him for help. Who’s that asshole? Is that your story? Darren’s?”
“So what ‘your story’ do you want?”
“She killed every fucking person in the world and threw their goddamn key in the lava.”
I left work early that night, around eight, and walked to Alewife station and rode the escalator down to the platform. I tried to work the question out.
Let’s admit some things about video games. They are boring. They induce a state of focus that is totally absorbing but useless—like the ghost of work or creative play, but without engaging the world in any way. They are designed to focus attention but don’t train you to overcome the obstacles to being focused.
They are fun but don’t tend to make a person more interesting.
The rewards are false coin—they are rarely satisfying or moving. More often, they offer something like a hunger for the next game, promising a revelation or catharsis that they never quite fulfill, that they don’t even know how to fulfill. They work in a single small corner of the emotional world, stirring feelings of anger or fear or a sense of accomplishment; they don’t reach for any kind of fuller experience of humanity.
But when I thought about story, I felt I couldn’t really be wrong. Because when I lay awake at night I wanted to be in a story; I wanted it so badly it was an ache in my bones. Anything story but the story I was in, of early disappointment and premature world-weariness. I wanted to feel like I was at the start of a story worth being in, instead of being twenty-eight and feeling like my story was already over, like it was the most boring, botched story imaginable.
I used to love books in which somebody from our reality got to go to another world. The Narnia books, the Fionavar books. Isn’t that what we could do, take people into another world? If not, why not? Why couldn’t that be what we did?
The next evening Lisa came by my desk while I was playing Realms of Gold: Prendar’s Folly. It had a Gothic feel, one of those impossibly beautiful CD-ROM puzzle games. I was searching around in a graveyard, at night, naturally. The tall, grotesquely carved headstones cast wild shadows, a flashy bit of graphics tech.
“God, what an ugly hack that was,” said Lisa.
“Looks nice, though.”
“Thanks,” she said.
I cleared my throat. “So. If you could make any game at all for yourself, what would it be? I’m asking everyone.”
“I’m not really a gamer, you know? It would be just like programming, I guess. Mostly games are about taking the computer and shutting down all the interesting things about it. All I can see in this thing”—she pointed at the screen—“is, like, a dumb kind of story pasted onto the computer, which is much less interesting than the computer itself.” I had the silver skull in a bag now. They knew Prendar had turned werewolf. I was on the path that would lead to recovering the NightShard—the price of Leira’s love and the thing that would divide the heroes for the rest of the age.
“Yes, yes, honor is satisfied, thanks. But if you had to try and make an actual game that you would like.”
She thought for a long while. “Talking horse, I guess.”
“Really?”
“You could ride it around and it would be your friend. Why? What superamazing game would you play? Honestly,” she said.
“I don’t know.” I thought for a long time, too, before answering. What did I want? “Probably I’d have a gun and go into Harvard Square and murder people.”
“This is why they hate us.”
Chapter Twenty
Okay, so just a clean sheet of paper.
I tried to think it through. Was it possible to tell the story without all the baggage Lisa talked about? No conversations, no cutscenes. Just gameplay. No interruptions, no one telling you what to do.
I thought about Doom. I thought about what it’s like to grow up in Endoria at the end of the Third Age, about the forest and the castle. What does the start of a story look like?
Once upon a time…
Like a path leading into the great forest at the edge of your father’s land. You can only see a short way down, then it curves out of sight, darkly shaded by the old growth above.
There’s a field behind you, and a low castle in the distance, smoke trailing up into the chilly autumn air. Sigh. There’s something expansive and melancholy at the same time. The sun is well