The Brave One

Eyes closed and ascending, she comes to the city. Ascending and awake and alone and coming higher, comes higher through the storm and through the desert and the car and comes higher past where the skyline dies in the sun and where life chokes out the street and where the ceiling explodes in flowers red purple yellow orange green blue, awake and alone and in motion and in her head. Here, where instead the world moves for her, the fatigue pulls at her and heat tears at her and the sweat sticks to her and when the doors open she steps out of the elevator and into the hallway with all of her baggage dragging behind. Twenty three oh one two, which is exactly her age except for the oh one two part and what are the chances of that. Is that significant or is it just like when the name of a racehorse includes the name Jack and someone at that race knows a Jack so they say oh that’s not a coincidence: I was born to bet on that horse. There should be a racehorse called Emily Isabella Emma Ava Madison Sophia Olivia Abigail Hannah Elizabeth Jacob Michael Ethan Joshua Daniel Christopher Anthony William Matthew Andrew.
              In dust and cotton in a wall mirror in a path cut by white walls and mood lighting bringing her still alone to twenty three oh one two. White plastic slides easily in and out of the gold lock and back into her bare dry hand she gets the green light and the other hand curls around and turns the door handle and Vanessa Delahaye entered Room 23012 of the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Nevada 89109 at 2:44 p.m. on Friday, September 19 2008. The Deluxe had been the cheapest and smallest room available to her at the time of booking, at $209 a night, but it was still a room in one of the largest hotels and casinos on the Las Vegas Strip and overly capacious for her purposes (sleeping in it).
              The gold and black marble threshold met the dirty soles of Vanessa’s navy Chuck Taylor All Stars and invited her deeper into the room where the marble was replaced by generic carpet substitute. The plush, beige king-size bed could contain all five feet and two inches of Vanessa Delahaye about six times over, and she wondered how she would ever, in her one night stay, make proper use of the two armchairs and the wall-to-wall closet space. The adjoining bathroom made space for not only a bath and walk-in shower, but a wall-mounted telephone directly above the toilet, and Vanessa didn’t want to picture the circumstances under which she would need to use that. A minibar was nestled between the closet and a small writing desk. At check-in, the hotel staff had warned Vanessa that the minibar had already been provided with the details of her MasterCard that ended in 5816, and that it would trigger a charge at the slightest touch. The lack of trust inherent in that arrangement irritated Vanessa, as did the room’s incongruously old CRT television: not even a flat-panel or widescreen, in 2008.
              She turned on the lights, which brightened the room very little. Safely abstract paintings comprised of pale red and green and yellow shapes hung on the walls and reminded Vanessa of nothing. A clock radio stared at her from the desk. The time was 00:00. Somewhere in a closed drawer laid a copy of the Holy Bible.
              Vanessa stood at the foot of the bed still holding a pre-owned black leather handbag with gold buckles and a scratched blue suitcase in either hand. She was twenty-three years old, and wore glasses with black, thick-rimmed frames, a brown-checkered plaid flannel blouse and faded jeans. Her tangled brown hair stopped before it reached her shoulders. No part of the ensemble now looked as hip or attractive as originally envisioned, having since weathered a non-stop 21 hour drive through 80 degree heat.
              Vanessa shrugged off the open handbag, whose contents spilled out over the tightly-tucked bed: tissues (used), bottled water since refilled with tap water and emptied again, Chapstick, a plastic tube of acne concealer, one blue and two black ballpoint pens, CoverGirl Continuous Color Lipstick Shimmer Natural Frost 020 and nineteen business cards collected in Austin and advertising, variously, level designers, environment artists, gameplay programmers, database programmers, software engineers, creative directors, project managers, game designers, community managers, animators and producers. In Berkeley, Vanessa shared an apartment with Maggie Wright (27, policy analyst) and Erica Moore (23, student). As that apartment belonged to the three of them, she observed, this room belonged to nobody. Briefly, she thought of her position in the history of this room and saw herself as nothing more than another anonymous tenant indistinguishable from the hundreds of thousands who had come before her and would, beginning tomorrow, succeed her. But her possession of the business cards left no room for ambiguity as to her identity: Vanessa Delahaye, for the last seven months, a staff writer of video game reviews and previews for a gaming website and magazine based in San Francisco. She welcomed the reminder.
              She settled in the armchair closest to the window, her muscles still tense at the length of her drive from Austin. The Bellagio stretched out in a thin, wide arc before a majestic fountain that ejaculated regularly towards the heavens in time with a playlist focus-tested for its inoffensiveness. With the room located in the rear of the Bellagio, the window looked out not over the fountains, but on a vista of industrial buildings with rooftops covered in sandpaper and weatherproof sheeting, and blocks of residential housing fading into clear sky. Craning her neck right and closer to the glass, Vanessa looked down to the hotel pool on the ground below. Outside, men and women walked through the water.

“…where Joe Pesci is narrating and they’re driving him out into the desert for that meeting? And obviously they’re going to kill him but he hasn’t that figured that out, and then when they get out of the car, Phil Leotardo whacks him in the legs, and Joe Pesci says – in the narration – ‘aahh!’”
              “That might be the only thing from that movie that I remember.”
              “I have literally seen that movie one hundred times. I love everything about Las Vegas.”
              Vanessa Delahaye curled up on the bed, her ear flat against the receiver of the hotel telephone, the phone resting on her arm and her arm resting on the pillow. She struggled to hear the call over the poor reception. The video game industry business cards and the other former contents of her handbag lay around her, undisturbed.
              “What’s your favorite part about Vegas,” Vanessa mumbled with her eyes closed.
              “I don’t know, I’ve never been there. I can’t wait, though. It’s part of a fantasy bachelor party thing I have – you don’t want to know! Okay, I’ll tell you. When I get married, I’m gonna have my bachelor party in Vegas. And it is going to be insane – I am going to wear a tuxedo, and hang out on the casino floor, and I’m going to cash in like two hundred dollars, and I’m going to order so many martinis. And I am going to play roulette, and blackjack… doesn’t that sound wild?”
              “I guess.”
              Vanessa began to wrap the phone cord around her right index finger.
              “So, listen,” she said, “I haven’t written up anything about GDC yet. It took so long to drive here and I think maybe I haven’t even really processed it all yet.” GDC was the Game Developers Conference, whereat game developers conferred. It was held annually in San Francisco and – with less regularity and less prestige – at other spots around the globe.
              “That’s fine, nothing ever happens at the Austin one. I told you that you didn’t have to go. You were insane to want to drive all the way there.”
              “I wanted to. I wasn’t here for the one in February.”
              “Oh, that one was amazing.”
              Vanessa nodded sleepily in lieu of coming up with anything to say.
              “Anyway,” the voice on the phone continued, “I was just saying that I love Vegas.”
              “You know what, I was talking to some other journalists at Austin,” said Vanessa, rolling onto her back, “about how people keep trying to legitimize games through looking for something that we can say is ‘our Citizen Kane’? Someone said that in 1940 or whatever, people didn’t watch Citizen Kane and think it was the greatest ever, and it didn’t even win the Oscar that year. So why do we always think that the Citizen Kane of video games is, like, perpetually coming out next year? Maybe it happened already. Maybe it happened ten years ago. You know? I kind of think I’d like to write a story about that.”
              “Yeah, sure. Sorry, I’m just – someone here’s doing something pretty funny, I don’t know, you’d have to be here.”
              “Okay, but do you think that’s a good idea for a story? It isn’t really about GDC, so it probably – you’d want more of a wrap-up first, I think. I could start on that. There were some sessions there that were interesting.”
              “No, come on, you’re in Vegas. What time is it there?”
              “It’s the same as where you are.”
              “Then go hang out! Forget about being a games journalist. There is so much to do in that city. You should do as much as you can. You’re in Vegas, it’s what you’re supposed to do.”
              “Okay,” she said flatly.
              “Weren’t you so excited about this? You – yeah, here, okay, I am going to read to you from the email that you sent out. This is you: ‘Hey everyone, I will be out of the office covering the Austin GDC until September 22. The day before I get back, I will be in Vegas’ – which is in capitals – ‘at the Bellagio hotel and casino’ – and then you have an exclamation point in parentheses – ‘and it is going to be off the chain! Things I will do in Vegas likely include: wearing sunglasses inside the casino and getting a crowd of people in evening wear to stand behind me at the craps table and having them all blow on the dice. I will also play poker and challenge someone to a duel. It’ll be ridiculous. Everyone take care!’ Then there’s two line breaks, and then three exclamation points in a row. So what happened to that?”
              “I think… now that I’m here…” Vanessa admitted that she had been delirious about the idea of staying in Vegas for her first and likely only time. She thought it was an absurd place; unsubtle and lavish to an extreme and hubristic degree, like first class plane seats made of chocolate. Presented with the option of driving all the way from San Francisco to Austin and back, Vegas – such a hilarious and perfectly realized juvenile conception of elegance where she could only stay for one night anyway – was right there in between them, and given that, why would she ever not go?
              “I don’t like the room,” she said. “The window doesn’t open, so it’s really damp and stale in here, and the prices for Wi-Fi are absurd. And if I want to plug in my laptop, I have to rent an ethernet cable from the hotel, so basically I don’t have internet access at all. There’s a lot about this that is actually pretty lame.”
              “That’s too bad.” Vanessa heard keystrokes over the phone. “So what else do you want to talk about?”
              “I don’t know.”
              “How was Austin?”
              “It was sad.”
              “Alright, I gotta go. You can officially take the day off. Don’t write anything! No games journalism; I don’t even want you to think about it. Okay? Go have fun.”
              “Okay.”
              “Stay frosty.”
By the time Vanessa opened her eyes she was lying on her left side, creasing her clothes even further. Her glasses skewed diagonally from right temple to left cheek. She gingerly lifted herself off the bed and drew the curtains across the window, through which the afternoon light still shone clearly. Vanessa picked up the debris coating the wrinkled bed sheet, and scooped all of the business cards into her left hand. She turned towards the trashcan by the nightstand, hesitated, and then put the cards back in her handbag.
              Pulling at her clothes, stuck to her skin with sweat, Vanessa stripped down to her underwear. Her blouse, jeans and shoes she left in a pile on the floor. She unzipped her suitcase and unfolded the only thing she considered classy enough to mix appropriately with the high rolling casino and nightclub folk downstairs: a white, pleated summer dress that she hadn’t worn in Austin or ever. She had bought it online for $195 and planned to wear it at a GDC party that was ultimately cancelled after the hurricane, and the dress had remained unattended to ever since. She stepped into the dress, fastened the two buttons at the chest and walked into the bathroom to examine herself in the mirror. The neckline adhered closely to her collarbone, and further down the dress tapered in at the waist and flared out slightly where it ended halfway down her thighs. She didn’t have any shoes that would work with this; only the navy Chuck Taylors that had accompanied her for the entire trip. Putting them back on, she thought that the ensemble didn’t look terrible, exactly, and it would work well enough at a party back home, but it wasn’t quite cover-of-Vogue material.
              Vanessa came out of the bathroom, and extended her hand slightly to the front door. She turned back, climbed onto the bed and lay flat on her back. Vanessa had never gambled in her life, and the whole idea of throwing money away did not seem fun or enticing to her at all. Given the choice, she’d take a night in her Berkeley apartment trying to persuade Maggie Wright and Erica Moore into a game of Rock Band. Her fingers knotted across her stomach and fidgeted with one another, as she stared at the plain ceiling.
              In the white dress, Vanessa leaned over the bathroom sink, built as a large porcelain cavity in a marbled olive countertop, and leveraged her empty water bottle underneath the faucet. Once it had filled, she closed the faucet and took a cautious sip. It tasted about how she expected bathroom water would. She retrieved a white cotton bathrobe from the wardrobe and returned to the bathroom mirror where she tried it on over the summer dress and Chuck Taylors. This took her even further from Vogue territory; more like the centerfold for a weekly magazine about bad decisions. She wrapped the bathrobe tight around her chest, then threw it back and with her hands pinned it behind her waist.
              Vanessa sat at the desk by the window, twisting her neck toward the mirror to catch a glance of the rash that had emerged across the nape. The skin was swollen and hot to the touch. She pushed it around with her thumb for the light burst of pain she received whenever she pressed in a little harder.
              The bathrobe still lamely hanging off her, Vanessa sat cross-legged on the bed eating from a small bag of salted peanuts she had carried with her from Austin. The salt stuck to her fingers. Every thirty minutes, the Bellagio fountains came to life in a bass eruption. This afternoon, they were joined by the Faith Hill song This Kiss. Vanessa felt she might die of boredom, if she hadn’t already.

Descending, in a return to the hall in which the elevators begin and where sits a heavy-set sentry in a sharp suit whose role is to confirm that the people going up to the rooms actually belong there. To the casino floors from the hidden rooms, clean-cut waiters and pretty old waitresses deliver drink orders in exchange for new ones. Standing rigid and impeccably dressed in shirts perfectly ironed, the dealers command the course of small felt tables hosting poker games. Croupiers unflappable call out numbers without passion. Blackjack players hunched over and tense at the tables eyes dead on the cards don’t talk and speak only when spoken to. A poker player, one with a baseball cap, backwards even, measures his chips into tidy piles. Waitress waits with drink in hand for a tourist in shorts who hurls forward dice to a craps table from a sweaty hand. Second shorts man calmly collected at a roulette table waiting for the wheel to be spun for him by a uniformed geriatric. Slot machine users sit steady spilling over the stool feeding coins and pulling levers with unemotional focus borne of routine. New guests stream in from the golden lobby and disperse towards their games. In the lobby and underneath the ceiling of multicolored crystal flowers two tourists with cameras and craned necks capture the light through their lenses and beside them stands a gold horse. A hotel porter pushes the baggage cart past a family waiting to check in at the front desk with three small children whose small hands hold backpacks in place. Behind the desk the female clerk with too much makeup answers the phone. Concierge points to an open brochure as he speaks to visor-clad visitor. Piano player too pleased with himself gently gentrifying his surroundings with old standard. On cue, the waters sing. Dice spill and clatter onto green felt tables. Stocky machines trill like electronic birds. Roulette wheels spin the whirr of a hundred barrels down a rocky waterfall. Cards are dealt, snapped, as a razor slices through paper. Regular but slight applause and murmurs from all corners.
              Now her.
              Stopped short on the carpet that cuts a swath down the hall as in a chapel where the pews are roulette tables: the young writer video games journalist twenty-three year old Berkeley hipster video game die-hard with the major in classics and minor in creative writing. Nobody who lives in a casino would understand what any of that is. Nobody here who she could talk to. Nobody who knows her. The wrong place for her. Why did she even come here, let alone alone. She is even over-dressed for the casino at the matinee hour. All around, dramatically fewer tuxedos and ballroom dresses than expected. A lot of polo shirts. A lot.
              It’s a thoroughfare and she knows she can’t really just stand still in the middle of it but unlike the clockwork ghosts switching from one game to another she doesn’t know where to begin or even why she should. Has to move one way or another though, like these others moving around her and checking her out. Look at them look at her making the scene in the worst way. This is absurd don’t you think, thinks she who has never been to a place like this before. Not the gambling kind. Giving away money, this is what dumb people do, so why is she here, what is she here for, why stay here, not for money. But then you’re not meant to play games to win or to lose, but for the experience. Try and feel what they feel, even with great reluctance. That is what she is buying, she reasons. Make new experiences. I am the brave one.
              And she is at the window that belongs to the central teller and she counts it out ten thirty forty ninety, one hundred dollars, taken and exchanged with mechanical proficiency into five blue chips one red chip two orange chips one yellow chip two green chips. Nothing said. The staff wears red. Red suits on black shirts. Red waistcoats on white shirts.
              Whatever seems the easiest, she settles upon the masses of slot machine players. Each of them pulls the lever or presses the buttons with practiced rhythm and in total silence, and she concludes that this game surely must be the least demanding of them all. Assured, she takes the stool at one of the free machines. To begin with, she looks for the place on the machine in which to insert her newly cashed chips, one of the blue ones clasped between her fingertips, and… actually does it only take coins? So what was the point of cashing ugh that is so irritating. Fine, take a coin, then, still have those after all and it disappears down the cascade, sounds right at least and. Then. Sound the click is registered the light show is arrested. Three wheels splayed at the meridian frozen from the last fall. On counters vivid red numerals inflate and collapse in chaotic movements. Next is to depress one of these buttons or this lever or what to select a line what’s a line. She explores around the machine, check other side and then the other side and then the other side and then the other side and there are no instructions anywhere. Think. Her impressions of the assemblage: this is a tall and dark machine a luminous array of buttons and detailing chromatically lurid installed in the centermost of the enfilade reaching out forever. Choose a button to press and nothing happened. Think harder. Press all the buttons and nothing happened, come onnnnn, the worst ever. Do the second row and correct okay the noise and now the lever down all the way then it retracts. Reels roll a semiotic kaleidoscope concours à gogo. What is she supposed to be hoping for? Think about the likely result. It probably uses a pseudorandom number generator, but theoretically there are only three reels in play, so, what could, think about it how many potential stops per reel machine des équations cubiques. Les chances doivent certainement être basculé en faveur de la maison. Yeux sont collés à la ligne de paiement de paiement répéter éternellement si nécessaire. Le train de marchandises s'immobilise et cet alignement de symboles that she loses, without even understanding why. The upshot is that she is down one dollar.
              Frustrated, the fairest daughter abandons the slot machine halls. In her wake she leaves behind a man undeterred by his mounting losses who pulls the lever again and again. It must be that he is like the others here who have found something that they enjoy. All she wants is to find what’s hers.
              There is an arrangement of semi-circular blackjack tables across the way and she chooses one of the inclusive tables that welcome the underprivileged with a ten dollar minimum bet. Two couples at the table, they look like those pictures in magazines of couples who look like one another, or do those even exist, is she actually thinking of those pictures of dogs who look like their owners, do you think dogs who are in love with one another start to look like one another, what are some famous dogs in love, there’s that picture of dogs playing poker, hey which is what she is doing right now. No wait this is blackjack. She joins the couples sitting before the dealer who stands with them in silence except to call the value on the cards being dealt. Try this now. She rests her chips on the edge of the table as the others appear to have done and she is rebuked immediately by the dealer because that is not where you put your chips. Chuckle from the couples. She is dealt the king of diamonds. Hit me she says. This is wrong. What she should have done is tap her knuckles on the table; this is demonstrated to her coldly by the dealer. Isn’t this supposed to be fun. New bet new stake. Ten. Seven. I fold she says. This is also wrong. Stay, you say, and with your hand pass over the cards as if you are waving closed a dead man’s eyes. Could he smile at her at least she is not a child. They are looking at her and trying to hide it, why would they do that. The husband seated to her left wearing the red polo shirt whoops it up when he beats the dealer. Red hot face with the admonishment as she loses another hand and loses it the wrong way. Couples exchange knowing glances as if she wouldn’t notice. Polo shirt is up. Not literally. Fine, she thinks, be that way, and she goes in again, hotter and higher this time. Hit me again if that’s how this works, hit me again. Whatever. All right, then, I’ll go to hell. Hit me she says. Hit me she says. Hit me she says. Hit me she says. Hit me she says. I’ll stay she says. Hit me she says. I’ll stay she says. I’ll stay she says. I’ll stay she says hit me she says hit me she says hit me she says hit me she says hit me she says hit me she says and it’s
              Over, and she can’t take her eyes from the one chip she has left on the table because if there’s really one chip left on the table then it slowly follows that she has lost ninety dollars. Ninety dollars. That can’t be real. Face on fire with the shame of it. Take it back. She should not have done that. She cannot afford to have done that. That was really dumb. Undo that. If that was the experience she bought, then return it. She knows they are watching her try to think of how to react and find a casual exit strategy. Look at them look at her making a scene in the worst way. Get out.
              Coolly, she retrieves her single ten dollar chip ignoring the stern dealer’s glancing judgments and the whispered mocking of the dog-faced lovers. She withdraws from the table and without her the table resumes the natural order of things.
              Out of sight and ninety dollars and gasps a little with her back turned. Hot coals under her skin and that rash on the back of her neck driving her fucking crazy. That is a lot of money they took from her and she didn’t even get anything for it. That was an experience, what a dumb fucking experience, the worst. Breathe. in. once. She doesn’t even want to be here anymore. It’s okay it’s okay. Look around so why not leave. Could do it why not. Walk out of here that at least is your decision. Yeah she thinks yeah. Breathe in control, so it’s okay. Don’t cry about it. Composure. Composition, composing, composed, composer, compose, compose yourself focus and retrace steps to the exit. Yeah. Yes. Good. Not even looking back, why should she. Yeah. Composition: so she walks to the room, she walks to return and view the cheerful skies, in this the task and mighty labor lies. Girt in sanguine gown, by night and day, observant of the souls that pass the downward way. What length of lands, what oceans have you pass'd; what storms sustain'd, and on what shores been cast probably shit whatever don’t think care even no like what her almost okay just looks I guess said and she reels from the impact, a clueless laughing tourist in her path having bumped her shoulder harshly and he continues loudly by. She stumbles and her hand in her dress pocket holding her chip trembles and lets it go. Everything in the world is behind that curtain now. Across the carpet guy at the card table wearing baseball shirt and majestic shades takes vodka from a roaming waitress and pounds it and talks at her nice very nice oh you look great. Picks it up and she is moving again but she is moving too quickly this place is the worst.
              Briskly she carries on down the aisle thinking what if all their eyes are on her, hate hate hate hate. And she is back in the hall of elevators, made it, and the sentry rises from his post and holds out his palm excuse me ma’am can I see your key please and she thinks what. Dice clatter wheel spins laughing. What she says seriously I was just here a second ago. No reaction. This is fucking ridiculous get out of here and her neck becomes hot again and she thinks of the tourists with the cameras. Don’t you remember she says heated. I’m Vanessa Delahaye. I am Vanessa Delahaye.

Underneath the mirror on the hotel room desk near the minibar laid the last of Vanessa’s chips; the ten dollar token decorated in charcoal and fluorescent orange concentric circles, with ‘BELLAGIO Las Vegas, Nevada $10 POKER Ten DOLLARS’ printed in white Trajan Pro Bold. Vanessa sat up on the bed holding her MacBook Pro above her lap, its power cord stretching down to the outlet located under the bedside table. For the better part of the last hour, she had been reviewing her notes on the Game Developers Conference that she had compiled at the Austin Convention Center during lunch breaks.
              Prior to Vanessa’s arrival in Texas, much of the state had been subjected to the category four Hurricane Ike, active from the first of September to the fourteenth. The storm had cut power, flooded homes and injured and even killed residents across the state. Austin was left more or less untouched, but closed its airports as a precautionary measure, thereby cancelling Vanessa’s return flight from San Francisco to Austin. Vanessa’s trip to the Game Developers Conference was already booked and paid for, and upon learning of the cancellations, she made a briefly-considered decision to drive the 1,791 miles and 30 hours from San Francisco in a rented Chevrolet Tahoe 4WD.
              Vanessa’s handwritten notes began underneath a staircase at the convention center on 500 East Cesar Chavez Street. In this august setting, groups of independent game developers demonstrated their games, often works in progress, to interested parties. Vanessa had conducted an interview with one of the developers, the lanky, blond and soul patched author of an abstract action game based on liquid physics. As official conference attendees both he and Vanessa wore army green lanyards coupled to sky blue straps. As the interview progressed, the designer drifted away from the particulars of his game and engaged Vanessa in a broader discussion of game design theory that she had found wonderfully interesting and later enthusiastically paraphrased in her notes.
              He spoke about the way that roulette worked, which was, as he explained it, basically a set of gameplay rules derived solely from the capabilities of a random number generator. It will come up with a number between one and thirty six that will be either red or black. All the player can do is guess what number or color it will be or whether it will be an odd or even number. That’s the kind of game, he said, that is created when you give a child a calculator for Christmas. He had told Vanessa that the two of them could play roulette right there with a deck of cards: he would turn the cards over one by one and she would try to guess whether the next would be red or black. For all intents and purposes, that is roulette, he said, proving that what makes roulette fun and more interesting than the hypothetical and boring card game is not the rules, but the presentation. Roulette is a game about having in hand a tumbler of whisky stick to a wet napkin, about a croupier in a tuxedo, about the green felt and the wood finish of the table, about a room lit in neon light and about attracting an audience. Those are all superficial elements in theory but that’s game design: translating base mechanics, routines and random numbers into an experience.
              As a consequence of the hurricane, the Austin Convention Center was partially repurposed as a temporary ward for displaced residents to shelter, sleep, eat and collect clothing and supplies. This was isolated from the ongoing Game Developers Conference by nothing more than a thick curtain. Here Vanessa’s notes deteriorated as she recalled noticing that a disheveled, middle-aged man in a gray t-shirt and khaki shorts had made his way beyond the curtain and into the independent games section. Even after seeing him she kept asking the developer questions but her unease at the man’s presence and vacant expression had made her a self-conscious and clumsy interviewer. She remembered hoping that the homeless man from the other side of the building would not come over and talk to her; wouldn’t embarrass her in front of this guy who was speaking intelligently on a subject really interesting to her. Instead, to her immediate relief, the man was drawn to one of the stations showing off one of the games. The game’s designer helpfully inquired if the man wanted to play, to which the man appeared deeply confused. Interpreting his silence as perhaps naiveté or shyness, the designer began explaining to him at a fundamental level how one played the game.
              Both Vanessa and her interviewee watched this unfold without comment, their discussion fully derailed. The developer leaned in toward her and in a low voice asked if she could imagine her entire life being behind that curtain. Vanessa examined the lanyard-less evacuee listening to what video games were and she said no.
              Vanessa settled the back of her head into the overly firm hotel pillow and thought about how to distill a single piece of reportage from the myriad talks and roundtables of the Game Developers Conference, and how she might connect her coverage up with things like her experience with the soul-patched developer and the refugee into the overall picture. For the moment, she disregarded the general message or theme of the Conference and focused on formulating the opening sentence of her eventual piece: The Austin Game Developers Conference was… Beneath the staircase at the Austin Convention Center… The highlight of this year’s Austin Game Developers Conference… When you think of the Austin Game Developers Conference, you’d think of a lot of talks about massively multiplayer online games, and most years you’d be right, but… The theme of this year’s Austin Game Developers Conference was, without a doubt…
              The Fountains of Bellagio began another song: Time To Say Goodbye. Vanessa’s train of thought disappeared.

Stares the girl in white at the fountains. Observing from a distance, not like the tour groups up close. She can’t be one of them she knows; she doesn’t have a camera or a friend. Tonight the fountain plays an instrumental, but she has heard this song with lyrics somewhere before and cannot place it now, fingernails scream down the chalkboard walls of her brain trying to place it. In separate rows the jets expel from right to left and left to right and in circles clockwise and counterclockwise, leaping majestically into the sky and writhing orgiastically. It would be cool if this fountain played heavy metal at three in the morning or maybe just alarm clock noises. The water show is almost like elevator music except that she is not going anywhere.
              Restless in light. The strip ablaze in neon fire and dry heat. Nevada has a skyline strewn with incandescent buildings yellow and green and purple white silver and the Eiffel Tower is in there as well, what that is about Vanessa doesn’t know. Posted outside her hotel, Vanessa cannot help stealing glimpses at the woman standing nearby and nearer to the hotel entrance, because if she is being honest that is the best-looking woman she has ever seen in her life. Alone the woman waits in a strapless white dress; the pale-skinned woman with the angelic face, dark rolling hair and a black bracelet on each wrist. Even cleansed by hot white fullbright floodlight her skin looks perfect. How, wonders Vanessa, could God be so cruel as to make other people that beautiful? She doesn’t believe in any god, so doesn’t ask it literally. The pale woman shifts her weight from foot to foot. Now an unkempt and unattractive guy comes striding out of the hotel and touches her from behind, she turns with a start and he kisses her full on the mouth probably with tongue. Pale woman more like a dead woman the way she doesn’t react at all, but soon she relaxes into his grasp he takes control and she likes it like that and he takes her hand and he takes her inside the hotel. Vanessa put your confused face on. What is going on in this place don’t answer, and she begins walking south down the strip away from the hotel away from the fountains away from the tourists away from the pale one and away from the setting sun.
              Not going anywhere really but anyway the girl walks by dressed in her summer clothes down the strip from one hotel/casino to another. Shoes are untied but she doesn’t care about that. Down this road there are palm trees bound in light and a different piece of soft rock bleating out from every shitty hearth. Advertising signs for dancers, musicians and cologne cut the street on a picture of dark where life goes on all around her. There stands the false lady liberty whose flame is the free lightning that burns for the miserable wicked fashioned after the great pyramids with a shaft of blue light beaming into the heavens where people come to sleep was built like a tomb and in a car running on a track that loops through the sky people cheer they like it like that. What, does this place actually never stop.
              The thrum of traffic and thoroughfare turns transversely. Soon down the path Vanessa edges past a double date in motion where one of the ladies in high heels and leopard-print tights, arms wavering up and about, trembles with one foot on the curb and her boyfriend holds her hand to steady her. The flow of couples continues in and out of the buildings on opposing sides of the street, they are dressed up and wasted and laughing and falling over one another and holding on with linked arms against the pull of the pavement. Drunk patrons outside the casinos. Fresh vomit at the foot of the palms. Two girls sitting on the ground who don’t look like they are going to be able to get up on their own power. Every third person clicking a camera. Crossing the bridge over the street are the husband with the head of a lion and his wife with the head of a wolf, so beautiful the mystics. As she watches she is startled by a blast of blunt noise from behind her and she steps out of the path of an SUV that is a mobile bachelorette party.
              The sidewalk is so thick with the customers that are its lifeblood that Vanessa can’t stop moving because then everything stops moving. Here is a wheel that spins itself. How easy it is for them to know how to spend their money and where to drink and when to cross the street even wearing an animal mask and where to throw up and when to take your girlfriend’s hand so she doesn’t get hit by a car and in the middle of all the motion Vanessa thinks about the beautiful pale woman in the white dress standing so still and doing nothing. That doesn’t add up at all. How can someone that perfect not do better than that guy. A passing man with a video camera for a face makes her thoughts immortal. Vanessa blinks and when her eyes open she is still in the Bellagio with the drunks and the shades and the people out there who are the same people in here. The strip is not separate from her hotel or any of the others; they are all rooms of the same party. Vanessa steps over a cluster of matches lying broken on the pavement in a pool of waste and shinier things.
              Unremarkable so man a for unenthusiastically so and long so waited who dress white the in woman pale beautiful the of mystery the to again returns she returns again to the mystery of the beautiful pale woman in the white dress who waited so long and so unenthusiastically for a man so unremarkable. Then of course, it occurs to Vanessa pleasingly, obviously, it’s not his girlfriend at all, it’s a hooker, and they act like strangers because they are strangers. That is allowed here after all, so why wouldn’t that be what’s going on. It was silly of her not to think of it before. So smart right now. Vanessa comes to the city on the Western edge of the Earth, by the stream of Colorado, where there is no snow nor heavy storm nor rain but golden fields and crystal waters. Her desire and her will turn like the wheel that spins by itself, all at an equal speed, by the love which moves the sun and the other stars.
              She trips on a loose white shoelace and tumbles forward through the crowd. Instantly she throws her hands forward to break her fall and collides roughly with the concrete. Her hands clap sharply. She cries out a little on the inside and also on the outside. Both her palms are grazed and stinging, and she must have hurt her right knee as well because the skin is raw and breaking out in specks of blood. A stranger amidst the onlookers helps Vanessa to her shaking feet with a warm hand wrapped around her bare elbow.
              Thanks she says and detaches herself from the masses and the road, feeling faint. She retreats off the strip underneath the kitschy awning of a life support bar where she brushes away the grit burning on her hands and her legs. Heart still pounding as she inspects her glasses. Cars drive by, horns honking like a flock of big dumb ducks, whipping up the stale desert air behind them. Vanessa, thinking of the time, was certain that the fountain this minute was about to begin a new song, and it did. I know it she thought, one hand clenched in the other. I know it. I know it. I know it. Even when she was grounded she felt closer to the stars.

Vanessa Delahaye let the door to 23012 slam shut behind her. She turned on the lights and haphazardly launched her handbag at a corner of the bed. Her MacBook Pro was still on the bed where she had left it and she carried it over to the desk, yanking out the power cord from the laptop, letting it fall over the pile of old clothes. Sitting down at the desk chair she opened a Microsoft Word for Mac window, hunched forward and began to type.

Last Friday I had the day off. Where was I (is what you are all asking in my mind)? Well, I spent a full day and night at the Bellagio casino and hotel in Las Vegas, kicking it on the Strip and getting in some major downtime on the casino floor itself. What does any of this have to do with video games, you ask? Well, at heart, Las Vegas is just a big video game.
              Let’s pretend for a second that the VERY IMPORTANT QUESTION of ‘what is the point of a video game’ isn’t something that everybody constantly argues about, and just agree that it’s this: to keep you playing. A Vegas casino is no different, and pulls all kinds of tricks to keep you on a stool throwing chips at a dealer while feeling like it’s all your idea.
              The first thing I tried at the Bellagio was a slot machine and I have to admit that I STILL don’t really know how that thing works. You’ve got a choice of about two dozen buttons to press (and a lever) and spinning wheels with symbols on them, and you’d THINK the idea is that you try to get three in a row to line up, but it’s way more complicated than that. There aren’t any instructions or directions around to tell you what to do or what button you’re supposed to press. I’m sounding like how my grandmother does when I watch her try to play a video game. But, you know? I bet that’s the whole point. It’s supposed to confuse somebody like me, who’s never been to a casino before, so that I keep at it for a while trying to figure it out and doing different things to see what works, and because each ‘round’ goes by so quickly, it makes it really easy to get hooked into pressing the button to make it spin over and over, so you’re getting constant and rapid feedback. And each try, obviously, costs me a little more money. And, yep, I fell for it. Epic fail.
              Down on the casino floor the lights are on the whole time, and there aren’t any windows or clocks on the walls. I’ve heard rumors about how they pump extra oxygen into the air to keep you alert and playing, and between that and the basically free access to drinks, it’s pretty clear that they’re doing all they can to keep you at the tables without you realizing that you’ve already been there for hours.
              Also? Let’s talk about the hotel rooms. Personally, I found my expensive room in this FIVE STAR hotel to be seriously lame, with dim lights, windows that don’t open even a little, outrageous prices for internet access and a minibar that you can’t even TOUCH without your credit card being maxed out, so it feels a lot more like you have a time bomb in your room than a snack emporium. If it’s starting to sound like the hotel would rather you stay in, oh, say, the casino, than in the rooms, that’s probably not a coincidence. The capper is that there’s a big security guard outside the elevators in the foyer who makes sure to check EVERY SINGLE TIME you go up to the rooms that you are a hotel guest. So not only are the rooms themselves not enticing, they make it a major inconvenience to get to them at all. It’s really the worst.
              I can’t help but think that this is a lot like the way that a video game works. Video games are basically always about funneling the player along a certain kind of narrow experience, and games make very specific decisions about difficulty, interactions, lighting, music, feedback, control, camera angles, etc, to keep you happy and engaged and encouraged, and most importantly, playing along. What’s a casino? Basically a larger and more expensive version of that. Oh, not to mention that video games used to LITERALLY be that – trying their hardest to keep you in the arcade and inserting quarters.
              That’s what I learned on my trip to Vegas. And what am I trying to say with all of this? Well, this kind of says something about how the world works as a whole, don’t you think? It makes you think about everything that you see in the world and how you react to it. Because it can’t be only Vegas that is like a video game, when you really think about it.
              I’m pretty sure that I’m rambling now.
              Actually, maybe the takeaway is just the opposite: it’s that looking around at the world and places like Las Vegas can actually help you to better understand how a video game works, and that life is about making new experiences because they really shape your point of view and who you are as a person. For instance, having spent all this time in Vegas, I’m almost

Vanessa scratched at the back of her neck and ran her right hand down her face. After idling for a minute on how to end the sentence, she flushed with annoyance and deleted the document entirely.

At the rear of the Bellagio, Vanessa Delahaye’s hotel room faced away from the brilliant narrows of the Las Vegas Strip, and did not enjoy the nighttime illumination of incandescent casinos and replica landmarks. Instead, even with the blinds drawn back, 23012 settled into quiet darkness until at 11:31 p.m. the door kicked open and shot the room through with hallway light.
              “I’m going to prove it to you,” said Vanessa Delahaye, surging backwards over the marble threshold with a graceless pirouette and she pointed at Will Sommer in his black pinstripe suit. “I can’t show you on Facebook because I don’t have an internet connection in here, but I still have the photo on my hard drive. It’s a real, it’s a real picture.”
              Vanessa leaned over the desk searching through the photo folder on her MacBook Pro, steadying herself on the desk’s edge with her left hand. Will Sommer closed the door and missed the light switch on his way in. The thirty year old sat down in the armchair in the corner of the room and reached for the lamp on the adjacent table.
              “I’m going to turn on this light, okay?” he said.
              “Yeah. Good,” said Vanessa without looking. She picked up and carted the MacBook over to Will and placed it down on the newly-lit table.
              “You look amazing in that dress.”
              “Thanks, what’s your favorite part?”
              “Um, the buttons, I think. On the chest.”
              Crouching, Vanessa turned the screen to face him and waved her finger vaguely at the image on display, feeling a rush as she spoke. “There. See? ‘By Vanessa Delahaye.’ This is a review I wrote in April of a game that came out earlier this year, and it’s the first thing I ever got published like this. This is in a magazine, an actual print magazine. And that’s the first time that anybody ever saw that: ‘By Vanessa Delahaye.’ Oh. I’m getting chills.”
              Vanessa studied Will’s face for his reaction and for any signal of approval in particular.
              “That is cool,” he said agreeably. Vanessa nodded enthusiastically, pride testifying through the inebriation. She stood up and smoothed down her dress for the third time in the last hour.
              “I wrote something in that review that my boss said was very interesting. I talked about how like there’s this great moment in some games where the player and the character that they’re playing are just… unified. That when, like, someone is shooting at your character in the game, you don’t think, oh I’d better press B and the right trigger. You think: someone is shooting at me. I need to take cover. The reactions are the same, as if you’re really there and you’re that person and it’s this great moment of…” Vanessa stifled a burp on its way up and made it appear to be a languid sigh. “…interception. Did you want another drink?”
              “Yeah,” Will said, loosening his black polyester tie from around the collar of his pressed white cotton shirt. “Do you drink scotch? I’ve got some with me.”
              “I guess I would get you something from the minibar,” Vanessa continued, “but if I even touch it my credit card starts getting maxed out so it’s more like having a time bomb in my room.”
              “Yeah,” he said, producing from his inside jacket pocket a miniature bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, the length of which fit between his thumb and forefinger. He set it down on the table to Vanessa’s disbelief.
              “That’s what you have?!” she said with a laugh.
              “I bought it outside.”
              “How many ounces is that?”
              “I think one. A little more than one.”
              “I should get us some glasses for that,” she teased him, and knelt down by the cabinet near the minibar and pretended to search through its drawers.
              “We’ll just share the bottle, okay?”
              “Yeah. Give it to me.” Vanessa got back to her feet and saw Will had taken his iPhone out again and was checking his messages or something like that. “You are still checking your phone?” she exclaimed with semi-sincere amazement. “You are totally Mr. Corporate. I love it.”
              “I’m turning it off now,” said Will quickly, and indeed returned it to his inside jacket pocket. Vanessa relaxed into the other armchair gladly, closed her eyes and felt the world slow down around her. She looked at Will through the warm glow of the one active lamp in the room and realized that she had started smiling again. Will unscrewed the cap from the miniature bottle of scotch and offered her the first drink. She accepted it gratefully and took a sip, the liquid biting at the lining of her mouth, though not unpleasantly so. She shook her head free of the aftertaste and passed the bottle back to Will, who readily imbibed.
              “What do you keep checking on your phone?” she asked softly, resting her head not entirely comfortably against the wall on her left.
              “Uh, stock prices,” said Will, after another drink.
              “Oh. For what?”
              “The company that I work for.”
              “Who do you work for?”
              “Morgan Stanley,” Will said, passing the bottle back to Vanessa.
              “Morgan Stanley, that’s a bank, right?” She took another, smaller, sip. She really didn’t like it that much.
              “Yes. For the moment.”
              “That’s cool,” she said, and racked her brains to think of a question that was more on point. “What do you do?”
              “I’m an associate. Equity capital markets. Investment banking.”
              She didn’t know what that meant. “Wow,” she laughed, “you are so Wall Street.”
              Will shrugged. “Well, we are in Manhattan.”
              “Manhattan,” Vanessa said dreamily and laid her bare arms across the table. “I would love to live in Manhattan.”
              “You should come and visit me,” Will said.
              Vanessa made a look that she had seen other people do when they wanted to appear coy and interesting. “I may have to take you up on that,” she said.
              “Great,” said Will and held up the bottle to the light to gauge how many drinks remained. It didn’t look like very many.
              “Is that what your friends do as well?” she asked. “Investment banking?”
              “Yeah. Do you want another drink?”
              “I’m alright. What did you guys come down here for? It’s a bachelor party, I bet, right? Wait, are you getting married?”
              “No,” said Will to her immediate relief. “It’s not a bachelor party either, a couple of us just felt like going to Vegas for the weekend, blowing off some steam.”
              “That’s cool,” she said. “So like a vacation?”
              “I guess so,” Will slurred, rubbing at his already bleary eyes. “We were just thinking, like, come here and have a party and drink and gamble or whatever for a while, because… I mean, why not? I just didn’t want to be at work.”
              Vanessa nodded. “I have days like that too.”
              Will raised an eyebrow without picking up his gaze from the carpet. “I really don’t think that is true.”
              His sudden decline in mood caused Vanessa both concern and irritation. “I’m sure it’s okay,” she said tentatively, cautious of stepping into a whole drama. “Sometimes at work I think that things are worse than they are actually are.”
              Will finished off the scotch and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Morgan Stanley’s stock price is down 42 percent. This is after Lehman went bankrupt literally this Monday. Those two things by themselves would be disastrous but this is all on top of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Bear and AIG imploding. There’s no floor to this,” he insisted, holding his palm out level to demonstrate what a floor looked like. “One thing happens and you think that it’s the worst thing that could ever reasonably happen, but literally the next day something worse has happened. This should be impossible.”
              Vanessa enclosed his outstretched hand in hers to calm him down. “Hey. Look at me. It’s alright.”
              Will laughed apparently despite himself. “It is by far the furthest thing from being alright. Tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs in, what, the last couple of weeks? And there’s no end in sight. The stock market is falling apart. The economy is just going to collapse entirely. A month from now there could literally be no economy. That means that your house won’t be worth anything anymore, but you still can’t pay your mortgage, or get insurance or student loans. Our state budget is decimated so that means no public spending on anything for, I don’t know, the next forever. Everyone’s going to lose their jobs. I will, for sure. And for… nothing, for no reason. There’s literally no rational reason why this should be happening.”
              Vanessa let his hand slip away. She was confused by what he had said but overtaken by a strange urgency. “You’re bullshitting me, right?” she said, needing to hear him confirm it. “That’s not real.”
              “Why wouldn’t it be?”
              “Because I would know about it.”
              Will merely looked at Vanessa as if waiting for her to talk herself into it.
              “How did that happen?” she muttered, thinking that he wouldn’t expand unprompted.
              “You tell me.”
              “No, you tell me.”
              Will Sommer poked at the empty bottle of scotch with his index finger as though to wish it full. “Okay, so there’s a thing called a subprime mortgage, and essentially that is a complicated and shitty deal with unfavorable terms sold to people who don’t have very good credit and can’t get a regular mortgage. They sign up for it because the initial terms aren’t bad and they think that when the rates are increased, that they’ll be in a position to pay them. Banks sell mortgages to these people because they, because banks, can make money off of it. All these mortgages get bundled up by the bank and sold and resold on to different parties all across the world many different times, which they do because that’s another way banks can make money.
              “That’s part of it. Now, though, recently, the housing bubble bursts and these houses aren’t worth anything anymore, and then you start to see mounting defaults, at a catastrophic level, on these mortgages. Banks have been selling on these securities that are based on real estate pricing and now those are worthless too, and the banks begin to lose billions on shitty assets and bad loans. Now you, as a regular person, are going to have a hard time getting credit because the banks are in a tough situation.
              “This is about liquidity. Banks trade more money than the world actually makes. Because it doesn’t all exist yet, we don’t always, you know, have it, definitely not all sitting there in a pile of cash. That’s been okay for us, though, because nobody ever actually needs all the investments they have in their hands at once. Unless something happens like every single customer en masse wanting to withdraw all of their cash at once, which would only happen if there was a total lack of confidence in the banks and the banking system. Which has happened. That is happening right now. You probably think right now that maybe you should close your account and put all your money under your mattress.
              “The market is not a science. It’s about how you feel. That’s seriously true. The economy runs entirely on belief. You invest in things that you feel are going to do well and take your money out of investments that you think will fail. You believe that the economy is improving, and that belief is measured and it matters. But people don’t always act rationally, you know? Hardly ever. And if you hear, over and over, that a bank is in trouble and it could go bankrupt – no matter where you heard it – you want to get your money out of there. But that’s what’s making it insolvent. It doesn’t have assets anymore, and can’t borrow money anymore because nobody thinks it’s a good bet. And the stock prices plummet, which makes the Dow fall and that creates a panic and now if you had stock in anything you are left with nothing. Once it starts bleeding it can’t stop, and all of it bleeds. Lehman bled out trillions and nobody stepped in to help, not to stabilize it or to buy it outright, because it was a shitty investment.
              “This is unprecedented, by the way. All this begins with banks making deals that are based on risk, and even with what’s considered a serious risk, the investor is confident that at the absolute worst, they’ll lose half of their investment. But now you’re seeing situations, everywhere, where they are losing everything. This is not supposed to happen.
              “What you’re seeing now is a run on the entire world financial system. You’re seeing destructive speculation from the media about how the banks are toast, and you can’t believe that. You have to believe that things are okay, because otherwise the situation snowballs into this death spiral. Once people start to think that things are this disastrous, it would take, I don’t know, it would really take a lot to convince them otherwise.
              “America is worth less than it used to be. Individual wealth is down. It’s harder to get credit for anything. People are getting laid off. Because this is a market that is controlled by fear and rumors. And instead of everyone pitching in and trying to fix it, there are people who will make money off the fact that it’s tanking at all. In our case we have short sellers actively, intentionally, driving our stock down because they are making bets that it will go down. This is like if your neighbor’s house is on fire and you don’t help because you bet someone a hundred bucks that the fire will kill them. You want people to do the right thing. But they don’t.”
              Vanessa did not understand everything that Will had said to her, but his clear sincerity wrapped her stomach in tight knots. “You’re not shitting me,” she said carefully, and sunk into the back of her chair.
              “It’s serious,” was all Will said.
              “Holy shit,” Vanessa said suddenly. “I work in the video game industry. I’m never going to have a house.”
              “I don’t know what will happen,” Will offered, in what Vanessa interpreted to be a gesture of real kindness. She found it funny in its complete inefficacy and lowered her face to hide a wry smile.
              “Okay,” she said, watching herself spread out her hands over the table. “So what’s your guys’ plan?”
              “What do you mean?”
              “I mean, what are you doing about it?”
              Will looked at her vacantly. “This is what I’m doing.”
              Vanessa shut her eyes and ran her hands back and forth through her hair until they became caught in the dry, tangled strands. She broke them free and exhaled deeply and roughly into her palms, still embedded with gravel. She felt as though she imagined a doctor would feel when called in to perform emergency surgery during a night of heavy drinking.
              “I need to stand up,” she said curtly, and smoothed down her dress. She walked in a doggedly straight line back from the chair and to the window overlooking the rear of the hotel. At night, without the benefit of the Strip’s light, she thought, it really looked like absolutely nothing. Feeling hot, she gently pushed her right hand against the cold glass.
              “Why don’t these windows open,” she mumbled to herself.
              “It’s so you can’t kill yourself.”
              Vanessa pulled back from the window. “You’re a huge downer, man,” she said, “do you know that?”
              “Do you know how it says ‘In God We Trust’ on dollar bills?” Will asked. “You know why it says that? It’s a warning. It’s warning you that when it comes to money, you can’t trust anybody else.”
              “I don’t believe in God,” Vanessa said.
              “Me neither.”
              Vanessa centered her hands on her hips and looked squarely at Will. “All right, then,” she said, nodding, and squatted down beside the minibar and wrenched it open for the first time, the sudden light of the refrigerator and the hiss of the air escaping becoming a beacon in the dim room. Vanessa scanned the minibar’s contents from right to left – Pringles, Sprite, Diet Coke, Red Bull, Coke, Heineken, Absolut, Snickers, a Kodak FunSaver disposable camera, Jim Beam – and pulled out two more miniature bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label.
              “On me,” she said, passing one by the neck to Will. She flopped back into the chair, wrenched the cap off the bottle and took an ambitious gulp that left behind an involuntary cough and a burning sensation in her mouth.
              “Oh,” she said, realizing they both had a bottle this time, “cheers.” With mock solemnity, Vanessa clinked bottles with Will, delighting in the pitiable scene the two of them made together. She drank again and cleaned the residual liquid off of her lips with her tongue. Leaning back in the chair and swinging the near-depleted bottle between her thumb and forefinger, she studied Will’s face and its emerging dark stubble.
              “Do you think I’m…” she said, eyes fixed on him and waiting for his blue eyes to fix on hers. When they did, she shook her head and emptied the bottle. She slammed it down on the table as though she had won a contest.
              Vanessa stepped up off the chair, making sure to balance herself on her heels. She picked up Will’s hand in hers and helped him to his feet. “Take this off,” she murmured, putting her arms over the shoulders of his jacket. Will removed it and let it drop to the floor. She looked at him seriously, squeezed his hand, turned and lay supine on the king-size bed with the sheets still tucked in. From above he kissed her, his breath hot, and the smell of scotch from his wet lips mixed with hers.
              Once he broke off the kiss and moved his mouth down to the side of her neck, she pulled off her glasses, which were getting in the way, and flung them vaguely at the nearby nightstand. Uncoordinated, their legs intermingled uncomfortably until they negotiated an agreement where he inserted his right leg in between both of hers. Will’s black tie swung down into her face and her eyes, forcing her to swat it away in irritation. He sat up and she helped him to undo and carelessly discard it.
              Her fingers pressed into the back of his neck and she kept him in place for a moment.
              “Do you have a condom?” she asked.
              “Yeah.”
              Will lowered himself again and kissed the side of her face. Vanessa lowered her right hand to the hem of her dress and hitched it up to her stomach at the same time that Will decided to pull one of the straps down over her shoulder. It annoyed Vanessa that there was confusion over whether the dress was coming up or going down. She tried to use one shoe to kick off the other but didn’t have the clearance to do so. Will, with his hands on Vanessa’s bare shoulders, shifted up her body, pulling his knee up into her.
              Vanessa shot her head backwards into the pillow as a shiver ran up her spine, and she closed her eyes thinking that if she let go she might lose the world forever.

In a dream, Vanessa Delahaye sat barefoot at the empty table in her Bellagio hotel room. At six, the church bells rang. In the corner of the room by the large and untidy stove, Maria Sergeyevna made herself busy scrubbing Vanessa’s Chuck Taylors clean with a horsehair brush. The lamp began to flicker dangerously in the breeze and Maria Sergeyevna picked herself up from the wooden stool to fetch kerosene.
              “I have to go,” Vanessa announced.
              “Be sensible, little one,” Maria Sergeyevna said, and set the samovar.
              “I’m giving a speech at the Austin Game Developers Conference. I can’t stay in this hut with you all day.”
              “Don’t be silly. It isn’t safe for a young girl to go out by herself at this time of night.”
              “I’ve already made it to Austin by myself! I drove all the way from San Francisco.”
              Maria Sergeyevna put a plate of bread and butter in front of Vanessa. A moment later she returned with a glass of vodka. “You must eat. You’re wasting away to nothing.”
              “I’m not hungry, Masha.”
              “If this is how you carry on,” snapped Maria Sergeyevna, “it’s no wonder that you haven’t found a husband. When you reach thirty-five, you know, that’ll be the end of you. It’s not right that you end up an old maid like me.”
              “I’ve written a great speech about video games,” Vanessa said, ignoring her.
              “You are a spoiled child,” she wailed. “Every night I pray for your rotten soul! Why has God made you my cross to bear?”
              “Shut up, Masha,” said Vanessa. “My speech is about how game developers can improve synergy between players of video games and the characters that they play. What I mean is, if the character in the game is under fire, the player shouldn’t think, ‘ah, now I press B and pull the right trigger’, she should think ‘I’m under fire. I have to take cover.’”
              Maria Sergeyevna cupped her wrinkled hand around her ear. “I can’t hear you, child. I am an old woman.”
              “I can’t deal with you now, Masha,” Vanessa said, getting up from the wooden table. “People are waiting for me to give this presentation. I made it in PowerPoint.” She gathered her things in a temper and made for the door. Maria Sergeyevna seized Vanessa’s wrist, stopping her in the hallway.
              “Don’t be scared,” said Maria Sergeyevna. “This is going well.”
              “Did you know that there’s going to be an economic collapse?” said Vanessa, leaning back in the black leather desk chair and toying with both of ends of a ballpoint pen.
              “No, there isn’t,” said Joshua, reading a magazine at the other end of the conference table.
              “Yes there is,” said Vanessa. “Look.” She pointed to a paper cup of water on the table and tipped it over the edge with her finger. Joshua and Prescott observed the growing puddle on the ground.
              “I have an idea for a story about video games,” said Vanessa eagerly.
              “Vanessa,” said Prescott, leaning over the table. “I have great news. We have hired a great new writer for the magazine. I am not kidding: it is the greatest writer that there is.”
              Joshua threw a copy of the latest issue at her. Vanessa caught it and looked at the cover, which in large letters announced the magazine’s newest staff writer as Anton Chekhov.
              “Hello,” said Anton Chekhov.
              “He’s a wonderful writer,” said Joshua.
              “I have an idea for a feature on video games,” said Anton Chekhov. “I think we should do a top ten list for the best sidekick characters in all of video game history. We would include our own commentary about what made each character a memorable sidekick.”
              “What did I tell you, Vanessa?” said Joshua.
              “That’s bullshit!” she said angrily. “I’m so much of a better writer than he is!”
              The men enjoyed a hearty chortle.
              “Here’s a tip, Vanessa,” said Prescott, wiping away a tear, “write what you know.”
              Vanessa flushed red at the humiliation and paced furiously up and down the wings at the Austin Convention Center auditorium. “Create one of dark,” she said. “Create one of dark.” At the sound of the red velvet curtains being hoisted back, she entered nervously from stage right, the wooden boards creaking under her feet. A white-hot spotlight circled the microphone stand in the middle of the stage. Vanessa stood before the microphone and squinted at the crowd, and without her glasses was unable to make out a single face.
              “Um,” she said, clearing her throat, “this presentation is about creating synergy between characters and players. Please remember to turn all of your cellphones off and to fill in your feedback cards at the end and hand them to one of the volunteers.
              “Cut the highway on a picture of dark. I will now be attended: shortlisted for the city. No luck to live, I guess that is having sex with bad luck. Looking out loud for lovers and I like to be judged with the lights off. Saints with bad memories closing away all your problems. This is a shame that already exists.” Vanessa tapped a remote and the PowerPoint slides changed over.
              “I will be a coin come up today,” she continued. “I throw up heads ten times. Imagine a mirror and roll my conscience brilliantly. It’s okay to finish a turn of spades, because I’m going all the time ever.”
              The house lights came on and the crowd of game developers launched into rapturous applause. Blushing, Vanessa descended the steps from the stage, the appreciative audience graduating to a standing ovation. Vanessa proffered her hand to receive kisses upon it. In the front row, a delighted Prescott clutched her non-ceremonial hand in both of his and shook it gregariously.
              “They drink too much to give me a serious question,” laughed Vanessa, tilting her head at the crowd.
              Will Sommer stood beside Prescott and clapped Vanessa on the shoulder.
              “Best part is when you cry and I have died,” said Will.
              “What is dying?” asked Vanessa.
              “It brings bad luck to say,” Prescott confided.
              “I would die,” said Vanessa. “I’m bleeding.”
              She worked her way down the receiving line to the rear of the empty auditorium and sat down patiently in the empty row.
              “Vanessa,” said Maggie Wright, turning around to address her from the chairs in front. “I have great news. I’m moving out.”
              “What? Why?”
              Maggie inspected her makeup in a compact mirror, painting her lips with the bare tip of her finger. She offered the compact to Vanessa, who refused it.
              “What about Erica,” Vanessa pressed.
              “You’ll never be with me for very long.” Maggie looked over her shoulder to where the staircase began. “Well, you have to go now.”
              “What about my presentation?”
              “Forget it.”
              Framed in the decrepit wooden doorway, Vanessa Delahaye peered up into the gloomy staircase. The harder that she tried to discern its end, the longer and cloudier it became. “What’s up there?” she asked. “I’m really not into this at all.”
              “Are you ready?” asked the soldier standing behind her.
              Vanessa twitched involuntarily. “I look through your eyes and I think I’m worried.”
              “Don’t be scared,” said the soldier, unwrapping a red blindfold around his gloved fist. “I’ve done this a hundred times.”
              “Why do you have a gun?”
              “I’m a soldier.”
              Vanessa extended her hands and let the blindfold drape over them. “You don’t have any clue about how girls think,” she cursed at him.
              “Do you want a cigarette? You’re going to want a cigarette,” he said, and lit the one loosely secured between her lips. “Now get ready.” Delicately, he withdrew a M9 semi-automatic pistol from his holster and held it up for Vanessa to examine.
              “I’ve only put one bullet in the chamber,” he told her, “because if it’s done right, that’s all it will take. One bullet. Here.” The soldier touched her forehead and dragged his finger south until stopping on her left temple.
              He offered her the pistol. “Here you go.”
              “Are you crazy?” said Vanessa angrily. “I’m not going to do that.” She slapped the gun out of his hand. “I’ll just take the blindfold.”
              The soldier took Vanessa’s glasses from her and helped wrap the blindfold over her eyes. “Whatever happens,” he said, tying the knot firmly against the back of her head, “do not take this off. Don’t even look back at me.”
              “What’s up there?” she asked in her newfound darkness, and waited for an answer to come back to her. She repositioned herself facing where she remembered the beginning of the stairs to be. Obligingly, she lifted her right leg and, after a long moment’s hesitation, let herself fall forward onto the sole, landing on the first wooden step. A dry, dusty heat choked the air around her. Cautiously, she imagined the distance to the next step, which creaked under her weight when she landed on it. The thought of a loose nail driving through the wood and into her bare foot sent her into shudders. As she climbed further, she cast out her arms for balance but could not find any kind of handrail or even reach the walls. She kept moving, but with increasing apprehension, reminding herself that this was only a staircase and she didn't have anything to be afraid of. Following this train of thought to its conclusion, she pictured herself slipping, tumbling back down the stairs and breaking her neck. The blindfold, which she was sure was tighter than it ought to be, did not help her general composure. As she continued up the stairs her mind stuck on the sting of the fabric against her closed eyes and flushed skin, and the heat in the staircase that exacerbated her naturally dry mouth. Soon she lost track of how many steps she had climbed and how long she had been at it. The blindfold was definitely far too tight and stung her eyes. She coughed and sweat broke out on her forehead. She really needed some water. Her lips were beginning to crack and her heartbeat quickened as the dangers of her present situation became unavoidably clear to her. She pulled herself up to the next step, her legs and outstretched arms trembling as her confidence diminished. If she tore this blindfold off now, she thought, what was the worst that could happen? What was she afraid of, she thought again, feeling angry this time, and thirsty. Wearing the blindfold was a stupid idea in the first place, she chastised herself, spots flashing in front of her eyes and perspiration smearing across her brow, and her fingers started to shake and she was starting to have trouble breathing, and she realized that if she didn't immediately get rid of the blindfold and into some fresh air she was going to pass out in the dark staircase that was spinning all around her, so get rid of it now she thought get rid of it get rid of it get out and with her hands clawed against the blindfold, scratching at it as she gasped for breath and wavered on the steps, wavering back and forth and in a panic digging her fingers deeper towards her eyes and gasping for breath, feeling faint and screaming and trembling on the steps and heartbeat racing scared of her heart exploding sweating and clawing her eyes at last and she tore the blindfold completely from her face and with her eyes open and ascending, she comes to the city. Ascending and awake and alone and coming higher, comes higher through the storm and through the desert and the car and comes higher past where the skyline dies in the sun and where life chokes out the street and where the ceiling explodes in flowers red purple yellow orange green blue, awake and alone and in motion and in her head. Here, where instead the world moves for her, the fatigue pulls at her and heat tears at her and the sweat sticks to her and when the doors open she steps out of the elevator and into the chapel with all of her train dragging behind. Lifting the veil over her head, she surveyed the pews on her left and spotted Maggie, Erica, her parents, her sisters, her brother, her grandparents, her great-grandparents and her great-great-grandparents who had travelled all the way from France and from death, all looking at her and smiling or crying or both. Nobody sat in the pews on her right, which Vanessa found curious, but this did not deter her and she continued down the aisle alone.
              Vanessa met the priest at the altar and took her place opposite the groom, clad in black tuxedo and black bow tie and who was, she discovered upon close examination, a clean-shaven Will Sommer. They took each other’s hands; only physically, not in matrimony, which was yet to occur.
              “I’m glad you came,” Will whispered to her.
              “We are gathered here today,” intoned the priest, “to join together the hands of Vanessa Jane Delahaye and Will in holy matrimony, here before friends and family and under the eyes of God.”
              “I don’t believe in God,” said Vanessa.
              “You should Google Him,” said the priest.
              She shook her head. “Googling it doesn’t matter, but I do.”
              “Vanessa will now read her vows,” said the priest, “which she has prepared herself.”
              Vanessa, who had done nothing of the sort, furrowed her brow. She felt the eyes of the crowd upon her, waiting for her to speak, but she drew a blank and her voice hitched on something low in her chest. She tried to remember if the vows might be folded away in her dress pocket, but she couldn’t pry her hands free from Will’s grasp to check, and the wedding dress didn’t have pockets anyway. A whisper from the front row embarrassed her and to avoid further critique she decided she would have to make something up.
              “Will. I will. I will wish that we saw the better, but I’ll wash away my charm. It needs to be around you. You and I only. I locked myself in love with you. I deserve the day.” She glanced at the priest. “That’s it.”
              The priest nodded approvingly. “Will, thirty second response.”
              “You should never be very different,” said Will.
              “Time’s up, I’m sorry.”
              Vanessa squirmed and shifted uneasily her bare hands around in his clutches.
              “Why aren’t you wearing your engagement ring,” the priest snapped at her.
              “I don’t wear rings.”
              “You have to.”
              The veil tumbled back over Vanessa’s face.
              “Epic veil,” said Will.
              “Will,” said the priest, “do you take Vanessa to be your lawful wedded wife?” Vanessa’s heart pounded desperately against her chest.
              “I do,” Will said.
              “Will you be laid off with her?”
              “I will.”
              “Will you lose your health insurance with her?”
              “I will.”
              “Will you default on your mortgage with her?”
              “I will.”
              “Will you go to her father for money with her?”
              “I will.”
              “Will you sell everything that you own just to survive with her?”
              “I will.”
              “Will you grow sick with her?”
              “I will.”
              “Will you submit with her to a life filled with ugliness and fear?”
              “I will.”              
              “Will you lie hand in hand on the filthy wooden floors of an empty house with her and wait for the rats to come?”
              “I will.”
              “Do you love this woman?”
              “I do.”
              Vanessa frowned. “No you don’t.”
              Will looked at her absently.
              “You don’t even know me,” she said. “I don’t know you. Why would I trust you?”
              “Vanessa,” Will said quietly.
              She shook her head violently. “I can’t even think, it’s too much.”
              “It’s going to be alright,” he urged her.
              Vanessa steeled herself and looked into his eyes. “I’ve seen it with you,” she said. “You say you can always count on him, but whatever. I don’t believe it with you.”
              Vanessa tore her hands free, to the audible shock of the crowd. She picked up her wedding dress with every intention of retreating down the aisle, but nonetheless, as she turned to do so, she remained firmly in place. She released the hem of the dress and it tumbled back down around her ankles. The chapel lights died off one by one.

At 5:11 a.m. on Saturday, September 20 2008, Vanessa Delahaye stirred awake in Room 23012 of the Bellagio in Las Vegas. For the next five minutes she remained under the covers, naked and with her eyes closed, bracing against the cold hotel room air. Over that time she settled into a state of wakefulness and rolled over in the king-size bed to check on Will Sommer, who, as she discovered, was no longer there. Vanessa sat up in bed and through squinted eyes surveyed the room. From right to left: glasses on the nightstand, the armchairs by the table with the three empty miniature bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label, the window overlooking nothing spectacular, the compromised minibar, the television, and with growing embarrassment she attuned to the conspicuous absence of Will Sommer anywhere in the room.
              Vanessa stepped out of the bed in the low light, goose bumps spreading across her cold bare skin. She folded her arms over her breasts and headed towards the bathroom, the only place left. She flicked on the lights which after spending hours in darkness immediately proved to be a mistake, and she screwed her eyes shut against the glare. She turned the lights off, because the bathroom was empty anyway.
              Of course he’s gone, thought Vanessa, and of course it was all bullshit. Her cheeks burned red as she was so angry with herself for having believed any of it in the first place. She stormed back to the bed, smoldering from the shame of having been taken advantage of, and grabbed the brown checkered plaid flannel blouse from where it lay in a heap on the floor and pulled it on. She climbed back into bed and threw the covers over her head. Curling her body up against the cold, she shut her eyes tightly and willed herself to sleep as fast as possible.

At 9:55 a.m. on Saturday, September 20 2008, Vanessa Delahaye was on her hands and knees peering under the bed. Having showered, brushed her teeth, cleaned her glasses, used the toilet, packed her bag and changed into a maroon crewneck sweater, faded blue jeans and the same pair of Chuck Taylors, she had done everything that she needed to check prior to check out.
              The only other thing, which was not itself required for her to leave the hotel, but more for her peace of mind, was to find her ten dollar casino chip, the one decorated in charcoal and orange. She swore that she had left it on the desk next to where she had at one point sat down her MacBook Pro, but the chip clearly wasn’t there now, nor was it under the desk, nor under the table by the armchairs, and so she ended up on all fours looking under the bed, where the chip wasn’t either.
              Straightening up and plastering her hands on her hips, Vanessa allowed herself to wonder whether the guy from last night might actually have gone so far to have taken the chip with him when he snuck out from the room in the early hours of the morning. Letting the thought linger, she hitched her handbag over her shoulder and grabbed her suitcase by its retractable handle. Who knew if he really did take it, she thought, but you can’t let yourself believe in the worst of everything all of the time, right? Why would you? Vanessa Delahaye snatched the room key from the table and turned the lights off. She opened the door and walked out without giving the matter another thought.

Bad Dreams

My life would be so much easier if I only had to show video games to people who had never played them before. People who have remained oblivious to the past thirty years of technical and artistic progress are the most willing to believe that video games are now able to simulate virtual reality perfectly in every dimension. I tell them that you can wander the streets of digital cities, fully populated and replicated in exhaustive detail, or that you can chart the course of an interactive narrative through an array of dramatically different choices, or that you can stand in front of your television and carry out an unscripted, real-time conversation with a computer-generated and creepy child trapped inside. Everything is new, beautiful and full of possibilities, and the only time that I get to see the awed expression of someone who believes in all of that is when the person in question doesn’t know much about video games.
  As easily impressed as these people may be, they don’t write for Game Informer, they write for Old Things magazine. They don’t realize that what they’re seeing is the only possible thing that they can see. The people in the gaming press that I do have to deal with generally don’t suffer from a lack of experience, and familiarity breeds being cynical about my video game.
  Games are most impressive when experienced along an extremely narrow path. Ask the wrong question or try the wrong thing and the game exposes its lack of understanding and capability. You will discover that despite first impressions, you can’t interact with the virtual city in any depth beyond shooting at it, the improvised conversation is a predetermined and performance-enhanced demonstration, and the interactive movie is only truly malleable within microscopic pockets. What was once astonishing turns disappointingly plausible. It’s just an ordinary thing whose brilliance was only ever apparent from one specific angle.
  I have to persuade people that despite all of this being true, what I’m showing them is actually the most amazing thing that has ever existed in the video gaming medium. This is the business of covering up teenagers’ acne for prom night. The presentation is supposed to be so strong that you don’t think about all the ways in which the whole experience is deficient. But most people can tell. The trained eye is drawn to the flaws so readily that the beautiful parts effectively become invisible.
  So the pure, unguarded reaction of the ready-to-believe idealist was the one thing that I really liked about this job, until I remembered that it was predicated on an illusion and then I stopped liking that as well.
  “Tell me why I should be excited about your video game.”
  Today, the question comes from a twenty year old who is wearing a faded Nico t-shirt and looks like he made out with a stapler. I’m pretty sure there are Chuck Taylors involved here as well. I think the implication of the whole outfit and his line of questioning is that he has much hipper places to be than here talking to me. He’s smiling. Does that mean he’s happy with himself for asking the tough questions? In the case of my game company, asking these questions is about as tough as making a punchline out of Andy Dick.
  Twenty years ago, I’m in Portland standing against the station wagon belonging to the parents of the boy offering me a swig from a plastic bottle that smells like paint thinner. He consistently misremembers my name as ‘Maggie’, and it doesn’t say much for me at that age that I never correct him. He pisses behind a tree and enthuses sloppily to me about his high score on a Galaga arcade cabinet in town. He wants to kiss me, but I’m not so into people throwing up in my mouth. My hands are in my pockets where I bury my fingernails into my thighs. To be polite, I ask him why he is so excited about this video game. He belches and tries to explain what it’s like to be the pilot of a spaceship who wields immense power and causes the destruction of many galactic armies. I think: that’s how you sell me on this? I tell him it sounds astonishing, which is just a lie, and then cruelly add that he explained the concept brilliantly. Even under the influence he picks up on my out-of-control sarcasm and his enthusiasm for Galaga and for me collapses, giving way to readily apparent hurt. I want to run out of the woods and crawl under my bed and change my name and move someplace where nobody has heard yet how awful I am. Instead, what I do is phase through college and stumble down the West Coast through a series of communications jobs until I’m doing press for a video game company. My life is about lying to teenagers.
  “We’ve really paid attention to what gamers said about The Third Day,” I say, “and in a lot of cases we actually agree with the criticism.”
  He writes something down: I hope the words ‘refreshingly candid’.
  “With The Third Day, we took a big risk in pushing players outside of their comfort zones, into open-ended, hostile scenarios where their character is significantly disadvantaged. The game left it up to them to figure out a plan of attack. So we learned that we could do that in an action game and still remain engaging overall. That’s an area of focus for us with Dreamland. There’s a major emphasis on that type of gameplay situation.”
  “And that’s what will be exciting to us?”
  I pause. “Well, who do you mean by ‘us’?”
  “I guess I mean anyone.”
  This is a high-maintenance journalist. I’ve told him about our combat mechanics, I’ve told him about our environmental storytelling, I’ve told him about the engine, I’ve told him that one of the voice actors in the game used to be on 24. The world is not enough, right?
  The centerpiece of this interview room is a poster of a female video game character whose blond ponytail spills out of her combat armor. Both of us sit around a table facing the screen of my laptop. Occasionally I show the journalist some gameplay footage that he observes without comment. I don’t think he even likes this t-shirt I brought him.
  I’ve explained how Dreamland is an action-adventure with role-playing elements taking place across a variety of battlefields staged in multiple characters’ dream worlds. He does seem to like the art for the different levels, but I wish that, instead of nodding appreciably, this journalist would ask questions like ‘how many teams of level designers does our company have working on this game’, and ‘how closely do they work with one another’, and ‘how does this information compare to the structure of a studio that makes games people like?’ I can give answers to all those questions and still make us sound accomplished. He’s pursuing an aggressive line of questioning, but his inability to hit upon anything actually incisive suggests to me that his pissy attitude is less endemic of courageous journalism and more about having missed an episode of Fringe. This is more babysitting than an interview. Whatever he’s writing down, I can construct a better preview in my head while reciting our downloadable content strategy aloud. Dreamland, a collection of woefully disparate levels, attempts to capitalize on its lack of unifying vision or strong story through the premise that it is set in a series of eclectic dream worlds, a design decision clearly arrived upon the day after Inception was released. Restless Interactive failed to convince this writer of the game’s promise in a presentation delivered by a horrible piece of garbage. I guess instead of ‘horrible piece of garbage’ I would be okay if it said ‘beautiful spokeswoman’. I could live with that.
  I don’t have any stake in seeing our game and our company burn to the ground but I do think about what that would be like. Shouldn’t he have seen enough games by now to know when something is totally fraudulent? Can he not see right through me? Look at me. Really look at me. Ask me when I started playing video games. Ask me to name my favorite video game. Ask me whether I do play video games. Ask me what qualifies me to tell you or anyone else how to make one. Ask me why I wanted to work in the games industry in the first place. Ask me for how long that has been my dream. Ask me how much longer I want to keep doing this. Ask me why I should be excited about my video game.
  He’s digging deep into that notebook. I don’t want to think about what dirty pictures he is probably drawing in there instead of listening to me. I lean forward and casually rest my arms on the table. “Anyone? To be honest with you, I can’t tell you why anyone is going to be excited about this game. I can’t tell you why you would like this game. I truly don’t know.”
  He finally looks up, a single eyebrow raised, as predicted.
  “Now let me tell you why that is.” I’ve held up the palm of my hand, the international signal for beginning a speech. “Try to remember the last dream you had. It probably had to do with a place you’ve been or a person you’ve met at some point in your life, right? Now try to think of all the places and all the people that you’ve ever dreamed about. Think about every dream where you’ve felt scared or exhilarated or mad or heartbroken. You have to appreciate the sheer magnitude of places and people and themes that you’ve dreamed about over the course of your life, real or imaginary. The only thing that all those wildly different experiences have in common is that they originated from the same place. You know what it’s like to build worlds. We all do.
  “That’s what we’re chasing: the power to build your world, define it however you want and be the person that you want to be. Games give players the opportunity to imprint on the experience that they’re given. But it’s your experience, really. Go anywhere. Do anything. Think big. You can play this game any way you want to. Anything you can imagine is yours.”
  By this point the notebook is a distant memory. He’s even holding his chin in the palm of his hand and respectfully nodding along as he listens.
  “It’s about getting to make choices. Every choice you make affects the characters and the worlds around you. There are consequences. The depth of interaction in this game and the journey that your character will take should surprise everyone. How do you want to play this game? How do you want to solve a problem? What kind of person do you want to be? Are you good or evil, or somewhere in between? Are you a diplomat or a warlord? Who will you align yourself with – or do you work alone? Do you like to talk your way through problems or confront them headfirst with guns blazing? Do you accumulate instant power at any cost or invest in long-term rewards? What are you prepared to sacrifice for the greater good?
  “Why should you be excited about Dreamland? You’re the only one who’s going to be able to answer that. Everyone who plays this is going to have a different answer by the end of the game. We want those answers to be different. This game is about you.”
  Now you’re looking at me.
  “And if you can’t get excited about that,” I laugh, “then it might be time to get out of the video game business.”


* * *


“Hi, my name’s Megan McCarthy.”
  Last year, I received a courtesy invitation to the Christmas party of a third-tier gaming website called GameView. This was, as you can imagine, the highlight of my holiday calendar. My invitation, and that of PR people from other companies, clearly arose from an internal GameView mandate to maintain good external working relationships. For me, it was an excellent opportunity to hover awkwardly in a room full of guys fifteen years younger than me and not say anything, except to obligingly and repeatedly inform people where I grew up and for how long I had worked at my company. One of those guys was a twenty-five year old writer named Eric O’Donnell, about whom I thought absolutely nothing until a month later when I was told he was leaving GameView to join the production team at Restless Interactive. GameView invited me to his goodbye party, so they must have seen something they liked in me at Christmas – maybe how I hated talking to everybody and stole a coaster. I imagined that someone from Restless Interactive showing up to the official GameView Eric O’Donnell farewell event would only make the proceedings even more delicate and uncomfortable, like a catered hostage exchange with Rock Band stations.
  The party is at a GameView editor’s downtown apartment. Before arriving, I had learned that Eric O’Donnell was a ‘multi-year veteran of gaming journalism’, information gleaned from thirty seconds spent on my iPhone. At twenty-five years old, he’s had a career long enough to be considered a veteran. When I was twenty years old, I remember being on my first date, the day after Kurt Cobain’s death was announced. I wore a black headband because that seemed sort of respectful but I don’t think anyone even noticed. My date and I went to a bar in Portland where we scored a table opposite a booth crammed with six or seven people whose voices were strained from day-long crying jags. They were talking about Cobain like everyone else was, but within the first five minutes of overheard conversation it became clear that they actually knew him, either from high school up in Washington or from wherever else he was in the early 80s. They knew him well enough to be telling first-hand stories about Cobain that I had never heard: intimate personal details about his drug use, his religion and his family. I remember looking at the guy I was with and confirming silently that we knew very well what we were hearing. Then we didn’t speak to each other the entire night, and listened carefully to the distraught reminisces we hoped to repeat to our friends as soon as possible. I don’t think anyone ever kept their demons away knowing that they spied on someone else’s funeral. Eavesdropping on that surely cancelled out my headband gesture. I’m wondering a lot lately whether my having done that isn’t just the parasitic act of a Perez Hilton or a TMZ. I never saw that guy again either.
  When I arrive at nine o’clock, the apartment is packed at fire hazard levels. One of the first things I see is a couple of shots being set on fire and hurled into people’s faces. As anticipated, Rock Band is present, and a tiny girl is slurring off-key along with Bad Reputation in front of a massive television. Although the whole apartment is imbued with a bro-ish character, it’s bathed in seriously dim mood lighting, which is a weird vibe not unlike scented candles in the back seat of an SUV. The apartment belongs to a GameView editor whom I told in my first month, as a joke, that if he didn’t give our game at least a nine out of ten I would plant cocaine in his car. Then he wrote that in his blog and I got in trouble. That’s when I learned my lesson about being funny.
  I vaguely recall what Eric O’Donnell looks like, but can only really pin it down to a pair of glasses and too much flannel. When I notice that someone is holding court by the kitchen counter, however, a group of guys hanging on his every word, that’s the only clue I need. Eric O’Donnell is waving around a beer bottle like a presentation aid as he schools these guys on something or other. That short girl is also there, having apparently jumped across the room in the last second. I brush past them up to the counter to find a bottle of wine that I can drain into a plastic cup.
  “I was searching all day for something meaningful I could do that would make my final moment as a video game journalist at least kind of special. I’d done an interview with the BioWare doctors but who on their deathbed wishes they’d spent more time with the BioWare doctors? So while I’m thinking about this, our site gets an email from a grandmother who is asking us, I guess as the first game website she found, what game she could buy her grandson for his birthday. And I think that’s great, I think that would be a great thing for me to do; genuinely helping somebody out. I write back with this detailed, thousand-word list full of game suggestions for the various consoles. And she writes back asking: how would she know what console he has? By then, it’s five thirty and I kind of need to leave, so I forward the email on to someone else who might do something about it on Monday. So that’s as close as I got. That’s my last act of video game journalism.”
  Easing away from the adoring throng, I end up backing into a wall when a couple of people want to move past me into the kitchen. Leaning against the door jamb beside me is a guy also sporting flannel and a beer. I take a cautious sip from the cup. I’ve been standing close to him in silence for so long that either one or both of us is really rude. I breathe in.
   “Hi, my name’s Megan McCarthy,” I say. “Do you work with Eric?”
  He looks blank. “No, I’m Andy. I live here.”
   “Oh, well, I don’t really work with him either. I work for the company that he just joined, Restless Interactive, I do PR for them.”
  “Do you do a lot of writing?”
  “Yeah,” I equivocate, “kind of, what I do is…”
  “I’m in a band.”
  I nod and scan the room for another opportunity. “Really.”
  “Yeah, but I mean I’m still looking for a drummer and a lead guitarist. And someone who can play bass. But I play guitar, and write the songs. I just wrote a song called Checkout Girl which is a ballad about the feeling that you get when you want to drill a checkout girl.”
  “Oh really.”
  “I can’t sing it for you though, you’d really need a Lady Gaga to do that one justice. That’s who I wrote it for. Actually, I originally wrote it for Chris Cornell but I think Lady Gaga would be a better fit for the video. If you imagine Lady Gaga hanging out in the aisles of a Best Buy or a Wal-Mart and when she goes up to buy a space heater, she eyes up the girl at the checkout counter. Then they start making out on the counter, and Lady Gaga drags her ass over the scanner and the readout says something like ‘hot’. And then there’s like a little drop-in in the song where there’s a guy saying over the PA, ‘can I get a price check on Lady Gaga making out with a checkout girl?’ Or maybe she is the checkout girl. It’s just a concept at this point. I’m also writing a song about the recording industry.”
  How far would I have to fall from the window of this thirteenth floor apartment to forget I ever heard that? After extricating myself from the conversation with Andy, I find someone who actually has the faintest connection with the world of video games. I can’t believe that took two attempts.
   “What I’m going to miss the most about EOD is doing podcasts with him. I was always so impressed with how analytical he was about games and how he could isolate all these design elements and make a convincing argument for what worked and what didn’t. He has such an eye for that. Really insightful and so funny.” He notices that I’ve been wincing ever since he mentioned the initials ‘EOD’. “We call him EOD. It’s kind of an in-joke.”
   “Does that stand for Eric O’Donnell?”
   “Yeah.”
   “Oh, I get it.”
  EOD, the man of the hour, takes a turn shredding with the plastic guitar on Baba O’Riley, for which he receives a score in the low sixties. At least he’s good on podcasts. After declining an encore performance, Eric crashes on the couch next to some guy wrapped up in his iPhone.
   “Guess how many posts there are in the thread about you leaving.”
   “I don’t know, seven.”
   “Close: eight hundred.”
   “Seriously?”
   “Let me read them to you.”
   “No, don’t.”
  “Here’s one: ‘This is total bullshit.’ ‘This sucks’ – most of these are of a theme – ‘that guy was the best writer at GameView. RIP GameView.’ I think that’s debatable. ‘This sucks, Eric O’Donnell was basically the only pretense to legitimacy that so-called gaming journalism had.’ ‘What does it say about the future of gaming journalism when the most talented people in it have to find new jobs?’ ‘Eric, your writing about games is literally the best that I’ve ever read. You will be missed.’ ‘Can he still do the podcast? Fuck Restless if not.’ ‘Eric O’Donnell’s writing was always insightful and challenging and I can truly say that he changed the way that I think about games.’ ‘This guy’s writing was what inspired me to get into games journalism. It’s a serious loss.’”
  “Jesus Christ,” laughs Eric, rubbing his forehead, “why doesn’t anyone tell you that kind of stuff before you decide to leave?”
  “This one just says ‘whateves.’”
  “Well, don’t tell me about those ones.”
  I can’t wrap my head around the idea that EOD is apparently genuinely talented and popular within his chosen field and wants to throw all that away to basically do what I do. Here’s how regarded I am by my company: it’s considered a valuable use of my time to drive two hours out of my way so I can pander to a twenty-year old kid for fear that he might make a snarky joke about our video game. Last year, the CEO of Restless Interactive sent out congratulatory letters to the senior design and production staff on account of the success of The Third Day. I didn’t get a letter. I was asked to write the letters. I thought that outsourcing the writing of your sincere, personal thanks made for a pretty weak show of gratitude. One of the people on the design team was my ex-boyfriend, to whom I dutifully drafted a letter praising his dedication and intuition and how the project would have undoubtedly ended up much worse without his significant contribution. He stapled that letter to the wall of his cubicle; he was so proud. Eventually I told him that I was the one who wrote it, knowing it would hurt, because I didn’t want him to think that anybody important ever cared about him. The other day my boss said that I was part of the furniture and I wanted to cry.

“I got more angry phone calls and emails about Eric than any other employee, including a plagiarist and the guy who vomited all over the Nintendo booth at E3.”
  The GameView editor that I had pegged earlier as having a poor sense of humor about cocaine-related entrapment is standing on a chair and addressing the crowd. I have gathered that this is because he was Eric’s boss and therefore responsible for delivering his eulogy, rather than that he is way too drunk and making a fool of himself. There was some debate about whether Eric should be lying prostrate on a table for this, à la The Wire, but nobody volunteered to clean the table for him. He’s standing on the floor like a normal person.
  “I would get harangued constantly by PR guys whenever they thought Eric had asked a question in an interview that was too tough, or given a score to a game that they thought was far too low.” I’ve made that call. “They always told me, this guy is unfair and overly critical. Please assign someone else to this, they would ask, or re-review the game. And I would say no, of course, as I would in any case, but for Eric I would go further. I would argue that Eric O’Donnell was not the attention-grabbing troublemaker that they made him out to be. I always defended Eric, because I was so proud of him and the job he did for us, and I was confident in his talents.
  “But now I concede they had a point all along. I sympathize with those wounded PR agents because now I know firsthand the pain that Eric is capable of inflicting. Eric O’Donnell, in leaving games journalism to go into development, you have revealed yourself as the worst kind of cliché. I can only hope that one day you will be punished for your failure of imagination and your arrogance in betraying those who took you in and loved you. To my brothers and sisters here who have not yet failed me, I ask you to cast out your former colleague. I hope that he burns in the fires of hell.
   “But for a traitor, at least you can write. Salut, Eric O’Donnell.”
  He raises his glass. Obliging applause follows.
  “Thank you for that incredibly heartfelt speech,” Eric says, broadly acknowledging the entire room.
  “Hey, get up on the chair.”
  “No, I’m fine.”
  “Fucking do it.”
  “Okay.”
  They switch.
  “You know, there were times when I felt like my leaving games journalism was in fact the big deal that you’re suggesting. And I’m not gonna lie, when Restless came to me with this opportunity, it was a difficult choice for me to make.” Eric pauses. “For about five seconds. Until I remembered all the things that I’m not going to miss so much. I’m not going to miss press events. Not going to miss being trapped on rented aircraft carriers and cruise ships for hours at a time while I’m being walked through demos of transparently flawed puppet shows. I’m not going to miss being fenced into conference rooms and grazing on a diet of mini-hamburgers and Doritos.
  “I won’t miss having my motives questioned at every turn by the depressingly large number of people who suspect I’ve engaged in a large-scale conspiracy to besmirch the PlayStation 3. I won’t miss the oh-so-high standard of accountability set by people who continually misspell ‘biased’ as ‘bias’. I won’t miss self-important forum threads decrying the death of gaming journalism on the basis that one time in an article I dared to make a joke.
  “I won’t miss being chastised for not being a shit-eating cheerleader for the industry. I won’t miss the blacklisting and the snubs at press events. I won’t miss passive-aggressive developers explaining to me that I may not realize what they do is hard work, and I ought to respect that. I won’t miss the perennial unpopularity of our site despite having the best content of anyone around – won’t miss being the little engine that could to corporate-sponsored hacks who cling to phrases like ‘made of awesome’ as a security blanket. I won’t miss shilling for clicks by churning out turgid lists about the hottest babes in gaming, and seeing the readership for that garbage far eclipse the kind of reportage that actually matters. I look forward to never having to pour my heart out into something only to be told that I’m overthinking it.
  “I won’t miss the insipid, cringe-inducing questions from other journalists at press events. I won’t miss my peers being barely-literate high school dropouts and/or meth heads. I won’t miss the confused faces of every first date I’ve had in the last five years as they struggle to comprehend what I do.
  “I won’t miss getting emailed pictures of dogs. My boss – over there, that motherfucker – knew that I was afraid of dogs, so when I was running up against a deadline he would send me pictures of barking dogs.
  “So, straight up: this is the right thing for me. I’ve done my time and I’m walking out of here with no regrets. I’m looking forward to this so much. Here’s to things getting serious.”
  There’s something about Eric O’Donnell that reminds me of a best friend leaving a mug on a coffee table without a coaster. Once he concludes his formal remarks, he perambulates around the room, drink in hand, soaking up drive-by compliments.
   “What is it you’re going to be doing over there?” he is asked. “What exactly is it that an associate producer does?”
   “You know, we’re figuring that out now,” Eric says. “There’s going to be a range of different responsibilities, a lot of PR and social networking-type stuff and probably there will be a little bit of interaction with the design team. All over the map.”
   “Would you ever consider going back to games journalism? That’s if things didn’t work out for you in development. I mean God forbid.”
   “To be honest, I don’t even see how that’s possible,” Eric tells him. “I feel like there’s such a ceiling on career advancement when it comes to games journalism. Unless I want to actually run my own magazine or my own website, there really isn’t a lot left for me to do. I’ve been doing this for five years and I truly think that I’ve written every kind of story that I possibly can in this job. Where can I go from there? I don’t want to be the boss. Do I just go to another website where I’ll be paid slightly more money for doing the same thing, but where I work with worse people? Or do I try to endear myself as ‘the video game critic’ to a place like Time, where all I’ll be able to do is a story on Halo every three years? This is not a sustainable career choice. I’m not the first journalist to go into development and I won’t be the last. There’s a reason why so many games journalists are so young and there’s a reason why they don’t do this for very long.”
  “So it wasn’t, like, your dream all along to go into game development?”
  “No. Nobody believes me when I say this, but it honestly was never my dream to make games. It just makes sense for where I am now. But really, working in games journalism was never my dream either, it was just a decent opportunity and I took it. That’s genuinely all there is to it.” How is it fair for someone to be so good at something that they don’t love? This is like Jennifer Garner claiming that she doesn’t care about the way she looks.
  When Restless Interactive was working on The Third Day, I was occasionally asked by journalists whether I thought this was the game with which the company would ‘make it’. I assume at that point Restless had a reputation as a company that had not yet ‘made it’. The other day I was asked the same question in reference to Dreamland, so whatever making it entails, it must not have been accomplished in our case.
  Last week, a friend linked me to a New York magazine profile of my half-sister Celia. She is twenty-five and described in the article as a New York-based artist, independent film actress, writer and model with aspirations towards her own fashion label, but her most substantive accomplishment to date is having appeared naked once in a television show. The article follows a day in Celia’s life, which appears to be all about lounging around her Williamsburg apartment and various clothing boutiques and Laundromats, surrounded by other trappings of expensive indifference. Laudatory quotes from Brooklyn cognoscenti about Celia’s mysterious talent are interspersed with a full page of Celia draped over a couch as she discusses airily with the reporter how she is attracted lately to outlaw types. The writer labels her ‘one to watch’. The first line of the article, which I re-read in progressively severe stages of disbelief, is: ‘After spending a day in the company of Celia McCarthy-Price, I concluded that she is not the delicate ingénue she initially appears as much she is a force of nature: at turns tempestuous and provocative, gregarious and jealous’. Fuck off. With Celia, I think that the definition of having ‘made it’ is easily confused with paying too much attention to a layabout with narcissistic personality disorder. I last spoke to her four years ago, when I told her that I was going to cut her out of my life for as long as she kept doing heroin, and that I was doing this for her own good. I guess the joke is on me.
  I read the other day that the keyboard cat had been dead for years before the YouTube videos. I wonder if that cat went his whole life feeling like he was a failure.
  Eric O’Donnell has been holding the same bottle of beer for so long that there can’t be anything left in it. Yet I keep seeing him keep bring it back up to his mouth as if there was something there to drink. What kind of person does that? Slouching further into the couch, EOD has an eye on his boss, who gestures animatedly to the handful of colleagues seated around him.
  “Patrick pitched me a feature today – which is impressive enough on its own since this kid is twenty-one and was hired a couple weeks ago and already has the confidence to be pitching features,” Eric’s boss explains to the crowd, some of whom are nodding along with him too enthusiastically to be sober. “Some writers try and stick to reviews for years. Reviews or lists. And these pitches of his are actually well thought out, clever ideas, too. The one today was about looking at different retro-styled indie games and tracing their influences back to actual retro games and then examining the relative importance that those games have had in terms of establishing an aesthetic legacy. I think it sounds promising. It should come off well; he has a great writing style. He has a knack for these clear, declarative sentences – you read it and immediately think ‘ah, I know what he’s talking about’. Which is seriously not such an easy thing to do with something as abstract as game criticism. Really talented.” There is murmured approval from most.
  If it is possible to look both uninterested and actively hostile, Eric O’Donnell manages it in that moment. Standing halfway across the room, I’m in the exact right place to catch the flash of disquiet on Eric’s face as his boss extemporizes on the finer points of Patrick. Even Eric seems to realize it, and he averts his eyes before anyone else notices. While his boss continues, Eric covers for his earlier reaction by directing an intense amount of focus to casually playing around on his cellphone. An hour later, he returns to the Rock Band station. In the middle of Jet, I see him draw back his arms to hammer the shit out of an upcoming chord. It comes out wrong.
  Another beer in hand, Eric is back on the couch with his friends.
  “I don’t know, man, to this day I have never felt once like I need to own a Kinect,” declares one of those friends.
  “Well, you don’t own a car, either, and people still seem to think that those are important.”
  Eric shakes his head vigorously. “The most important trend in 2010 is not going to be Kinect or Move or anything like that, not long-term. It’s DLC, it has to be. That’s admittedly kind of a 2009 trend as well, but it’s definitely what mattered last year.” Eric takes a swig from his new bottle and leans forward. “I mean, I know, obviously, that DLC has been around for years, as long as horse armor at least, and even before then it was still around as microtransactions. I understand why people can still be cynical about DLC – most of the time it’s plainly nickel and diming which is absurd when you consider that video games are already the most expensive single piece of entertainment that you can buy other than a prostitute.
  “But even horse armor – two dollars for a virtual coat of virtual paint that you can put on a virtual horse for virtual people to totally ignore – is not something that I think matters at all. The price was ridiculous, but it was the first time anyone had ever really sold something like that. There’s no baseline there. And Bethesda changed up the value proposition immediately, giving you far more content and even stand-alone experiences for a much smaller amount of money. They deserve a lot of credit, in my view, in helping DLC get to where it is now.
  “I’m in love with things like Lair of the Shadow Broker for Mass Effect 2, or the Grand Theft Auto IV episodes, and Leliana’s Song and Minerva’s Song. Minerva’s Den. These are stand-alone short stories that are viable because they rely on existing assets and gameplay systems from these much larger – and in many cases, aesthetically less coherent – triple-A games. They’re better experiences for that. Remember in 2007 when Portal and Episode Two came out, and everyone lost their shit over the potential of short games? That because of their length and lower cost they were less likely to overstay their welcome or blow their potential? That’s what these DLC packs are to me. DLC is a way to spin off huge blockbuster titles into smaller, riskier, tighter stories. Undead Nightmare, that’s another one.
  “That’s a big part of why Mass Effect 2 was my game of the year. That game has such a great infrastructure, the way it’s set up to add more and more content to its spine. To me, that game is about standing on the bridge of a spaceship, pointing somewhere on an inter-galactic map and, you know, on this planet is this story and so on. And it might be paid DLC or a companion sub-plot or an unannounced side mission but it’s all about small stories. A chain of little experiences all branching out from home base.
  “You know, what genuinely irritates me, though, about Mass Effect 2 is this character Kelly Chambers. Which is a shame, because on the face of it, it’s such a cool concept for an RPG hero to have a personal assistant, which is what she is. In every RPG, your character is the most important person in the universe, so why wouldn’t you have someone who keeps track of your emails and screen your calls?
  “Mass Effect 2 treats its characters with such obvious care – the story is entirely about pulling a team together – and given that, there’s something a little ugly about how it treats Kelly Chambers. She’s this young, pretty, earnest person who works for you, and because this is a video game you can work things out so you’re fucking her. You can do that whether or not your character is male or female, and the problem with that is it reveals that Kelly wasn’t written to be explicitly bisexual or into women or into men. She’ll respond exactly the same no matter who you are, so the conclusion you draw is that Kelly Chambers was just put there to be yours. She’s player-sexual. What’s more, the game files her away as a little fling that keeps her mouth shut and won’t interfere with any of your other, meaningful hook-ups, the ones you get an achievement for if you make it to third base. What am I, Don Draper? And – and! The worst thing is that if you don’t act fast enough in the endgame, you witness Girl fucking Friday suffer a gruesome demise. She’s the only person in a game about shooting things that you’ll ever see die horribly. Kelly Chambers is there to give you an erection or make you throw up. It’s like Hollow Man. I think in that respect the character’s background as a psychology student is ironic.
  “There’s a whole article in there about games evoking inappropriate emotions. I’ve wanted to write something about Gears of War ever since I rewatched that ridiculous trailer with the Mad World song. That game is so perfectly represented by the image of a chainsaw-mounted assault rifle that its designer announced the game’s sequel by bursting onto a stage holding with a replica of it. It’s, like, the quintessential space marine game and its place in the wider culture is in the background of an Entourage episode. And yet its trailer is footage of a mournful space marine walking through a ruined city set to fucking Mad World, a song that was only ever meant to be the soundtrack for a fifteen year old boy’s first breakup. It’s actually really striking imagery for an action game, and it shows the guy looking morose and running away from his enemies – but in the game, the character is a type-A badass who’s so happy when he kills someone, and if you ever tried running away from a fight someone over Xbox Live would shout you down for being a faggot. Gears’ audience would make fun of the game’s own trailers. I don’t let the game off the hook for its fans either, because it completely sets the tone. Gears, at least the first one, doesn’t affect any kind of profundity or emotional nuance beyond, you know, death is sad, if you’re not one of the bad guys.
  “I don’t want to say anything mean about Tom Bissell, because he seems like a good guy, but I have never not been confounded by that New Yorker article he wrote about how Gears of War has this beautiful, melancholic, soul. He has Nathan Englander testifying to the game’s literary merits and gets Cliff Bleszinski to go along with this absurd explanation of how the game is emotionally sophisticated and fundamentally sad and even autobiographical. The game where you get an achievement for curb stomping a hundred dudes! There’s an achievement named after the canon of Ted Nugent. And Bleszinski genuinely does seem to think that the game is sad at its core, but what is it ever even saying? When does it pretend that war is anything other than fucking rad?
  “All of that seems more designed to repackage the game for the New Yorker audience than anything else. And the image I can’t get out of my head is that, is that…”
  “Eric, hold on one second.”
  “No, the image I have in my head is Gears of War being sponsored to go and hang out at the Algonquin Round Table with Dorothy Parker and her buddies talking shit in iambic about uh, uh, Katharine Hepburn, and Gears of War is sitting there struggling to play along and think of an anagram for ‘eat shit and die’. And I think Gears of War does want to be sad, a little bit, but how can it be within the confines of what it is?”
  “I have to tell you something.”
  “It’s not going to make players feel bad about killing anything because everyone knows that killing things is exactly what they signed up for.” Eric’s leg is bouncing up and down so much that it hits the underside of the coffee table.
  “Eric. Eric.”
  “The thing that I wanted to say, I mean, what I wanted to write, is that – let me finish – that there is an anagram in ‘eat shit and die’. If you try and make an anagram out of that, you get ‘death’ and ‘sad’… and with a couple of letters left over that don’t spell anything. Those extra letters, to me, represent what Gears of War hasn’t figured out yet. That jumble of letters is the gap between what Gears is and what people want it to be. That’s what it means to me. And don’t you think that, more than anything else…”
  “Eric.”
  “What?”
  His colleague pointedly taps his wristwatch. “Dude, it’s midnight. It’s Saturday. You’re not a journalist anymore.”
  For a second, Eric looks genuinely thrown off. He holds an uncertain pause waiting for his train of thought to catch up with him. Then he throws up his hands and smiles in an exaggerated show of defeat and sinks into the back of the couch. As the others resume control of the conversation, I pay attention to the smile on Eric’s face and the way it gradually hardens and then collapses entirely. Whatever it is that they’re talking about is so obviously washing over him, and you wonder if he even knows. When I see his eyes flicker around briefly and then turn down to the floor, I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach.

I’ve been so concerned about not driving home drunk that I’ve had one glass of wine in the last three hours. People have been steadily filing out of the apartment since midnight, all exchanging goodbyes with Eric that are of varying degrees of tenderness. By now, I’m alone in the kitchen. Someone asked me what I had planned for the weekend and I invented something about a friend’s birthday party. Is that what a psychopath does? I grew up thinking that psychopaths are bad people.
  “Keep in touch, man,” Eric tells one of the guests, hesitating somewhere between a handshake and a firm pat on the shoulder.
  “Definitely. Are you on Facebook?” He arrives at the shoulder.
  “Yeah.”
  “Okay, I’ll find you.”
  “I’ll be there.”
   I’m finally thinking about leaving when Eric walks into the kitchen to grab another beer. I hope someone is driving him home.
  “Hey,” he says, looking over at me from the counter, “Megan, right?”
   “Sure, yes, we met at the Christmas party last year.”
  “I’m really glad you came,” he says, shaking my hand, “I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk.”
  “That’s fine.”
  Eric knocks back the bottle. “Dreamland, right? I’m excited, man. Game development, shit, that’s the big time. I feel like I’ve finally made it.” He laughs.
  “You know,” I say, tipping my head slightly in a minor gesture of confidentiality, “please don’t take this personally, but I wanted to say that I thought the farewell speech you gave was probably too harsh.”
  Eric stifles a burp, not very well. “We’re just giving each other shit.”
  “I know. I just think some people might not have liked it, is all.”
  “Like, what part do you mean?”
  “I don’t think people really appreciated how you were so dismissive about journalism. Everyone is here to say goodbye to you because they’re so sad you’re leaving and then you get up there and you make them feel miserable about their jobs. I don’t think that was a cool thing to do.”
   “It’s just bullshit.”
   “It’s not bullshit, though.” I have to say, I assumed I could give Eric more credit than this.
  Eric lowers his head. “What do you want from me?” he says evenly.
  “Well, I personally don’t really like how you’re so cavalier about closing the door on something that you’re clearly very good at. It’s not like everyone is so lucky to be the best at what they do, and you are, and you decide you want to throw all that away to go and shill for a middling game company. You can’t get a Pulitzer for writing a press release, I don’t know if you realized that. You’re at the top of your field and you set an example, and the example you set is that everyone else in the field is wasting their time. That people in games journalism today might as well be wiping up after zoo animals for all the good it will do them in the future. I hate that. I mean, I don’t understand why you don’t seem to care about journalism at all? You’re ending something. That’s such a horrible message to me.”
  Eric snorts. “You know, it’s not absurd to think that people make decisions about their careers based on what’s best for them. What I had in games journalism was a good job, but this is a better one. It just makes sense. Also, not to mention that I’d like to at least try doing some different things. Why does it have to be any more complicated than that?”
  Why doesn’t he understand this? Can’t he see where this is going? I’m coming up against a brick wall and it’s aggravating. “Does it not even matter to you that you are good at this?”
  “What matters is what I want to do. But wait, hold on a second, really, because what you said is so strange and I have to ask: in your world, am I suffering under some kind of delusion? Seriously? If I understand this right, you want me to be a games journalist for the rest of my life? Yeah? With no opportunity for career advancement and for no more money, you want me to cap out at twenty-five doing something that I don’t love and that I never really wanted to do in the first place? To basically retire? And all of that for… what? What is that worth? You want me to do that because of people on the internet – people I don’t know – who you think like my writing? All you are doing is asking me to make a bad decision.”
  Okay, I want this to be over. I want to be home now. I want to scream at him and run out of here. I want to smash my hand through a window.
  “I’m sorry that you seem to think that I’m a role model,” he continues. “but even if I am, Jesus Christ, I don’t think that being practical and sensible is such a bad thing to teach. You’re being unrealistic.” He takes another drink. I can’t believe how angry he makes me.
  “Have you thought this through?” I ask. “Do you realize that you won’t get to talk honestly about games anymore?”
  Eric glances out into the hallway. Don’t look away. I can feel my cheeks burning. There’s something caught in my throat and as I cough, the words come stumbling out.
  “Do you realize that you’re not going to be able to do any real writing the way that you’re used to writing?” I say. “Have you realized that you won’t get to say what you really think? Do you know that you’re not going to have an audience who knows who you are? Do you realize that you won’t have an internet forum talking about how great you are anymore?”
  “I’ve thought about that,” Eric says, “and I want to try this. I think I owe it to myself.”
  My skin is on fire. “This is a mistake for you.”
  He regards me coldly. “You’re wrong. I don’t know how else to say it to you. You’re not thinking clearly.”
  I glare at him. Why am I shaking? “They’re going to leave you,” I tell him. “Everyone at this party who worked with you. Everyone on the internet who said how much they love you and that games journalism is dead without you. They are going to forget about you. They will find some other writer to take your place and you are going to hear everything about him and how he is the best thing. You don’t understand how fast that is going to happen. And then you’re just going to be another guy in an office who nobody looks at and who nobody talks about.”
  Now you’re looking at me. I stare back into his eyes. And I can tell.
  “You know it, too,” I say. “You know it.” I say it like the words have always been there.
  After I say it I inhale sharply. Eric doesn’t react but I know that he feels something. I wish I were taller. My head is fucking drowning. My heart is pounding; I want to punch myself in the heart. Eric says nothing. I make myself focus. I make myself think about every breath. I make myself center on his face. I need to hear what he says. I’m here now. I don’t know where I am. I am ready.
  I look at Eric, and he walks out of the room.
  Of course, I wonder briefly about what he might have said then. Maybe he feels now like he’ll never even speak to me again. But I can probably tell what it would have been. I’ve been here so much longer than him.

For me, the worst part is that it’s already been Saturday for two hours. When I go home I am going to fall asleep, and in my dream I am going to imagine myself in a different place and convince myself that I have lived my whole life differently. Then I am going to wake up and it will still be this day. Before I leave the apartment I stop in the one of the bedrooms to check my cellphone in private. The room is microscopic, and in the dark I hit my foot on some heavy crap lying on the floor and curse under my breath. It’s dismaying how little light there is coming through the window from the street, but I can’t be bothered to figure out where the light switch is. I have no missed calls or text messages; I don’t know why I couldn’t have guessed that sight unseen. With the orange light filtering through from the street, I can make out that there’s an open notebook lying on the desk. After glancing at it, I lean in closer and run my finger down the page as I read.
   Checkout girl, I’m checking you out
  I’m not old enough to buy cigarettes
  But I’m old enough to want you
  Around and around
  Up and down
  Round and round
  Hey, checkout girl, I want you
  Don’t you want me too?
  This goes on for… pages. It’s even worse than I imagined. How long is this song? He’s written down the guitar tabs and everything. The middle section of the book has hypothetical set lists.
  “Hey,” calls a voice from the doorway. “How’s it going?”
  I turn around, and of course it’s Andy. “Is this your room?” I ask him, as if that book and this room would belong to anybody else.
  “Yeah. Do you like it?”
  I flick idly through the pages of the notebook, which is overflowing with draft lyrics that have been crossed out and revised multiple times. “How long do you spend on this?” I ask him.
  “All day, pretty much. After I come home, I work on this for hours.”
  I come close to the end of the book and decide to leave it alone. Getting my things together, I pick up my bag from where I dumped it on Andy’s bed, and fasten my coat around my waist. Standing near Andy in the doorway, I hesitate and then look up at him.
  “I think you’re awesome.”
  “Ah, really, you think so?”
  “Yeah, I do.”
  I take the elevator thirteen floors down. Thirty years ago, I came home from school one day and told my dad that when I grew up I wanted to be the first female senator. He looked at me and said that there had already been at least a dozen of them. So now I do this.

Hell

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.