The State of Play Read online

  It’s a cursor. It indicates a command line, and it’s waiting for me.

  At five years old I know this much: An arcane language lives inside this box. The computer can understand things, so long as I put them to it in exactly the right way. I type words, names, and then random strings of nonsense. I want a reply.

  I always get the same answer: the phrase SYNTAX ERROR IN 10, spat onto the screen like a wrist-slap, a dark mantra, prickling my nape. I don’t know what SYNTAX is, or why the 10, but I know from ERROR that I haven’t cracked the riddle. The sphinx that lives in the space that opens up when there’s no disk in the drive will not answer.

  • • •

  I would mash the keyboard in fury. Sometimes when I did that, the machine would beep, and the screen would pile up with white, impossible sigils, whorls and brackets, and lock there. The mad static of some unknowable mind.

  The father of my neighbor Charlotte was a scientist. At her house, I would haul enormous manuals on programming language and calculus down from high shelves and try, to no avail, to make sense of them. I caressed their thin pages, piqued to trembling by their foreign language, and that was enough. The act of pretending to read them was fundamentally more exciting than whatever hard work they might have contained.

  I didn’t like hard work, so I spent much of grade school consigned to the hallway bench, for discipline. The bench was wrought of smooth black wood, with an airbrush painting of fruit on its winged back, accented, maybe, with gold. I had to sit there, writing my name in little puddles of tears, because I threw temper tantrums over long division. You have to learn math, they told me, you’re going to need math, come on, you can do it—and I had no skill at it, no patience for it, no willingness to learn, though I knew, even by six or seven years old, that without the goddamn math, I’d never unlock the machines.

  I would occasionally try hard, first lavishing on the preparations of my materials. I needed three pencils, a husband and wife and baby pencil sharpened according to their respective sizes, then they’d need a pet eraser. I’d take the family to my task, dutifully concentrating: I meticulously kept the fat-bellied sixes and leering number nines tidily in their grid boxes, sketching everything very slowly and thoughtfully.

  Even then, no matter what, I’d come up with some dangling remainder, and a horrific red pen line would slash my earnest effort. “I hate this, I’m going to die,” said little me, throwing Baby Pencil.

  “You aren’t going to die,” the teacher said.

  “I am too, I have appendicitis,” I told her, having learned about appendicitis from a computer game about surgery. The game made me want to become a surgeon, and when I told my third-grade teacher that’s exactly what I was going to do, she said I’d better get good at math if I wanted to make it in medical school.

  I gave up upon my fledgling dream of internal medicine. I rolled around in a melodrama of agony, and then I was sent to the hallway bench.

  The precise language of computers and programming might as well have been magic spells. Trying to brute-force my way into arcane conversation with machines was like feeling my way along a dark closet wall, hoping to stumble into Narnia. I did plenty of that fumbling for Narnia: this button, this ritual, this combination of objects would—oh, it had to, it must—let me escape this little world, where everyone yelled at me about math.

  I promised my cousin we could teleport to a museum at night if we said the right words. I promised my sister we’d fight crime just as soon as I could build a portable AI. I promised my classmates on the playground that there were invisible tribes in the woods. We would summon mermaids if we arranged a set of stones just so.

  I feared the word “no,” its very self. I hated to be thwarted. By the time I was in fourth grade, the teacher had already called my parents more than once to say they did not think I could tell fantasy from reality.

  I could tell. I could. I just didn’t want to. I don’t want to, I don’t want to, I wailed, I marched out to the hallway bench. Again.

  My earliest memories are of the breathing machines, and how they promised from the time I was born that anything could exist, that all things were solvable, that anything could be brought into striking, vector-lined reality if you had imagination enough. There was always someplace else to go than here, where I had to do math and wear a neon scrunchie for dance class.

  My father wrote a “home technology” column for the Boston Globe in the early 1980s, when technology in the home was a novelty in and of itself. He wrote about hi-fis and that somehow led to an uncurated heap of press materials barraging our house continually. We were sent hardware and software in plastic-wrapped boxes the size, thickness, and weight of novels. They had dramatic sci-fi cover paintings—vast, elaborate box art on the outside, and clumsily-blipped eight-bit shorthand adventures inside.

  Dad thought I should learn computers as a child to be employable as an adult. My access to them was virtually uninhibited, except for when I was yelled at for accidentally erasing this or that. Otherwise I was constantly enshrined in front of the Apple ][e, mashing keys, engaged in lawless, experimental dialogue with a machine.

  From the mysterious boxes piled in our office closet, I pulled and prized black floppy disks with bright labels and sticky, flimsy black-tape bellies I knew never to touch. Each disk was shorthand for an adventure—they had names like Critical Mass, Mystery House, Ring Quest, Blade of Blackpoole, Kabul Spy, and Death in the Caribbean.

  Those old things were blunt objects, the kind that make you think about how many tiny edges must have existed all over the surface of the very first wheel. Slowly, there emerged a line drawing loads, etching a graphic abstraction of a path, house, or forest into the black mirror of your boxy computer screen. You are an international spy. You must find the wizard. You are standing outside the house. You are on a path facing EAST. Things like that would be all you were given to know about yourself and the world.

  You would type N for North, and often YOU CAN’T GO THAT WAY would be the stern rebuke. GO NORTH, you’d patiently enter, and if you were lucky, you’d get back a line or two about how the mountains barred your way, or how the impassable woods sprawled forever in that direction. CLIMB TREES, I would insist. Or I’d try, CLIMB THE MOUNTAINS.

  YOU CAN’T DO THAT, the world inside the machine would insist in return, or I DON’T UNDERSTAND.

  Some games understood climbing, some did not. Some let you press I to view your inventory (a lamp, a letter, or nothing whatsoever), and some required you to type the entire word, INVENTORY. I learned so many words from games: GULLY, SLUICE, BRAZIER, ADUMBRATE, OGRESS, EGRESS (which I thought was another kind of ogre).

  For a child who hated to hear “no” so badly, I never heard it so eloquently than from the leaden mouths of those ancient worlds. Their blunt denials kept me up at night—the locked gate whose key I couldn’t locate, the vile and crudely-animated manticore whose appetite I couldn’t figure out how to slake, the endless and constant grisly deaths I couldn’t manage to avoid.

  So often, it was a matter of the right answer and the precise right phrasing. These games were finicky about their syntax—TIE ROPE, you’d demand, and TO WHAT, it would ask, then TO TREE would confuse it, but merely answering TREE would not. It was always, always possible that you had the right answer to the puzzle, but the wrong words, the wrong verbs.

  At seven years old, I would sit bolt upright on the verge of sleep, struck suddenly by a solution in the dark of my room, waiting for morning and my next attempt with uncontainable excitement in a kind of fever.

  I’d imagine what new lands waited beyond the sequences I couldn’t complete, so fervently that even now I can’t remember if they were real. My neighbor Charlotte (of the scientist father and the basement full of spellbooks) and I would constantly plot, collaborate, and imagine, spending those hot summer afternoons when school was out sitting side by side at a machine.

&n
bsp; At her house lived a monolithic, primitive PC the size of a refrigerator. It was 1988 and there was one particular pizza-sized disk we’d tuck into its shelf-sized jaw at every opportunity. At the command prompt, Charlotte would type ADVENT to run the game. She hit those letters like a religious hymn.

  This particular game was called Colossal Cave Adventure, a text-only network of caves and treasures that sprawled like a tomb of hieroglyphs so truly massive and confounding that I’ve not solved it to this day, which feels right.

  Digital historians call Colossal Cave Adventure the “granddaddy” of text adventure games. A spelunker named Will Crowther made it for his daughters to help share his cave-crawling pastime with them while he endured a divorce with his wife. His work parented me and Charlotte through those summers, in a different era. It felt like we could lock ourselves away and go absent for hours without making our parents nervous.

  Much of our playtime was spent concentrating on the game itself, rubber-cementing reams of printer paper end to end to map the cave and its strange place names: Bedquilt, the Hall of the Mountain King, mazes of identical twisting passages, an alcove where a hollow voice cried “Plugh.” The virtual cave network contained a Ming vase, a set of batteries, a bent rod crowned with a rusty star and all kinds of objects to be collected for some inexplicable purpose.

  The rest of the time, we tumbled forth into our real-life suburban wildlands, the scraggly woods between one grassy yard and another, and the tiny duck pond that still looms large in my memory. Everywhere, it seemed, we saw a puzzle, a mystery. Why was that bundle of twigs leaning against an old oak? Why did some stones glitter when you struck them, and others stank of gunpowder? Under this log, a salamander, and under that, a nest of beetles. There were loamy, unseen living things always scuttling just out of reach. We left notes and signs wherever we could get away with it, and it felt like important work.

  This knothole could be a button. Behold this twig stripped of its bark and written on by termites—a magic staff! The things that lay beyond our reach in the digital world seemed to mirror and echo the natural mysteries we found when we played outdoors. At the end of the day, I’d be in trouble for the mud on my shoes or for coming home a little too late, but I always tromped into the front door feeling like I was almost, almost somewhere. Like I’d almost solved it, whatever “it” really was.

  There were, there had to be, gorgeous infrastructures beyond what I could reach, just waiting for me to know the right words. The whole world was a blinking prompt, daring me, ENTER COMMAND.

  Leigh Alexander’s writing on the business and culture of video games has appeared in Wired, The New Statesman, The Guardian, Polygon, and numerous other publications.

  Bow, Nigger

  Ian Shanahan

  What you are about to read is, in a way, what started and defined it all. Originally published under Ian Shanahan’s online pseudonym, Always Black, “Bow, Nigger” is a key text in the canon of what is now known as New Games Journalism. It was one of the earliest pieces to grapple with how digital identity is expressed in multiplayer games, and it is widely considered one of the most influential critiques of video game culture, ever.

  “Bow, nigger,” he typed.

  I kind of hunched uncomfortably over the keyboard at that point. Not that I should’ve taken offence, really.

  For one thing, my screen name has nothing to do with my ethnicity. For another, it’s only a game and the fascist doing the typing is probably hundreds of miles away and far beyond anything you could call an actual influence on my life.

  But still . . . It’s not very nice, is it?

  What to do?

  I circled around him warily.

  Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast does one thing very, very well, and that’s lightsabres. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to say George Lucas et al did lightsabres very well in the Star Wars films and Outcast does a good job of recalling the memory of those flashing contests. The emulation is near perfect, from the initial hiss as light slowly rises from the handle, to the sweeping motion-blurred visuals and the threatening, pitch-shifting hum.

  Throughout the game, you can choose which perspective to view the action from. The game defaults to first-person for projectile weapons but drawing your lightsabre switches to third-person ass-cam and this is by far the best configuration. Leave it alone.

  Third-person allows you to fully appreciate the acrobatics of the sabre fighting animations. You can swing away in one of three styles: fast, medium, and heavy, all of which allow you wrestle mouse movement and direction key presses to produce jaw-dropping combinations of slashes, chops, and stabs that risk you forgetting any question of your actual opponent as you stare in disbelief and whisper, “Did I just do that?”

  “Bow,” he types.

  Hmm. Problem. For all of the excellent swordplay animations, Raven seems to have omitted any of the more mundane actions you could imagine your avatar performing. There is no “Bow” button.

  What my socially belligerent friend is being so insistent about is something else, and that’s a form of “physical” expression that grew out of the enthusiasm of some of the more ardent Star Wars fans who play JKII online. Some people take their fiction VERY seriously and wannabe Jedi Knights are among the most serious. The faithful, in order to be more true to the Jedi Code of Honour, crouch before each other and duck their “heads” down as a mark of respect before entering into battle. Some people think that’s silly.

  I thought it was silly, the first time I saw it. Then I saw everybody was doing it. And then I felt silly not doing it. It’s strange how much weight the actions of your peers can bring to bear on you, even when your social medium is only a bunch of really fast math on a German server.

  I’m currently in heavy style. This affords me the most damaging attacks at the expense of much slower swings. When you’re not attacking, it also provides the best defense, parrying is handled automatically. The best defense is wise while I’m facing off with this wanker. We’ve been engaged in our duel for two or three minutes and neither one of us has come close enough to hit each other yet. This is a period of sizing up.

  Sometimes rash headlong attacks can be exploited by a player of a reasonable skill level, and you’ll find yourself ghosting and waiting for another turn before you know what hit you. If you’ve never played a particular opponent before, it pays to feel him out a bit.

  First, though, there are the formalities. I crouch and duck my head in a “bow.” Vulnerable.

  Stupid? Yeah.

  But you know what? I entered in to it willingly and “why?” is a very interesting question.

  I’m a big boy now and I don’t want to be a Jedi Knight when I grow up. The Star Wars films are great, but they’re also just that, films—a form of entertainment to be enjoyed during breaks from my very real and financially challenging life (mortgage, two cats, a broken gutter and a car that needs some attention. Cheers.)

  So I didn’t bow because I wanted to role-play as a Jedi. It was an act of defiance.

  Duelling is not new. Any multiplayer game can leave you with one opponent on either side, and I’ve played that scenario out in many games. The difference with lightsabre duelling, Outcast-style, is that it’s so very personal. These aren’t detached sniping matches across the width of the map, or rocket-spamming blast-fests to see who can respawn the least. JKII duel is winner-stays-on, and you can be floating around for anything up to half an hour on a busy server waiting for a game. This makes your game life actually worth something, and it makes it worth fighting for.

  Into this potent mix, you can toss in the fact that while you’re a ghosting spectator you have time to chat and actually get to know the people you’re playing, even on that usually most impersonal of beasts, the public server. During actual fights, play can swing from bouts of thrust, slash and parry to more distant and wary sizing-up in search of an opening that wil
l allow you to land a sucker-hit before your opponent can counter. There’s time to talk and taunt.

  But perhaps most personal of all is the close proximity you have to come to damage your opponent. I’m an avoidant player at the best of times, but JKII lightsabre duels don’t allow you to hit and fade from range. You have to be right in there trying to give the other guy a laser enema if you’re going to avoid watching the show for another six games.

  So I bowed. Not because I was naive enough to think he’d give any significance to the gesture. Not because he was commanding me to from his pillar of arrogance. I bowed despite his taunts. For all his goading, I did “the right thing” to show him I wasn’t going to come and meet him down on his level.

  Blammo.

  SONOFABITCH! Jesus, all my shields and forty health are lost from one big heavy-stance overhead chop before he spins away, back to the other side of the map.

  “LOL! Nigger.”

  He goes into a “blender.” Every style has a selection of special moves that can activated by combination key presses; these are set pieces taken from notable moments of the films. Unfortunately, because JKII is based on the Quake III engine, the macro scripting of that seminal of all first-person shooters is easily migrated across. This means that all skill or effort can be eliminated from the execution of these moves by a few simple scripts that can be readily downloaded and bound to a key. A blender is the heavy-stance backsweep move, or several rather, chained together, causing the model to spin unrealistically like a top. It’s fatal if you get too near it, but very difficult to use in an actual fight, since you’re unable to do anything until the animation has finished. It’s a shame that exploits like this would eventually lead to the ultimate downfall of the multiplayer game.

  He’s showboating. He’s demonstrating how 1337 he is.

  “Are you really black nigger?” he types.

  “Why?” I replied.

  “Because it matters,” he says.