fun and pretty and that’s all that they care to know about you. I see something else in you. You are sublime. You’re deeply smart and literate, you challenge my assumptions at every turn. I’m trying to get around your personality, but you have such a unique, peculiar soul. You just shatter my perceptions of what I expect to exist. I’m constantly engaged when I’m with you.
   “The core of you, it’s something so special. It resonates. It’s something that comes along so rarely and when I see it reminds me why I like people in the first place. It reminds me why I like you. You take my breath away.”
  Greg looked at her expectantly. Nadia checked out the window, turned back to Greg, and winced.
  “Can you take your glasses off at least?” she said.
  “Yeah, definitely.”
  Nadia wearily leaned in for the kiss.

2008

There was a knock at her door, and Nadia, while trying to maintain her concentration on a line in her lecture notes about high-definition cinematography, called for the person to come in. Darren, walking in, asked if he could borrow Nadia’s Guitar Hero Rocks the ‘80s disc. Keeping her eyes fixed on the notes, Nadia waved her hand vaguely in the direction of the entire room, which was still evidently sufficient instruction for Darren to find the game and take off. Nadia had been effectively sealed in her room for three days, preparing for an important upcoming film exam. Now, by her senior year of college, she had been thoroughly disillusioned to learn that writing about entertainment could be so time-consuming. She had given the last two hours over to an intensive crash course in Molly Haskell’s entire body of critical thought; Haskell’s book now lying splayed over Nadia’s bed.
  Darren had pulled the Guitar Hero disc from a stack of games that appeared to be Nadia’s game collection, though this was not entirely accurate. Since junior year, Nadia’s father had been Fed Ex-ing her games that he had played and highly recommended. Nadia had received the first one, BioShock, gratefully, and played it for a couple of minutes that felt so innate and familiar. She put off playing the rest of the game, feeling guilty about it, because she had a busy weekend scheduled, and by the time she was ready to go back to it, Mass Effect arrived, and then Grand Theft Auto IV, and then Oblivion. She couldn’t believe that she ever had the time or the patience to exhaust even one of these forty, fifty, sixty hour games. She would actually really intend on catching up and making her way through the increasingly large pile, but invariably there was some band in the area that she’d never seen play live before, or another first date to think about. By now, she could construct a CD rack out of undisturbed game cases. Then there were the new games that she rejected out of hand entirely, like when she was out with friends and someone mentioned that they were looking forward to the new Metal Gear Solid game, to which Nadia laughed derisively and said Metal Gear was just a bad movie. The guy gave her a dirty look.
  The film exam went well enough, Nadia believing that she had put in a competent performance bolstered by an unnecessarily liberal use of Molly Haskell quotes. Returning home, she fell backwards onto the bed and shut her eyes. She thought that, by the time she opened them, she didn’t want to still be in her dorm room. She couldn’t just go back to studying or spending this night like she spent any other. This was what college was doing to her, she recognized. Having been there for so long, even so close to the end, she had fallen into such a routine. She wondered if she could get excited about a life where she put so much effort and energy into something just to come home and continue as if nothing had changed. If she was going to keep going at all then she needed something to shake it up, something new, just to keep her awake. Whatever the lifestyle equivalent of smelling salts was, she wanted that. She lifted her hand into her hair and considered dying it again.

The new blonde Nadia opened Darren’s door, her coat hanging over her arm. “I’m going to see this Yo La Tengo show tonight,” she said, “does anybody want to come?”
  “We’re playing Rock Band here, Nadia,” said Darren, tapping on the drum kit.
  Nadia shut the door behind her.

2009

On Monday, Nadia was to begin her first real post-college job, a copy-editing position at a public relations firm. She spent the weekend before taking the job up in San Francisco with her parents, and the last thing she did on Sunday before going home was to see a showing of Synecdoche, New York with her father. After the movie, they went to a diner for coffee, and Nadia was about to broach the subject of what her father thought of the film – she was throwing around adjectives like powerful and heartbreaking in her head – when her father volunteered that it was aggressively nonsensical garbage. Nadia decided not to pursue it further.
  “What time do you start?” asked Jack, stirring his coffee.
  “Nine.”
  “What are you going to be doing?”
  “As I understand it, it’s just proof-reading and editing reports and stuff like that.”
  “Ah.”
  “I mean, it’s not a great job but it’s kind of what I want to get into, you know: publishing and magazine editing.”
  “Yeah. It’s a good first step if that’s what you want to do.”
  Nadia timidly sipped at her coffee, scared of how late this was going to keep her up.
  Jack kept his head down for a minute. “Hey,” he said, “have you been following this whole controversy about Resident Evil 5?”
  “I – I haven’t, actually, I don’t know what it is. I didn’t even know they were making a new Resident Evil, to be honest.”
  “Oh, well, it’s – never mind, it’s not important. Did you ever play that copy of Resident Evil 4 that I sent you?”
  “I, uh, I didn’t,” she said, feeling a little shamed, “I got caught up with other things.”
  “No, that’s fine,” said Jack, nodding. “It’s just really good.”
  Nadia scratched at her nails and sighed. “I can understand you not being excited about this PR job. ‘Cause I know that for a long time, although you never explicitly said this so much, you were hoping for me to do something with video games, especially after the industry just became huge. Not to mention you clearly wanted me to keep playing them. And I don’t know what to tell you, Dad. I know that this part of your life is important to you and you get mad when people undervalue it, and this is not supposed to be me acting out.
  “I think the thing is that I have just, finally, finished my education, and it’s been almost twenty years of it. I can’t even remember a time that I wasn’t in school. This is the first time in my life where – I’ve done everything that I was supposed to do. I finished school. I finished college. There’s nothing that traditionally comes next other than me getting to decide what I want to do for a living. I feel like I’m finally ready for my life to begin, and I just, I’m not, I don’t start thinking about the past again. I want something new.
  “I know I disappoint you,” she said, “and I know you wish that I liked certain things more, or made other decisions. I don’t think that I’m like you.”
  Nadia shrugged and lifted the corner of her mouth slightly: a sad, weary half-smile meant to convey that it was okay. She looked down at the table. Jack rubbed at his temples. “Do you think that it is the job of a parent to tell their children that they love them even when they don’t mean it? Do you think that if you were running drugs and stealing things and hurting people that I would come visit you in prison and tell you how proud I was of you? I don’t always know what to say to you. But I have never not been honest with you. When I say that I am proud of you, I mean it. I don’t throw that around emptily. If you think that I say that a lot, it’s because I am crazy about you. I look at you and the last thing I see is somebody that is lacking anything. Jesus. Look at how confident you are. Look at how smart, how accomplished, how funny you are. Look at you going out into the world. You are the best thing I have ever been involved in.
   “You never got to meet my father. I still have no clue if he ever liked me. I know he liked to call me an idiot, and I honestly am not sure if he loved me underneath all that or actually thought I was an idiot. I have no idea.
   “The game thing, I don’t care. I wanted to share something with you. But I don't need to invent things for me to have in common with my daughter.”
  Jack got up from the diner table, finding his wallet in his jacket pocket. “I’m going to go pay for this,” he said, putting a hand on Nadia’s shoulder and leaning down to kiss her forehead. Nadia gently touched her hand against his.
  A teenage couple were sitting at a table across the diner, and when the boyfriend, a real skater type, got up to use the bathroom, Nadia got a look at his girlfriend. Slouching in her chair, she had bleached-blond hair, dark bags around her eyes, a nose piercing, and a brand-new red Atari t-shirt. Noticing Nadia staring at her, the girl frowned and shot her a glare asking what the hell her problem was. Nadia thought about what in the world she could possibly say to this stranger. Looking back at her hesitantly, she tried to think of something and then burst out laughing.

2010

Michael Wyeth was seriously concerned. He was in his late thirties, he was respectable, he was responsible, and he had chosen such a bad night to drink heavily. He had barely slept when he boarded the red-eye to New York City at five in the morning, and the colleague he was traveling with took one look at him and was clearly mortified, and a little afraid that would throw up in her lap mid-flight. Michael was usually never like this at all. His excuse this time was that by the time he had started to drink irresponsibly, he was drunk. The New York meeting was with the representative of a vodka company, ironically, vodka being perhaps the only thing that he didn’t drink the night before.
  Upon landing, the woman, obviously alarmed about this impending meeting, pulled him into an airport bathroom. This was a bad look, although one he’d have been able to find some enjoyment in if not for his current death wish. She fed him some aspirin and applied some of her own makeup to his face in the hope of making him look less frightening by degrees.
  They were seated at the restaurant before the client arrived. Michael scanned the menu, trying to hold his gaze steady. The woman expressed her preference for the salmon. He wanted to order coffee and chicken filled with coffee and glazed in morphine.
  When Nick Sullivan from the vodka company showed up, Michael stood up to shake his hand and knew instantly that he had nothing to worry about. He gave Sullivan a smile, shook his hand with total confidence, and settled in. This was home.
  “Nick, I want you to meet one of our writers, Nadia Heller.”
  Nadia and Sullivan shook hands, and everyone gave their orders to the waiter before Sullivan launched into his shopping list of issues. Michael was into this now. His gaze fixed on Sullivan, he nodded, said yes at strategic points, and responded with wit, understanding and compassion. Sullivan outlined what his company perceived to be the strengths and weaknesses of the brand, what they were looking for and hoped to communicate in a public relations campaign, and the kind of character they were hoping to exude in print, television and internet ads.
  “I brought this magazine,” said Sullivan, holding some news weekly up for Michael and Nadia and opening it to a full-page advertisement. “This is the kind of space we want. And, I mean, look what’s in here now. ‘Bayonetta’? Starring some harlot, apparently. Have you two seen these bizarre ads for the Wii? It’s the entire family sitting around the lounge and enjoying their video game console. How deceptive.
  “When I think about video games, the last thing I think of is family values. I think of desensitizing kids to violence, I think of graphic sexual content, I think of school shootings, I think of an entire generation sitting around the TV set and getting dumber.”
  Michael nodded in practiced sympathy.
  “They say it’s a bigger industry than movies now. Well, what can you say to that? I know this is something I would never let my children be a part of.”
  Nadia stood up and looked at Sullivan.
  “You’re a jerk-off,” she said, and she left.

High Society

noreply@blogger.com (Duncan) — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:37:00 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO

“What do you think about this: I’ll come to your office for one day, early next week, and we try and chronicle all the important decisions that are made that day, just to give a sense, you know, of how and when these decisions get made, way before they manifest themselves in the final product that people get to see.”
  Henry Rich was a young-looking thirty, with thin-rimmed glasses and a mop of thick black hair that bounced against his forehead as he attacked a plate of eighteen pancakes. Rich wore a friendship bracelet and a Vampire Weekend t-shirt, and more or less fulfilled Grant Hayes’ visual expectations of a serious young writer.
  Clinking a spoon against the inside of a mug of coffee, Hayes watched the writer eat with mounting skepticism. Hayes himself was conservative in appearance, with the exception of a rough leather jacket intended to bestow a James Dean-like edge. The clothes of Hayes’ would-be biographer, despite his credentials, made Hayes question the future security of his public persona and what a Vampire Weekend was.
  “Are you thinking,” said Hayes, “that this is going to be one of those aimless quote-unquote character studies, or is there some greater message or theme here about the industry or the world that I am not seeing?
  “Yeah, I don’t know,” said Rich, dabbing at the syrup-stained corners of his mouth with a napkin, “but do you think that they only make these pancakes this small so that people can say they ate eighteen pancakes at once?”
  Hayes could not see any problem with this setup at all.

Passing through the glass doors and underneath the massive ceilings and arcing escalators of the Moscone Center, Hayes bent his head slightly. He only did this to throw a lanyard up over his neck, but the gesture might have been misinterpreted as weird genuflection at the building; and if Grant Hayes was a reporter, he thought, this was exactly the odd kind of character detail he would include. Rich stuck close to Hayes amidst the crowd decked out in bright t-shirts and tote bags that said ‘GDC’.
  “This obviously is the Game Developers Conference,” said Hayes. “There are other GDCs in Austin, Canada, China, Europe, but this is the major one. People from all over the world come to this show. Living in San Francisco, I have friends that I only ever see here.
  “This year there’s supposed to be about fourteen thousand people attending; designers, engineers, writers, producers, artists, plus however many press are here to cover the event, like you I guess.”
  Rich by now had a notepad and pen in his hand, in contrast to the ten thousand people currently using their iPhones, and Hayes caught this old-school touch and thought it was worthy of a little respect. Rich dropped his pen and in bending to pick it up, headbutted someone in the back.
  “Here’s a place where you can buy a bagel for thirty-five dollars. No? Okay, let’s just keep going.”
  Bypassing the massively bored bagel vendor, Hayes and Rich got on the first escalator. Hayes nodded and waved to someone coming down the escalator opposite.
  “Obviously I only come here once a year,” he said to the reporter, “but the minute I come through those doors I know exactly where I am and what I’m doing. This place is so familiar. The location is the same, and the people are largely the same, but I mean it in a deeper sense.”
  Across from the escalators, long halls stretched out deeper into the first floor, flanking tall placards chronicling every keynote, workshop and presentation taking place that day. The first floor was three times as crowded as below, with a critical mass of guys and no women seated at tables using their laptops or sorting through the considerable junk that came in their tote bags.
  “These are the conference halls, and there’s another floor above as you see. This is only one of three buildings, by the way. We’re going to go across the street later as well.”
  “Grant?”
  Hayes turned and offered his hand to somebody.
  “Doug, hi, how’s it going.”
  “Great. Just heading over to see the McKenna talk.”
  “Right; freemium versus subscription.”
  “I don’t actually agree with a lot of his ideas. You’ve seen the Gamasutra stories on charging for re-specing builds, and new quest content, but I’m hoping to talk to him afterwards and ask him about his stats on player base and DLC uptake in particular.”
  “DLC numbers could be significant. Doug, this is Henry Rich from Vanity Fair.”
  Doug looked at them. “What, really?”
  Rich stuck out his hand. “Good to meet you.”
  “Yeah,” said Doug warily, “alright. Nice to see you, Grant.”
  “See you later.”
  Hayes scanned the placards. “Ah. We want the next floor.
  “It used to be,” he continued, “that in any random place in the world, there’s going to be a minority of people there who play video games, and an even thinner minority who think about games in serious and creative ways, regardless of whether or not they make them. If you are not in the industry, and you are not on the internet, and if you are one of those people, then in your life you will be lucky to meet another person like you.”
  A woman dropped her glasses, which Hayes caught and handed them back to her.
  “Thanks, Grant.”
  “Hey, Jane. There’s an industry shorthand that exists here. You can launch instantly into these high-level, very technical conversations, and even with total strangers here you know that you have something strong in common.
  “That over there,” he said, waving a hand at the back of the hall, “is where I did my talk last year. There’s a common subculture, and you know if you ask somebody in this crowd about Bayonetta, they will have an opinion on it, and you didn’t even have to preface your question with ‘do you play video games’.”
  “Excuse me, Grant Hayes?”
  The speaker was a kid with a hairstyle Hayes couldn’t name, but it looked like something he thought you would probably see on The O.C. when that show was still on.
  “Hi, how are you.”
  “Hey, my name’s Christian, I’m from Digipen? I just wanted to tell you that I was at your talk last year, about player-driven storytelling, and I really thought it was great and I wish everyone in the industry had been there to see it.”
  “Thanks, I hope you’ll like the talk I’m doing tomorrow. This is Henry Rich, by the way, from Vanity Fair.”
  “Yeah hi. I’ve actually written some stuff about the same kind of themes that you talked about last year, I mean not exactly the same thing of course, but I think they’re closely related and I was just wondering if you could take a look, you know, and let me know what you thought.”
  “Absolutely, I’d like to read it.” Hayes pulled a business card from his jacket pocket and passed it to the student. “My email’s on there, send it along.”
  “I will,” he said, “thanks so much, it was nice meeting you.”
  Climbing aboard the last escalator, Hayes turned back to Rich. “This is a microcosm of society that exists for a week. It’s the smartest people in the industry in the same rooms with each other and I think the opportunities that arise from that are immense. When you’re here, you see can such a complex mix of personalities and ideas that connect to one another so suddenly, and at the end of the week they fall apart just as abruptly. When everything comes together, though, it’s like no time has passed.
  “I did my presentation last year, which was my first time doing that, and it was received incredibly well. That was my fourth GDC, and it was when I went from just watching to participating in this abstract and ongoing exchange of ideas that lives here. This is a dialogue about what games are and what they should be.”
  Coming off the escalator, Hayes arrived at the glass wall that offered a full view of the street below.
  “The idealism generated here isn’t always practical. But the ideas here, I don’t believe, are necessarily intended to be doctrine. Even before I released a game and gave a talk and people found out who I was, I kept coming back here because more than anything, this place reminds me of what I should be trying to do as a game designer, and more importantly why I wanted, sincerely wanted, to make video games in the first place. It’s scarily easy to forget that.
  “3002, this is it,” said Hayes, pausing at the room’s entrance. “Let’s start.”

“In the ten year history of our studio, we’ve learned from our successes and, more importantly, from our failures, and have applied three key principles that have turned us into a dynamic core team that responds effectively and efficiently to the challenges of the economic environment. Since 2007, we’ve operated according to this model: streamline functions, outsource, and react. Let’s look at the slides.”
  The speaker paused on the dais for effect and gestured to the projection behind him: a Powerpoint slide that read ‘Since 2007, The Studio Has Operated According To This Model: 1) Streamline Functions 2) Outsource 3) React.’
  Rich scribbled furiously in his notebook.

“How long have you been at Lithium Cell?”
  “Six years.”
  “And as a creative director?”
  “Four years.”
  “How old are you?”
  “Thirty six.”
  “And at Lithium Cell you’ve released one game.”
  “Yeah. Blacklisted: Occupied Territory.”
  “My grandfather was blacklisted, under McCarthy.”
  “What?”
  “Just kidding. Let’s talk more about your background.”
  Hayes and Rich were in a sparse meeting room on the third floor of the Moscone Center, close to where the outsourcing lecture had taken place. Hayes slouched in a chair watching Rich, who inexplicably had both his paper notebook and a digital recorder out on the table. Hayes was already beginning to wear out his voice.
  “Can we leave today’s interview for later? I saw someone coming out of the lecture who I want to catch up with.”
  “I booked this room.” Rich looked hurt.
  “Fine, let’s keep going.”
  “Your presentation is – actually, let’s look at what you’re up against. Do you know?” Rich looked for his conference program guide in his GDC tote bag, which, again, to Hayes’ confusion, he was still carrying in addition to his regular bag.
  “Yeah, I know.”
  “Ten a.m. on Thursday, you’re on against…” Rich flicked through the pages of the large, magazine-sized guide at increasing speed. “Why don’t they organize this chronologically?”
  “I can just tell you. There’s a panel with a couple of guys on the future of storytelling, Eskil Steenberg on procedural generation, and something on the art and design of AI barks. Then some other things, I guess.”
  “What are AI barks?”
  “That’s the dialogue that characters in the game have outside of the core narrative. So imagine that your character is hiding from some guards, and a guard says ‘I heard something’ or ‘What’s that sound’, and those pieces of dialogue are chosen randomly from a programmed set that they have. Those are barks.”
  “And there’s an art to ‘I heard something’?”
  “Yeah.”
  “Your talk is called – here, I found it in the book, finally. Your talk is called ‘You Only Live Twice: Permanence in Interactive Storytelling.’”
  “Yes.”
  “And this talk, you’re giving it tomorrow morning, so it’s all written and you have your slides ready right now?”
  The answer wasn’t yes, and Hayes momentarily deliberated on whether he should actually tell Rich where he stood with the talk; that he had completely revised, and was continuing to revise, the material that he had successfully pitched late last year. Since the pitch, Hayes couldn’t shake a deep dissatisfaction with what he’d committed to saying in front of a large crowd. The high expectations set by the glowing reception to his first talk didn’t help, but he felt less confident in the subject, and the conclusions he had drawn felt weak. The closer he examined what he had written, he saw that all he had done was to merely identify an interesting area of game design without contributing anything himself. Was an observation enough to justify an entire talk, he wondered. The talk lacked an ending for this reason. Any possible conclusion felt like a prescription, and when he reached this point he didn’t even care about what he was saying. He was struggling for a way to connect to this discussion. His only anxiety about the impending deadline was that he would have to fall back on what he had written months ago, and its facile, stupid call to arms.
  Hayes thought about this and decided that it wasn’t his job to make Rich’s story good. “Yeah, it’s fine.”
  “What’s it about?”
  “It’s based on the idea that games are about infinite chances. You know, nothing’s permanent in a video game; you die and reload. Right? As a designer, I can’t do anything to your character in a game that actually lasts. You don’t like what happens, you reload a save game and go back in time a few minutes if you can. Even if you can’t, then you turn off the game and start again. Nothing permanent can happen to you in a game because you have the power to erase everything at any time.
  “I’m sort of examining whether we as designers can have players make choices that truly matter, and are truly permanent, or whether we should be exploring another design path in which we acknowledge the impermanence of the fictional setup, and tell stories that are intrinsically about revisions and multiple chances. About living in a world where nothing matters.
  “The difficult thing with that second option is that I don’t think there are many stories that you can tell about those themes before they all start to cover the same territory. For instance, I’ve really been influenced by this 2008 game called Braid, which is made by this independent developer Jonathan Blow, and I think it’s really the first game to explore this area in any significant way. That game’s kind of abstract, but it focuses on this character that literally has the power to rewind time. Like I explained, you essentially have that power in any video game; the power to start again. In Braid, though, you see the effect that complete control over the world would have on a person, and what it would do to his life and his relationships.
  “Even though I think this self-awareness is a positive direction for video games, it seems impossible to make a game about those themes that isn’t another Braid.”
  Rich nodded and seemed to take this in. “Is this interesting to you?” asked Hayes. “Is this the kind of thing that you’re looking for?”
  A knock at the door cut off Rich’s reply.
  “Yeah?” called Hayes.
  “It’s Stephen.”
  “It’s Stephen,” Hayes explained, and moved to open the door. “Stephen is our associate producer at Lithium Cell.” Stephen was also six foot four, worked out and could easily murder someone. “Stephen, this is Henry Rich.”
  “Right, from Vanity Fair.” Stephen shook Rich’s hand. “It’s great to meet you; how’s the story going?”
  “It’s going well, thanks. It’s good to meet you.” Hayes looked to see if Rich was wincing from the grip. Didn’t really seem like it.
  “Henry, would you excuse us for one moment?” said Stephen. “I have to talk with Grant for a second.”
  “Sure, of course.”
  The developers closed the door behind them and walked a couple paces down the corridor. Hayes stuck his hands in the back pockets of his jeans.
  “Lana’s back?”
  “Yeah,” said Stephen, “we were waiting for you.”
  “Okay,” Hayes shrugged, and by way of explanation, added, “I’m in with this guy.”
  “How’s that going, by the way?”
  “I have no idea. I’m getting uncomfortable with the setup we have where everything I say is going on some permanent record at this guy’s discretion. I have no idea if this guy is a good writer. For sure he doesn’t know a thing about games. And I can’t write his story for him, you know? Who on earth knows.”
  “Just be yourself.”
  “Whatever. We need to talk to Lana.”
  “What about your writer?”
  “Maybe I can get rid of him for a couple minutes.”
  “But why not – hold on.” Stephen swung open the door of the meeting room. “Henry, you’ve read your NDA, right?”
  “Sure, yeah. I just finished it, actually, I started reading it when I was in high school.”
  “Ha ha ha, you’re right, it’s very long, Henry. You’re familiar then with what information you are and are not allowed to publish?”
  “I am.”
  “We’re about to take a phone call from our producer Lana, who’s just met with our publisher. You can take whatever notes you want but check against the terms of your NDA before you print any of this.”
  “That’s fine, but the deal doesn’t prevent me writing something that Lithium Cell might happen to find embarrassing.”
  Stephen looked at Rich blankly.
  “Vanity Fair,” stressed Rich, “is not giving a publisher’s PR team editorial approval over a work of journalism.”
  “Ha ha ha, another good one, Henry. Grant, we’ll take the call in here.”
  Stephen laid his iPhone on the table and dialed Lana’s work number. Hayes shut the door and watched Rich shift into an earnest reporter position, pen poised in hand.
  “Hi, Stephen?” called a woman’s voice from the iPhone speaker.
  “Lana,” said Stephen, “it’s me and Grant here.”
  “We’re also here with Henry Rich from Vanity Fair,” Hayes added.
  Lana paused at the other end of the line. “Mr. Rich, you can take notes on whatever you want here but check against the terms of your NDA before you print any of this.”
  “We just said that,” said Hayes. “What happened at the meeting?”
  “They’re concerned.”
  “About what?”
  “Content.”
  Hayes let Rich in on his look of disgust; a briefly considerate act on his part, he thought.
  “What do they object to, Lana?” asked Stephen.
  “They’re worried about the terrorism connotations. You play a character that accepts money from underground organizations to blow up buildings and assassinate foreign leaders. You know they were always going to hate this.”
  “Do they realize,” said Hayes, “that it is the whole idea that your character’s actions are transforming him into a bad guy? He ends the game as a terrorist. The game is not condoning acts of terrorism. We’re saying blowing up buildings is bad, and that you’re a bad guy for doing it.”
  “I explained that and they don’t think that distinction is going to matter to a lot of people. There’s a part in the game that would let the player blow up a plane in mid-flight, and it doesn’t matter to them what the theme is as long as players are allowed to do that and get away with it.”
  “Lana, are they giving us any room here?” asked Stephen.
  “They say it’s absolutely out.”
  Rich was taking notes. Hayes sighed. “Anything else?”
  “They are still adamant about a Christmas release.”
  “Are you serious? They just vetoed our entire design.”
  “They want it.”
  Hayes looked over at Stephen. “That means outsourcing the multiplayer. Lana, I want you to go back to the publisher. I want you to fight them on this.”
  “On what?”
  “On everything.”
  “I’ll call them today.”
  “Thank you. Stay in touch, I need to know what’s happening.”
  “Yeah. Remember you have your two o’clock. At the meeting, Suzanne told me she’s going to be there.”
   “Okay.”
  “And she wants you to talk about Blacklisted 2.”
  “What? Why? This interview is just supposed to be a general post-mortem kind of deal. Why would we want to talk about the game this early?”
  “Suzanne says it’s the right time to start a buzz for a game that will be coming out in Christmas 2010.”
  “Oh yeah.”
  “She’s going to start setting up a lot more of these for you in the next couple of weeks.”
  “Great.”
  “Yeah. Talk to you later.”
  “Bye Lana.”
  “Bye guys.”
  Stephen ended the call, and the three men stared down at the table in silence.
  “You’re allowed to blow up a plane in Rockstar’s games,” offered Rich after a moment.

“Vanity Fair? No fucking way.”
  Hayes had made a good-faith attempt to introduce the seven developers sitting around the table to Rich; but he could see Rich struggling to keep up with who was who, and realized that all seven of them were destined to be quoted as anonymous colleagues in Rich’s eventual piece. Hayes pried the lid off a plastic tray containing a ham wrap and pasta.
  “What have you written?” asked a Seattle-based level designer called Shawn.
  “In the last year,” said Rich, thinking about it, “I was embedded in Afghanistan for the New York Times, I did a piece on Cat Power for Vanity Fair, another piece on Conan O’Brien, and I did a review of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, for New York magazine.”
  “Outstanding,” said Shawn.
  Hayes threw back a gulp of bottled water and narrowed his eyes at Rich. “How do you know who Rockstar is?”
  Rich shrugged as though there was no possible verbal response to that question.
  “Do you have a degree in journalism?” asked Shawn.
  “Yeah, from Columbia.”
  “Gosh.”
  “So you live in New York City?” said Dylan, a lead programmer at an Electronic Arts studio. Hayes thought about the synonyms Rich would eventually have to come up with for ‘a developer colleague’.
  “Mm-hm. Yeah. Lower East Side.”
  “Are you married?”
  “Why are you asking him if he’s married?” Hayes protested through a mouthful of ham wrap.
  “I’m not married.”
  “Grant!” exclaimed Jason, a fellow game industry professional, “this is, like, a real guy! Why is he writing about you?”
  “I can’t say I understand the interest,” said Hayes, “but it’s very flattering.”
  “Who’s the most famous person you’ve ever met?” asked Shawn, leaning forward.
  “Oh jeez,” said Rich, “probably Chuck Schumer. Or Alec Baldwin.”
  “Have you ever met David Bowie?”
  “No.”
  “Have you ever met Amy Poehler?”
  “Yes.”
  “Have you ever met Larry King?”
  “No.”
  “Have you ever met David Bowie?”
  Hayes tried and failed to skewer a piece of green penne pasta on a biodegradable fork. “This is the same pasta they had last year.”
  “Why didn’t you want to write about an interesting designer?”
  Dylan swallowed his food and climbed an inch onto the table with his elbows. “Grant’s very interesting. I have an interesting Grant story. Henry, do you want to hear it?”
  “Sure,” said Rich, smiling.
  “This was a year ago,” said Dylan, “after Lithium Cell released Blacklisted, and me and Grant and a couple of other guys were over at someone’s house having a couple of drinks, you know, and after a couple of hours one guy asks if anyone has ever done cocaine.”
  Hayes stared at him.
  “So one guy said, yeah, I did a little cocaine once, and I was so wired that I stayed awake for three days. And someone else said, yeah, me too, I did some cocaine and I couldn’t piss. And everyone laughs and then Grant says, man, one time I was so buzzed on cocaine that I fucked a dog.”
  Hayes winced.
  “Just kidding,” shrugged Dylan. “Shock humor. Sarah Silverman.”
  Hayes’ phone started ringing and he fumbled around for it in his jacket pocket while trading bitter looks with Dylan. He answered it without checking who was calling.
  “Hello?”
  “It’s me.”
  Hayes’ stomach turned. Not now, he thought, before he had time to really think about it, and he was embarrassed by his reaction.
  “Hold on,” he said, getting from the table. “Guys, I need to take this over here.”
  Hayes walked away from the table with the phone pressed into his palm, and he felt Rich staring at his back.

Nobody seemed to bother walking through this back corridor that bridged both wings of the third floor of the Moscone Center, and however inexplicable this was, it didn’t bother Grant Hayes, slouched down on the floor, alone, lowering his voice to a murmur.
  “You’re a celebrity now,” said Jill Hayes.
  “Is everything okay?” said Hayes.
  “I’m fine; is something going on?”
  “No, I wasn’t expecting you to call, is all.”
  “You asked me to look up this guy Henry Rich, did you want to hear about that or not?”
  “Yeah,” said Hayes, “tell me.”
  “I found this old issue of Vanity Fair from November,” said Jill, “we had it in the living room. It has Penélope Cruz on the cover. Penélope Cruz! Are they going to put you on the cover?”
  “No one has brought it up yet, believe it or not.”
  “Why did they want to interview you then if you they didn’t think you were fashionable? Anyway, I don’t want to tell you where she’s putting her hand. It’s obscene.”
  “Who?”
  “Penélope Cruz. And it says ‘va-va-voom’ on this cover. Grant, it says ‘va-va-voom’.”
  “Did Henry Rich write anything in the issue?”
  “No, he didn’t, I was really just calling to tell you about the cover.”
  “Okay. The conference is going well. We saw an interesting talk about level design. I picked up a lot.”
  “Isn’t level design what you do?”
  “No, I’m a creative director. It’s something different.”
  “Oh, right,” said Jill, and waited for a second. “I think I found an apartment today. In LA.”
  “Can we talk about this later?”
  “How long do you think you can avoid having a serious discussion about this?”
  “Maybe until I stop having a guy following me around and writing down everything I say; how about until then?”
  “Please don’t be cute with me.”
  “Can I talk to you later? I’ll call you tonight.”
  “Not too late?”
  “Not too late.”
  Hayes ended the call and smacked the phone against his forehead.

In the three minutes that Hayes was away from his friends, everyone had left save Rich and Shawn; perhaps having been put off by the enthusiastic hand motions Shawn was currently making to a rapt Rich.
  “Grant,” exploded Rich as Hayes neared the table, “Shawn is telling me about this amazing guy called John Romero. He’s this wild, trash-talking rocker-type guy who runs away from his abusive parents to live with his friends on a boat. And they decide to make a video game, and right there on that boat they make the Doom games. Doom is a huge hit, making Romero a millionaire, and so he retires from games to go into property development. But after a number of years, he gets bored, and so uses his largesse to fund his lifelong dream. He forms a heavy metal band: Red Faction. Did you know about this?”
  “Yeah, it was quite surprising when that happened to John Romero.”
  “Grant,” said Shawn, “you are so lucky to have this guy who is the epitome of a classic reporter. He really listens and observes the world around him.”
  “You know we have to go soon,” Hayes pressed Rich.
  “Well, I’m just about to finish the story,” said Shawn.
  Rich’s face went abruptly solemn. “Shawn was just coming to the part where John Romero is cruelly murdered.”
  “Some people say,” said Shawn, confidentially, “the body was never found. Also, after this, I want to tell Henry the Ballad of Allard.”
  “Well, I wouldn’t want to deprive him of that pleasure. I’ll find you later.”
  While thinking about how Rich ever managed to sustain a physical relationship, Hayes moved out into the corridor, past people filing into conference rooms, past a man hissing into a payphone, until the corridor opened up and he watched the crowd come up and go down the escalators, pause at the placards, sit down, stand up, move to the left and to the right, and he wondered how long he would have to stand here and watch this before anyone in this crowd started getting creeped out by his presence. This train of thought was perhaps answered by a hard shove from behind that pushed him forward a step, and he turned around to see an assailant who herself was jumping back, a whirlwind of dark hair covering her face and which fell back revealing the biggest, stupidest grin he’d ever seen.
  “Kirstin Lynch!” he yelled, pulling her into a hug while she laughed hysterically right into his ear. “When did you get here?”
  “Last night,” she said, still grinning as she pinned her hair back.
  “I honestly did not even expect you to show. You know it wouldn’t be GDC without you.”
  “I didn’t want to miss your talk,” said Kirstin. “Are you ready?”
  “Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. Not really.”
  “Oh, come on. You get it together.”
  “I do? I get it together?”
  “Yes. You are together.”
  “What does that mean? What are you even doing here?” He whispered the last part, not being entirely sure why he did it, and Kirstin, raising an eyebrow, didn’t seem to understand either.
  “I just came for the conference. I’m not on a panel this time, I’m not doing anything; I just wanted to see everyone. I came for the show. I came because it’s GDC. And I wanted a break from making a game and I wanted a break from New York.”
  “This is your vacation?”
  “Yeah. I guess that’s true.”
  “What a sad vacation. You know there’s a lecture going on right now about Facebook games. Make sure you take plenty of notes.”
  “I don’t know, Grant. I like it here.”
  Hayes smiled at her like an idiot before a relevant thought entered his head. “Hey, you know what? You are not going to believe -- here’s something that’s really going to impress you…” Hayes trailed off at the sight of ace reporter Henry Rich sidling up behind Kirstin. Kirstin and Rich exchanged small, confused glances.
  “You know what?” Hayes concluded. “I’ll tell you about it later. I’m supposed to go do an interview with a magazine.” He looked at Rich to clarify, and added, “Not you.”
  “I want to catch up,” said Kirstin. “Call me later.”
  “I will,” said Hayes, waved goodbye, and without speaking to Rich further, led him away from Kirstin and down the first of the escalators, not looking back at either of them.
  “Hey, how long have you been married?” Rich asked on the escalator.
  “What?”
  “Was that your wife?”
  “What?”
  “On the phone, before.”
  “Yeah.”
  “Where do you guys live?”
  “Marin.”
  “How long have you guys been married?”
  “Three years.”
  “What’s her name?”
  ”Jill.”
  “What does she do?”
  “She’s an accountant.”
  “Cool.”
  Mister fucking questions, thought Hayes.

The interview took place in a mood-lit hotel room that the publisher had rented out for press demonstrations of another of their Christmas 2010 releases; a futuristic racing game called Chase City: No Limits. Hayes was not enthused by the sudden prospect of having his game share a marketing budget with something called Chase City. Aside from the console hooked up to the television, and some Chase City-related literature lying around, the only other prop in the room was a basket of chocolate chip cookies. Hayes took the liberty of offering the cookies to his two interviewers: Rich and David Close, a writer from an industry enthusiast magazine.
  “I had all these questions ready about your last game,” said Close, eating the cookie, “but Suzanne called me and told me I can ask you Blacklisted 2 questions.”
  “Yeah, we’re ready to start talking about it now,” Hayes lied.
  “Just the campaign,” added Suzanne Meyer, a representative from the publisher, sitting behind Hayes and keeping an eye on their conversation, “we’re not doing multiplayer questions yet.” Rich sat beside Suzanne, reading a Chase City one-sheet.
  “That’s great; we’re all really excited to hear about what you guys have come up with. I have a question about Blacklisted 1, though, and you can tie this into the sequel if you like. A few months before Blacklisted came out, you said that: ‘there shouldn’t be a fail state in a narrative game released in 2009.’ And in the case of Blacklisted, there were fail states.”
  “Yeah. That was a goal that we didn’t have time to fully implement in the first game,” said Hayes, emphasizing the word ‘time’ for Suzanne’s benefit. “I haven’t changed my perspective, and we’ve made some progress this time that will allow that to work better. In Blacklisted 2, even if you didn’t pick the right loadout and you’re stranded deep in enemy territory, there will still be a way for you to complete the mission. We think that players who do it that way might actually have a more interesting experience, as opposed to the player who zips in and does everything perfectly.”
  “Is that something you’re applying across the board; giving the player a shorter leash?”
  “Yeah, it is. If the player’s going to be empowered to make his own choices, we’re going to have to give him a greater freedom to interact with the gameworld. That was something we wanted to do with Blacklisted 1, but again, we didn’t have time.”
  “Okay,” said Close, offhandedly, glancing up from his notes to Rich and back. “What do you think – I’m sorry, before, when we came in, did Grant say you were from Vanity Fair?”
  “Sure. Yes.”
  “Henry is writing a profile on me for Vanity Fair.”
  “On the game?”
  “No, on me.”
  “And so he gets to follow you around all the time like this?”
  “Well, for a week.”
  Close looked back at Rich. “Do you have any openings?”
  “I’m freelance, I don’t really know.”
  “Alright. Well, I should get back to the questions; I only have ten minutes. Let me just ask: there’s no chance I could get a release date out of you?”
“You know, we haven’t pinned it down yet,” said Hayes, and took the opportunity. “Probably in 2011.”
  Take that, he thought, and finally he began to enjoy the interview.

“How long does it take to make a video game?” Hayes and Rich were back on the third floor of the Moscone Center, alone on the floor, while, in a nearby conference room laughter and applause periodically erupted from the evidently hilarious powerhouse occurring behind the doors.
  “It’s usually about two or three years.”
  “You’re making this one in less.”
  “Yes.”
  “Is that going to be difficult?”
  ”It’s always difficult to make a game.”
  Although Rich was trying to catch the designer’s eye, Hayes appeared busy making diagonal swipes across the screen of his iPhone. He appeared this way because in actuality he was staring at a text message from Kirstin Lynch, and the finger motions were an attempt at diversion.
  “How many hours do you put in a day?”
  “It varies. But when it’s really crunching it’s not unusual for us to do twelve, thirteen-hour days for weeks at a time. Including weekends.”
  “That seems excessive.”
  “It is. But there’s no other way to deliver a game at the quality level that people expect without making it a top priority and putting in those hours.”
  “Does that mean you think Blacklisted 2 will be compromised if you have to finish it by this Christmas?”
  “I don’t know yet,” he lied.
  “Are the hours hard? I mean; hard on your personal life, your family?”
  Hayes wondered how he could duck Rich to go and see Kirstin. Not – he caught himself – that there was anything about his friendship with Kirstin that he was embarrassed about. There were areas of his life in which he was simply not comfortable with the presence of a third wheel, especially one who was relaying everything he saw to the entire world.
  “It can be. Yeah. It is.”
  “The reason I ask is…”
  “Grant?”
  Hayes looked up from his iPhone to see the gaunt, button-down but nonetheless menacing frame of Andy Blakely suddenly looming over the table. “Grant!” said Blakely, and stuck out his hand.
  “Ah,” said Hayes, having his hand shaken vigorously, “hi, Alex.”
  “No, it’s Andy.”
  “Oh, right. Andy. I don’t know where my head is. Andy, this is Henry Rich from --”
  “Vanity Fair, yes!” Blakely flicked his gaze down onto Rich, shook his hand, then went back to Hayes. “Grant, I had heard a rumor that you were being written about for a profile piece in Vanity Fair.”
  Hayes could not believe that that was an actual rumor. “Yes.”
  “Well, I think it’s great,” said Blakely, sliding back a chair and sitting down. “Henry, I’m Andy Blakely.” He whipped a business card out from a shirt pocket and offered it to Rich. Rich shot Hayes a look conveying his apprehension about whether it was a smart idea for him to do the same. Hayes gave him a non-committal nod and Rich found a card in his wallet.
  “I think it’s a truly important milestone for our medium to be recognized by such a prestigious mainstream media organ. There is so much smart, accomplished work being done in our medium that I think is really going to be of interest to your audience.”
  “Oh, really?”
  “Yes, and let me tell you about some of the work that we’re doing over in New York.”
  “What a great idea,” exclaimed Hayes, skipping up out of his chair. “Andy, you and Henry should talk, don’t let me get in the way, Henry, I’ll call you later.”
  Turning his back on Rich’s death mask, Hayes walked at a quick step towards the elevator, bathing in the laughter cascading out from the room behind them.

Kirstin Lynch sat on a concrete step outside the coffee place at the Yerba Buena Gardens, sunglasses on, hands pressed between her knees, staring into the wind. “They almost wouldn’t sell this to me,” said Grant Hayes, taking a seat next to her and handing her a chai latte, “because they said that only girls are allowed to order this.”
  “That must have been super fucking tough for you,” said Kirstin, taking the coffee as she dug into her purse, sliding out and lighting a cigarette. “Do you want one?”
  “No thanks.”
  “I have lights,” she offered, producing a second pack from her purse.
  “Why do you carry around another pack like that?”
  “For girls,” she said, shaking a cigarette out into his palm.
  “You’re a weird person,” he said, letting her light the cigarette for him.
  She smiled at him as he inhaled. “Hey. Did you know I’m not seeing Justin anymore?”
  “No? Oh, that’s too bad.”
  “Shut up! You don’t care.”
  “No. I can tell you this now, though,” said Hayes, “one time when we were all out for dinner I saw him steal a fork from the restaurant.”
  “Really?”
  “Yeah.”
  Kirstin paused and took another drag. “Very strange.”
  “I’m sorry about your break-up if it’s something that you actually are upset about.”
  “It’s fine. I don’t care. He didn’t respect what I did. I’m getting to a point in my life where I don’t want to surround myself with people who don’t take my job seriously. Remember what we used to say? ‘I don’t want to come home at night to someone who doesn’t understand what I do.’”
  “Well. Mazel tov.”
  “Thank you.”
  They sat for a minute.
  “What were you saying before?” She turned to him. “What was the thing that was going to impress me? Were you going to tell me about the Vanity Fair guy who’s writing about you?”
  “How do you know about that?”
  Kirstin shrugged. “I saw it on Twitter. Everyone knows.”
  “Everyone knows? Good lord.”
  “That must be crazy, huh? Having someone follow you around all day with a notepad?”
  “It is. Yes. I’m glad you think that. It’s weird having to moderate everything I say and having to decide what information I want to share with the rest of the world. I don’t know if going through all that is really going to be worth it.”
  “Of course it’s worth it. It’s Vanity Fair.”
  “I’m also really wondering why anyone who writes for a magazine like Vanity Fair would ever say: Grant Hayes, yeah, he’s the guy. Why am I interesting to Vanity Fair?”
  “Because you’re fucking smart.”
  “To you, maybe. To the people at GDC, maybe. To Vanity Fair? Who am I to Vanity Fair? I think he knows something I don’t.”
  Kirstin flicked the ash off the tip of her cigarette. “Just be honest with people,” she said.
  “What this whole profile has made me realize,” Hayes continued, “is that I’m public now. There are real consequences for not living up to expectations, and so many different people have expectations of me that I can’t even keep track of them all. Am I supposed to be this genius with great ideas coming out of me automatically? Am I supposed to act like the fascinating subject for this Vanity Fair profile?”
  He looked at Kirstin. “Wasn’t GDC supposed to remind me of why I liked games? This is my panicking face. I’m serious. I don’t even know if I want to work in games anymore. So far, my game’s release date has been pushed up to Christmas, where it will ship as an insipid, rushed product and get killed commercially anyway, and our publisher doesn’t even want us to use of the interesting ideas that would make a sequel worthwhile.
  “I don’t have the luxury of failure this time. What do I have in this industry? I have one hit and I have a speech. This new game doesn’t work out and I have nothing. I have nothing to fall back on. People forget, Kirstin. I’m not going to be remembered for those.
  “And,” he said, “I still don’t have an ending to my talk.”
  Kirstin slipped off her sunglasses with a finger and hooked them onto her shirt. “You know what I think you should do?”
  “What?”
  “Come to New York already!” She smacked the back of his head. “Christ! You would not have to worry about any of this shit in New York. You would be great in New York.”
  Hayes laughed bitterly. “I might be moving anyway.”
  “To New York?”
  “No. Considerably worse.”
  Kirstin sighed and stubbed out her cigarette on the step.
  “Man,” said Hayes, hearing his iPhone beep from his jacket pocket, “I should get back to this Vanity Fair guy. Are you coming to the Lithium Cell party tonight?” He threw away the cigarette.
  “Sure.”
  As he got up to leave, Kirstin grabbed his hand and stared into his eyes with more sincerity than Hayes was accustomed to. “Seriously. Come to New York.”
  Hayes touched her hand, looked at her, and smiled. “No.”

Moscone North, in comparison to its larger counterpart, opened up onto a relatively small floor, with game kiosks and a bar, with escalators leading to a wider area downstairs. Hayes found Rich at one of the kiosks, wrangling a mouse and keyboard to pull his avatar in the game Crysis out of a rocky crevasse.
  “Hey,” said Hayes, “looks like you’re having some problems here.”
  “Mmm. Who is Kirstin Lynch?”
  Hayes blinked. “What?”
  “Kirstin Lynch. Didn’t you just go talk to her?”
  “Yeah.” Hayes wondered why he should even bother being surprised by anything Rich said or did. “She’s a game designer from New York, she’s at a studio that does a lot of casual and social networking games.”
  Rich nodded blankly.
  “You ready to go downstairs? There’s a lecture in ten minutes that I want to see.”
  “Yeah, alright,” said Rich, stepping away from Crysis, “I’m never going to kill this guy.”
  Riding down the escalator, Rich asked Hayes: “How do you and Kirstin know each other?”
  “We started in the industry together, here, as testers. Later she moved out to New York to form an independent studio with some other people. She does, in addition to whatever puzzle game that goes for a dollar on the iPhone app store, some progressive and experimental stuff that is clearly more what she is interested in. She’s been trying to recruit me for years to work on that kind of thing. It’s artier, you know, than what I’m doing now.”
  “Do you think that you can’t do progressive and experimental work within the commercial framework you’re in now?”
  “Absolutely not. It’s harder in my position, for sure, because I’m responsible for a larger team, and their families, and a publisher’s cash. I don’t have the luxury of just doing whatever the hell I feel like. But it’s not impossible to make something significant or interesting. If I thought that it was, then maybe I would be with Kirstin in New York.
  “At the same time, though, I am envious of people like Kirstin, or Jonathan Blow or Jason Rohrer, who have the relative freedom to make very personal projects.”
  “Jason Rohrer, right, who did Passage.”
  The two men stepped off the escalator. Hayes waited for Rich to turn and notice that he was staring at him.
  “How on earth do you know who Jason Rohrer is?”
  “There was a profile of him, in Esquire. Written by Jason Fagone. He also made Gravitation and Between, and he consulted with Electronic Arts on a Steven Spielberg project that I think now is cancelled. Do you know what I’m referring to?”
  “Yeah, I do,” said Hayes, a little stunned. “Let’s go in here,” he said, leading Rich towards the Expo Hall on their left.
  “Weren’t we going to a lecture?”
  “We’re just going to hang out here for a minute.”
  The actual size of the Expo Hall was concealed by the thick crowds surrounding booths loudly proclaiming patent-pending advances in computer technology. Hayes and Rich passed by bodysuit-clad dancers, who moved in tandem with wireframe representations of themselves on a monitor above. Next to another booth, models dressed in what appeared to be steampunk train costumes attempted to hand out flyers. Rich looked at one of the girls who had a cardboard steam train engine bolted onto her chest.
  “Do you want to know more about Cryptic Signal’s new particle effects solution?” she asked in the most laconic of all possible California accents.
  “No he doesn’t,” said Hayes, pulling Rich along by the shoulder.
  “Why is she dressed like that?”
  “It doesn’t matter.”
  They stopped by the Nintendo booth, where evidently the person at the kiosk had accidentally thrust the Wiimote into the attendant’s face.
  “Who have you written for?” Hayes asked.
  “Apart from Vanity Fair? The New Yorker, the New York Times, GQ, New York Magazine, the Believer, the Village Voice, the James Madison Standard.”
  “What is the James Madison Standard?”
  “It’s a high school paper. My high school paper.”
  “No college newspaper?”
  “No.”
  “What did you do in college?”
  “Marijuana.”
  “Oh.”
  Something in the independent games area caught Hayes’ eye; a bloom-saturated take on a side-scrolling shooter. Hayes took a step toward the game developer, a student hanging out by the game stand, but someone else cut in and began a conversation with the student. Hayes decided to forget about it.
  “Why are you writing about me?” Hayes asked finally.
  “How do you mean?”
  “The guys at lunch had a point. There are people in this industry far more interesting than myself, and I wonder why it’s me you’re writing about instead of them.”
  “Like who? Like John Romero? Like an extended obituary for John Romero?”
  “No, not like John Romero. I think, in the mainstream, there’s Jordan Mechner, who I find curious for only occasionally working in games and yet having one of the sharpest designer minds out there. Harvey Smith, who came to game design through an unusual career path, including a stint in the army. Seamus Blackley isn’t in design anymore, but had this wildly absurd career, and is just a fascinating guy with great stories. And people like Keita Takahashi and Hideo Kojima who both seem like individualistic and slightly crazy guys who make very idiosyncratic, iconoclastic games. These are all people who I find personally interesting for reasons beyond the games that they make. I’d want to read a profile of those guys.”
  Rich seemed to think about this for a moment. “I think that there is something interesting about you. I understand if you don’t see the same thing. We don’t look at ourselves the way other people do. We don’t write about things in exactly the way that they happen to us. My job here is to put together the pieces in a way that is interesting and make sense.”
  “Well,” said Hayes, thinking about how no one had ever spoken about him like that before. “That’s nice of you.”
  “Henry!”
  Rich and Hayes turned to see Andy Blakely, again, to a mutual lack of enthusiasm.
  “Henry,” said Blakely, striding across the show floor, “good to see you again. I have some people I want you to meet.”
  Hayes tapped his watch. “We have to get to a talk, Andy.”
  “Yeah, hi, Grant. Henry, this will only take a minute.”
  With a hand on Rich’s shoulder, Blakely beckoned at two tall, dark-haired guys standing nearby, neither of whom looked that into meeting a Vanity Fair reporter.
  “Henry, this is Adam Barrett, he’s an independent developer who made a game in 2007 called Magnetic North. It was nominated for an award. Adam, this is Henry from Vanity Fair.”
Rich and Barrett exchanged pleasantries.
  “And Henry, this is John Romero.”
  Hayes decided that this profile-writing process was probably worthwhile, all things considered.

“We make things that challenge us. We make things that visually and sonically surpass contemporary cinema. We have made things that reinvented the music industry. We make things that bring people together. We make things that talk with the audience, and show them what they only dream about. To the notion that games are lesser and that games are a promise yet to be fulfilled, I say that video games are the most creative fucking medium in the history of the world.
  “This is the wrong slide. Hold on a second.”

They left the Moscone Center at five o’clock to get some dinner before the Lithium Cell party. Hayes began to run down the considerable list of area restaurants for Rich’s benefit, and then after walking one block, Rich pointed to the Denny’s on Mission and insisted to Hayes that this would be a good idea.
  “I like the lighting in here,” said Rich of the establishment’s supernova fluorescence, “it’s better for my eyes.”
  Rich laid out slightly damp notebook pages in some kind of sequence along the table, while Hayes ran his finger over the laminated menu. A waitress asked to take their order.
  “Just coffee,” said Hayes, handing her the menu.
  “I’ll have a chai latte,” said Rich.
  Hayes narrowed his eyes. “They don’t have that here.”
  “What do they have?”
  “Bacon.”
  “Just coffee then.” The waitress left, probably, Hayes realized, less than impressed with his joke. Maybe she didn’t mind. Maybe it wasn’t worth thinking about anymore.
  “You still have questions to go?” Hayes asked. “We’re doing this for another week, how long is this article?”
  “Yes,” said Rich, focused only on the notes, “I wanted to ask you this before tomorrow morning. Where did you get the idea for your talk?”
  “The idea?”
  “Yeah. About infinite chances.”
  Hayes rotated a saltshaker between his fingers and spilled some on the table. “I was thinking about this since the last game. If video games are intrinsically about anything, I think it’s being about having infinite chances, and the chance to be a different person. What’s universal amongst every kind of video game? Action, sports, puzzle, simulation games; these things have so little in common, except for impermanence. Unlike every other kind of media, what happens in front of you is not final, decisions do not matter, and you as a player can always do better.
  “And what does it mean to make video games? What do we do as game designers? We iterate on something over and over until it becomes successful. That’s why we’re doing a sequel. We remake it and improve it until it clicks. Until we get it right.
  “With that idea in mind, I was thinking about why games don’t appeal more to really hopeless, desperate people. Real fuck-ups, failures, people who have made huge mistakes, people with bad judgment, people who are compulsive fixers because they’re also compulsive losers. Like, what an attractive thing the endemic premise of a video game is. You get to do it all over. You lose something and then you can get it back again. You get endless chances to improve yourself and erase every mistake you ever made. Video games are a forgiving universe. There is always another chance.
  “However, by and large I don’t think that’s who we have in the games industry. There are some weird dudes, drinkers, divorcees, and I think when they close the book on Jonathan Blow, he will be revealed to be a lunatic. But this theory doesn’t make that much sense when you think about it, because game design as a field is about precision, and it’s extremely budget-conscious, but philosophically, emotionally, it seems like such a perfect fit.
  “This has nothing to do with the talk. The talk is about video games. But you asked where the idea came from, and that’s where.”
  Rich finished writing and the waitress came back with the coffee.
  Hayes took the cup and thanked her. “Did you like my joke about bacon?”
  “Yes.”

“WAIT,” a voice shouted at Hayes, “THEY DON’T LOVE YOU LIKE I LOVE YOU. THEY DON’T LOVE YOU LIKE I LOVE YOU, MAPS, MAPS, MAPS, MAPS, WAIT, THEY DON’T LOVE YOU LIKE I LOVE YOU…”
  In an effort to have his voice heard over the general volume, Nick screamed this directly into Hayes’ ear. This was the bar Lithium Cell had booked for the party, located a couple blocks down on Mission, and surprisingly full, Hayes thought. Scanning the room, in the low light, he spotted about six Lithium Cell employees who evidently had invited about thirteen people each.
  Hayes physically pushed Nick back an inch. “Just because you know the one song doesn’t mean you have to sing it.”
  “You’re right!” yelled Nick, “this is the one song they’ve played that I know.”
  “Is this in Guitar Hero?”
  “I think it’s in Rock Band!”
  “I think you’re right.”
  Hayes and Nick, who was one of Lithium Cell’s younger designers, leaned against the bar itself in the center of the room. Hayes held an untouched glass of beer in his hand without much enthusiasm.
  “Can I buy you another drink?” Nick asked.
  “I can’t stay long,” said Hayes, “I’m supposed to call Lana back.”
  Nick snapped his head around. “Lana’s not here?”
  “In this place? Lana has a life, come on.”
  Nick looked genuinely hurt. “Hey.”’
  Hayes slapped Nick on the shoulder and tried to push forward left through the throng of people. “I gotta find someone before I go.”
  He moved around the bar, shooting glances left and right, taking the occasional sip of his beer, occasionally brushing asses with someone in the crowd but not stopping to worry about it. Towards the back of the room he spotted Kirstin, her jacket removed and draped over a barstool she was standing beside. She stared out into the crowd, swinging a Corona back and forward between her thumb and forefinger, and moving slightly in time with the music. Hayes watched her, watched the dark strands of hair slip off from her bare shoulders as she moved, and took in the warm, expectant smile on her face. Hayes took a step back, then stepped forward again, and finally, painfully, decided he didn’t want anything to do with Kirstin Lynch right now.
  A guy that Hayes didn’t know approached Kirstin, as Hayes turned away. Working his way back to the bar, he downed the entire glass of beer in a couple of seconds and spilling all over his shirt in the process. When he caught up again with Nick, he had been joined by a couple of the other, newer hires. Hayes, though he’d never admit it, would have trouble putting names to faces normally, and the alcohol didn’t help.
  “Grant!” said Nick, “you’re back. We’re just about to do these shots. You in?”
  “I don’t know.”
  The bartender slapped five shots of a semi-translucent liquid on the bar.
  “These are called – Darren? What are they called? Oh yeah, Grant, this drink is called Montezuma’s Diarrhea.”
  “Whatever,” said Hayes, “let’s do it.” Hayes grabbed one of the glasses and almost instantly regretted it once the caustic purgative plunged down his throat. He slammed the glass back down on the bar.
  “Yeah,” he said, “okay, yeah. Nick, I have to go talk to someone again, and then I’m out of here. Have a good night.”
  Hayes moved forward again, in the opposite direction and with a certain clumsiness in his step this time, he noticed. Eventually he found Rich, sitting in a booth against the wall talking animatedly to someone. As he came out of the crowd and his field of vision improved, he saw the other person in the booth: some blonde girl he didn’t know, wearing a low-cut blue dress, looking totally thrilled at Rich’s every word and gesture. Stumbling towards them, Hayes kept his eyes focused on the girl until he put a hand on Rich’s shoulder.
  “Hey,” he said, “I’m getting out of here. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
  “Yeah,” yelled Rich, “you alright getting home?”
  “Fine,” said Hayes, “see you later.”
  Making a conscious point not to look at the blonde girl’s face, Hayes slowly left the bar, pushing through the crowds of people dancing and making out until he burst out onto the pavement, hands on his knees, gasping for air.

Hayes was sprawled out on a queen-size hotel room bed, a phone cradled between his shoulder and his ear, and a packet of minibar peanuts spilled out over the sheets.   An aborted attempt at a rewrite of his presentation was evident by a notebook, drenched in red ink, lying on the bed.
  “Christmas 2010 is a done deal,” said Lana over the phone. “No movement.”
  “This year is going to be horrible, Lana,” said Hayes, throwing a peanut into his mouth.
  “No movement. They need it for Christmas.”
  “We’ll deal with it. How about the content?”’
  “They’re willing to have a discussion. To be honest, I think they need to hear the case from you.”
  “Why me?”
  “They trust you. You gave them a hit. They just want to know you’re sure about it.”
  “What do you want me to say?”
  “Persuade them. Challenge them. This is what you do the best. If you want to go down the route that you do, then you need to fight for this. If this is what’s important to you, then you have to fight for it. There’s going to be a lot more of these meetings, Grant. But start with lunch tomorrow.”
  “Okay. Lunch tomorrow.”
  “Twelve thirty, probably. I’ll call you tomorrow to confirm.”
  “Twelve thirty. Thanks, Lana. Sorry for calling so late.”
  “I work in the games industry, Grant,” she said, “I’m used to it.”
  Hayes hung up, and dialed the second call he had been putting off all day. The hotel phone still used a cord, and Hayes found himself drunkenly delighted at this particular piece of antiquation.
  “Hello?”
  “It’s me.”
  Whatever anticipation there had been in Jill’s voice upon answering the phone immediately flattened. “Hi.”
  “I know it’s late, but I promised to call you every day.”
  “I was getting ready for bed.”
  “What did you do tonight?”
  “Nothing. I just put the dog to sleep.”
  “You killed the dog?”
  “No, you idiot. I physically took him outside and put him in his kennel. What is wrong with you?”
  “I’m sorry.” Hayes rubbed his forehead. “It’s been the weirdest day of my life.”
  “Did anything happen with the game?” Jill asked. “Did you get a release date?”
  “Yeah. Christmas.”
  She sighed. “Grant.”
  “I know. It’s not what I want, I swear to God.”
  “This is just – I’m not going to do this again.”
  “I know, but if that means… I know you want things to be different and I am promising you that they can be. Here. I don’t want to go to LA. This is my home.”
  “How can it possibly be different? I don’t want the long hours. And don’t think I’m acting entitled when I say that. How can you demand anything of me? Considering what we have been through, I think you have a lot of nerve making me anything other than your first priority. I should be your focus. You make me feel horrible for having to say this.”
  “You are my priority.”
  “Yeah,” she said, “right.”
  “I know the work is not going to be different this year. But I’ve done this before, and this time I know what it will be like. It's going to be hard, I know it. But I know what I’m dealing with now; I can handle it. Please trust me. I know there is a way to make everything work. I am committed to making this work. I am not going to let this get in our way.”
  Jill said nothing for a long moment. “Do you want to meet for lunch tomorrow? At about twelve thirty?”
  Hayes pinched himself. “I can’t do lunch.”
  “Fine then.”
  He sat straight up. “Wait. Yes,” he said, “yeah, I can. Let’s do lunch. Let’s do it.”
  “Okay? Are you sure?”
  “Yeah. I am.”
  “Okay, then. Call me tomorrow morning.”
  “Goodnight,” he said. “I love you.”
  “I love you too.”
  Hayes hung up the phone and never felt so good and bad about himself at the same time.

Henry Rich greeted Thursday with a second Vampire Weekend t-shirt, which, in Grant Hayes’ eyes, lent the reporter a sad and heretofore undiscovered Charlie Brown quality. In a room set up to accommodate about a hundred people, Hayes and Rich sat at the front, lounging around behind the dais-mounted table. The table flanked a podium that in five minutes Hayes would get behind to address the crowd.
  “You know you can’t stay up here,” Hayes reminded Rich.
  “Why not?”
  “Get down there! They’re going to be completely confused about who you are.”
  “I’ll go in a minute.”
  The audience had begun to filter into the room, accepting feedback form cards from volunteers at the door, and then promptly discarding them. Hayes toyed with the Powerpoint remote; the projector currently displaying the title card of the presentation.
  “What if I’m not interesting?” he asked Rich.
  “What?”
  “You know what fascinates me about you? How sometimes you seem to be so clued-in beyond what I would have expected, like you know who Jason Rohrer is, and then at other times you are perfectly willing to believe that John Romero’s body was never found. It’s so unclear to me how much you actually know. You seem to be veering in and out of the area of total competence, and so I don’t know which part of you was in control when you decided to write this profile of me. You’re a writer. You’re a creative guy. What if you’re wrong? What are you going to do if you go through all this only to end up with something disappointing? Your name’s going to be on it. How would you deal with that?”
  Rich nodded. Hayes was surprised by the considered, thoughtful reaction to this challenge.
  “I don’t know why you think that because I write for Vanity Fair I know something you don’t,” said Rich. “I’m writing a profile of a game designer and that’s all I’m thinking about. I’m not trying to think about whether it will win a Pulitzer or even if you’ll like it. If I finish it, and I don’t think it works, then I move on with my career and do something different. Isn’t that what you do?
  “We try things, you know? This profile of you isn’t definitive. Why do you think so many different biographies get written about famous people?”
  “Yeah,” said Hayes. From the front row of the audience, Kirstin Lynch waved and gave him an exaggerated thumbs-up. “I guess in general I like a little more certainty in life than that.”
  The conference volunteers pulled the doors closed and took their places standing against the wall. The general chatter in the room began to subside.
  “It’s official, by the way,” said Hayes, as Rich stepped down to join the audience, “the game is coming out in December.” He paused. “This is going to be a very long year.”
  Hayes cast an eye over the crowd and checked the clip-on mic attached to his shirt. Throwing back a gulp of bottled water, he took the podium before the silent room.
  “Thanks everyone for coming. Can everyone make sure that their cellphones are off,” and, waving a feedback form, “make sure you fill out your form at the end of the session, they are important.”
  Hayes clicked the remote, calling up a screenshot from the game Mass Effect. In the middle of the image stood the player character in mid-conversation, surrounded by his team members and other allies. A dialogue wheel at the bottom of the picture displayed three options for the player’s selection.
  “This could be anywhere,” said Hayes, pointing at the image. “This could be like any other place in a video game where you are asked to make a choice, and you are told that your decision will matter. These characters and this world have been set up to respond to whatever you select here. They’re waiting for you. In this case, the decision you make will ultimately determine whether this character on the left or this one on the right will die. Only you’ve been here before, but these people don’t know that.
  “That’s your advantage. This could be your second, third, fourth, fifth time in this exact position. You’re here again because you failed the first time, or because you want to do or say something differently, or you feel you could have done things better, or because you’re simply curious about the potential variation. Whatever. You’ve been in this spot before, these same circumstances, and because of what you know now, this time is going to be different.
  “The first time you were here, you made the wrong choice. Your second chance puts you back here at the point in time where you can change everything, and that second chance gives way to endless chances until you get it right.”
  Hayes circled the non-player characters in the image with a laser pointer. “Nobody else in this fictional world knows any of this, because as designers we don’t build them that way. None of these characters, then, are capable of recognising your avatar for what he is: superhuman. You go into every game, every dilemma, knowing that your chances are endless. There are no consequences. Nothing is permanent. You know this. They don’t. And this is power.
  “Your advantage in this situation can be a drawback, because you forget how valuable the second chance truly is. I mean the second chance where, afterwards, that’s it. We here in this room know what’s great about a second chance. It’s being lucky enough to get one last shot at something that ended, something that you screwed up, something that you know you could do so much better if you could revise history a little. You know what you lost and you can get it back if you work hard. The second chance is the feeling of: this time, everything matters. This time it has to work, because there is no next time, and so you devote every part of your being to the achievement of success. This is a surge. It’s incredible.
  “It’s just impossible to convey that in a game. This is a weakness, but it’s not debilitating. Think about what we have instead. Infinite chances, infinite lives, infinite variability: these things are such powerful conceits that belong to no other medium in existence. This is ours.
  “This can be anywhere. A game can make you look like any kind of person, but it’s always going to be you. A game can take you to any setting imaginable, but it’s always going to be a game. And we know how games work. The rules are always the same. We know that nothing is real. We know we are in control. So maybe we haven’t been to this exact place before, but we have been here.”
  Tapping the remote rapidly, images lunged across the screen: video game representations of apocalyptic wastelands, medieval castles, fishing villages, savannahs, jungles, the streets of New York, Hong Kong, Paris, Osaka.
  “In all of these worlds, and as all of the characters who inhabit them, we are the same person.”
  Tap.
  “This is who we are.”