for games? I mean, imagine you’re twelve years old, and you want to play a video game. Can I—” She gestured to my computer. I rolled my chair away, she rolled hers in.
Her hands crawled over the keyboard.
cd doom
doom.exe
A spray of system messages, then the familiar splash screen—towering blue-and-gold letters on a hellish red background; in the foreground, a freaked-out space marine in green armor. She whacked the Return key a few times, blasting through starting options, and the game started instantly. “Look, I’m running around moving and shooting and that’s fun because I’m twelve. Seven seconds and I’m on Mars.”
“Phobos.”
“Phobos. Now let’s do ours. Realms of Gold VI: Far Latitudes.”
cd
cd rogvi
rogvi.exe
We watched the loading screen for about ten seconds, then intro animation. Splash screen. Character selection. Another animation introducing the story, this one forty seconds’ worth. Then we were in the game, walking around.
“You still don’t have a weapon. Barely know what you’re doing. No gameplay. All you’ve done is watch some animations and waded through a ton of exposition in fake medieval. Haven’t even done the tutorial.”
It took, maybe, thirty more seconds to get to the first character, a woodsman who starts to explain that while you were away, something terrible has happened in the capital. She folded her arms.
“Still no weapon. So, yeah, I’m twelve years old, I left five minutes ago. I’m riding bikes now. You see why people like Doom more?”
I remembered the IT company across the lobby. I could see into their classroom from our floor. It was just a room with rows of computers on long tables. I knew when the Doom demo came out because I could see just from standing there that a third of those machines were running Doom.
“And it even gets worse. I’m playing Brennan, but as a player I don’t know anything about him, so it’s like I have amnesia and for the first hour everybody who talks to me has to explain things like where I live.”
“Okay, okay.”
“And they’re telling me what to do, which is—here—helping these villagers, who I don’t give the tiniest fuck about. And this guy has a horse, and what if I want to just take his horse—oh, no—I can’t! I can’t do anything except what I’m supposed to do. None of these people are real and they’re all telling me—THE PERSON WHO OWNS THE GAME—what to do.”
“Okay!”
“And then when I’ve gathered twenty sticks or killed twenty rats I get a tiny bit more powerful. And then at the end of it all they tell me I’ve saved the king, the same asshole who’s been telling me what to do in the first place. It’s the opposite of play. It’s work.”
“Okay, but wait,” I put in. “Doom has a story. You’re, like, a marine. You went to Mars to figure out what’s happened to the Union Aerospace Corporation.”
“Nobody knows that but you!”
“And me,” said Matt quietly.
“And Matt! The only two people in the world who read the Doom manual! It’s Doom! You’re just on Mars and daemons are trying to mess with you and you fucking kill them. Why? Maybe at some point you feel a tiny stirring of curiosity about the proceedings. Might be cool to look into at some point! But you don’t have to read a page of text, you don’t have to stand around having pretend conversations that feel more like creating a macro in Microsoft Word. Story. Sucks!”
“Okay, wait, but this is exactly why people hate video games!” I had to stop her. I knew on some level I was right. At least I thought I was.
“Why?”
“Because they don’t mean anything. You just run around murdering things! Moby-Dick, on the other hand, has story. Citizen Kane does. Star Wars does. Until we have proper stories and characters we’re not going to be anything. We’re not going to be art.”
“Did you ever think maybe we shouldn’t try?” she said.
“And just be about shooting things?”
“Yes! If I absolutely have to play one of our video games, the first—the first—thing I do is kill everybody I possibly can—”
“But w—”
“Let me finish! Not because I’m psychotic but because these fake people creep me out, and because it’s a game, it’s supposed to be my story, and that”—she pointed at Realms of Gold—“isn’t my story.”
“I thought you didn’t care about games.”
“I said I didn’t play them. I’m not going to play an art form—excuse me—that says it’s about me, and then it’s about some patronizing, do-gooder asshole and the shiftless fuckwits who asked