they’re kind of… assholes. I’m not sure I would have gone even if they asked me. I know them pretty well.”
“So… what exactly do you do here now?” I asked.
“Rendering and lead,” she said. She was doing her best to hide it, but for the first time since I could remember she may actually have looked pleased. “Our deal with NVIDIA is toast, obviously. I have a Quake-style renderer I’ve been doing in my spare time. We shouldn’t have to change the data scheme radically from what we had, so we’re going to see what it can do.”
“Did you write the renderer for the last one?” I asked, wondering what the words spare time meant to her.
“Some asshole in Ukraine did it. We bought it through the mail. Women don’t write renderers, not on Darren’s team, anyway,” she said, and underneath the blanked-out affect I felt just a hint of her bitterness. “Not anywhere, really. This one’s going to be first on a triple-A game.”
Black Arts was already starting to look different to me now that I was a leading player. It had its own rules and character classes that I needed to know. I realized it as Gabby, the lead artist, came in—I still didn’t know anything about her other than that she was tall and bony with frizzed red hair, and that she was supercompetent. She wore jeans and a tank top and generally had more color than the average BA drone. Artists in a game studio are their own species. They produce the showy graphics that are the only things game publishers care about. They are all, on average, cooler and sexier than the usual employee, which is also a mystery, since the last time this class of people were seen they were drawing dragons on the backs of their notebooks in biology class. Four years later, they would come back from art school with different clothes and an attitude that told you they were only here because they had to be, which was probably true.
Gabby ran the art department as a fairly closed shop; which was okay with Don because it was also the only department that was reliably on schedule. I could see it was going to be embarrassing to have to go stand over her at her desk and explain why the green dragon couldn’t be breathing fire on the cover of the manual because, “Um in Realms um green dragons only breathe poison gas um it would have to be red it’s just what the rules say.”
And then, Lisa. I didn’t understand all of what programmers did, but as a game designer I knew I would have to talk to them. I was starting to divide programmers into two categories according to the two basic ways they accommodated their personalities to the weirdness of having to invest a massive cognitive load into an invisible, inhumanly intricate rule-based system that functioned on many, many levels of abstraction. To appear normal even though they spent their lives in a dark empire of strict and arbitrary rulings.
First, there are the ones who try to normalize it. They make an effort to show that this is just a regular job to them; they have pictures of basketball players and racing cars, and whatever else normative adults post, in their cubicle. They go home at five thirty in the afternoon; they’re good at scheduling, and always deliver product to spec and on time. They are typically very average programmers and mediocre-to-poor conversationalists. They simply choose not to look into the dark cognitive mirror of the machine.
Then there are the ones who in some way let themselves invest in what they’ve taken on, give a core part of their personalities to it, and embrace the damage that results. It comes with an inward depressive streak. The world of the compiler is an extension of the cursed, Chekhovian world they already live in, with the same mocking sense of humor and dour Slavic fatedness. When the world goes right, when the code compiles, it’s a brief, anomalous suspension of the rules.
They work irregular hours and make a fetish of using the slowest computer in the building. Don would send an IT guy in after hours to install upgrades without their permission, just for everybody’s sanity. I got the sense that Simon had been one of these compilers. It was a tribute to his brilliance as a coder and manager that no one ever tried to interfere with his nakedly pathological