He tosses a notebook in his satchel and his hand hovers over Sweet Sorrows before grabbing The Little Stranger instead.
He is halfway out the door when he doubles back to put Sweet Sorrows in his bag as well.
As he walks toward Scott Hall his damp hair freezes in curls that brush crunchily against his neck. The snow is crisscrossed with so many boot tracks that there is hardly an untouched patch on campus. Zachary passes a lopsided snowman wearing a real red scarf. A line of busts of former college presidents is mostly obscured in snow, stray marble eyes and ears peeking out from beneath the flakes.
Kat’s directions prove helpful once he arrives at Scott Hall, one of the residences he’s never been in before. He passes the stairs and a small empty study room before finding the hallway and following it for some time until he reaches a half-open pair of French doors.
He’s not sure he has the right room. A girl sits knitting in an armchair while a couple of other students rearrange some of the postapocalyptic-looking tea-party furniture, velvet chairs and settees worn thin and wounded by time, a few repaired with duct tape.
“Yay, you found us!” Kat’s voice comes from behind him and he turns to find her holding a tray with a teapot and several stacked teacups. She looks smaller with her coat and striped hat removed, her buzzed-short hair a fuzzy shadow covering her head.
“I didn’t realize you were serious about the tea,” Zachary says, helping her move the tray to a coffee table in the middle of the room.
“I don’t jest about tea. I have Earl Grey and peppermint and some sort of immunity-boosting thing with ginger. And I made cookies.”
By the time the tea and the multiple trays of cookies are arranged the class has filtered in, about a dozen students, though it feels like more with all the coats and scarves flung over the backs of chairs and couches. Zachary settles into an ancient armchair by the window that Kat directs him to with a cup of Earl Grey and an oversize chocolate chip cookie.
“Hi everyone,” Kat says, pulling the attention in the room away from baked goods and chatter. “Thanks for coming. I think we have some newbies who missed last week, so how about we do quick intros around the room, starting with our guest moderator.” Kat turns and looks at Zachary expectantly.
“Okay…um…I’m Zachary,” he manages between chews before swallowing the rest of his cookie. “I’m a second-year Emerging Media grad student, I mostly study video-game design with a focus on psychology and gender issues.”
And I found a book in the library yesterday that someone wrote my childhood into, how’s that for innovative storytelling? he thinks but does not say aloud.
The introductions continue and Zachary retains identifying details and areas of interest better than names. Several are theater majors, including a girl with impressive multicolored dreadlocks and a blond boy with his feet propped up on a guitar case. The girl with cat-eye glasses who looks vaguely familiar is an English major, as is the girl who continues to knit but barely glances down at her work. The rest are mostly Emerging Media undergrads, some of them he recognizes (the guy in the blue hoodie, the girl with the tattooed vines peeking out of the cuffs of her sweater, ponytail guy) but no one he knows as well as Kat.
“And I’m Kat Hawkins, senior Emerging Media and theater double major and I mostly spend my time trying to turn games into theater and theater into games. And also baking. Tonight we’re going to discuss video games specifically, I know we have a lot of gamers here but if you’re not please ask if you need terminology clarification or anything like that.”
“How are we defining ‘gamer’?” the guy in the blue hoodie asks with enough of an edge in his voice that Kat’s bright expression darkens almost imperceptibly.
“I follow the Gertrude Stein definition: a gamer is a gamer is a gamer,” Zachary jumps in, adjusting his glasses and hating himself for the pretentiousness but hating the guy who needs to define everything a little bit more.
“As far as how we’re defining ‘game’ in this context,” Kat continues, “let’s keep along the lines of narrative games, role-playing games aka RPGs, etcetera. Everything should come back to story.”
Kat prompts Zachary into sharing some of his standard primers on game narrative, character agency, choices, and consequences, points he’s made in so