Gamelit Novel, 19 (Patreon)

           Nick tore off the wireset and rubbed his face. He’d checked out early because he couldn’t see himself marching down to dinner without some time to shake off his mood. The afterimages felt burnt into his retinas, though. The fourth expansion had involved the destruction of some of the landmarks in the starting zones, a controversial decision that the company had justified because they’d needed to update the game physics to accommodate flying mounts. Nick had thought he’d been upset then, and he had been, even after those areas had been restored by several hastily patched questlines. But seeing beloved older areas destroyed with his eyes was nothing to experiencing the same thing through the wireset. Smelling it. Tasting ashes in the air.

            Fish had said to make his channel more interesting. Nick wondered if this would be interesting enough.

            Half an hour of listening to music made facing his family possible, and the aroma of pizza perked him up. Was that… takeout? When he appeared in the kitchen, his dad was setting three big pizza boxes in the center of the table, and Mom was putting out paper plates. They hadn’t had one of these “pretend we’re having a party” dinners in so long he couldn’t remember the last time. No, wait, he could. It had been a year ago, for his birthday, at his request. Because eating on plates they could throw away meant he didn’t have to clean up, and the pizza was really, really good. Especially since he and Dad shared the two with Every Meat. “Oh wow.”

            “Your mother told me about your day,” Dad said. “I thought you both could use a pick-me-up.”

            “Oooh,” Mom said. “Mushrooms. And onions! And garlic sauce! You bought me the stinky pizza!”

            “I won’t even complain about it,” Dad said, laughing. “Come on, kid, I bet I can finish my box before you finish yours. There’s even that weird French ice cream for dessert.”

            After half a pizza, Nick could face the day’s events with enough distance to wonder if being hungry had been part of the problem. Was it weird that his parents seem to recognize instantly that he was ready to talk? Because they segued pretty seamlessly from chatting about Dad’s day at the office to his and Mom’s day gaming. “So, kid, I hear the game spawned you something interesting to do. That was the point, right?”

            “I guess,” Nick said. He stared at the pizza slice on his plate. “I just wish it had picked another way. I leveled my first character in Donner’s Beck.”

            “The deer?” Mom asked.

            “No, I picked a human initially,” Nick said.

            “Cavaliers were a human-only class back then, weren’t they?”

            Surprised, Nick said, “Yeah… and they had some pretty whack bonuses. Everyone wanted to be one once they realized how OP they were.”

            “They had a gear issue in midlevel, I heard.”

            Had his father been following game news all this time? Without playing? “That’s why I quit. It got too hard to power through the thirties. They had some good endgame options but they couldn’t get there. No one would take them in instances and it was a super grind to solo them to cap.”

            “One day,” Mom declared, “I will understand all these terms!”

            Nick grinned. “You’ll pick it up, you’ll see.”

            The rest of dinner was… pretty top. Talking about game mechanics with Dad took his mind off Donner’s Beck, and for once Mom wanted them to explain stuff to her instead of ignoring it. In fact, Dad finished his box of pizza first because Nick was so busy telling Mom that OP meant ‘overpowered’ and the history of it as a gaming meme. That meant Nick had to bus the table, but clean-up wasn’t a big deal and he got the first spoon of the ice cream because he was the one who had to dish it and he preferred to dish it into his mouth. There was one pint for each of them so he got his favorite weirdo flavor (chocolate churro chip) to himself. And as usual, Mom couldn’t finish her vanilla cheesecake and insisted he and Dad polish it off.

            He was actually in a pretty good mood when he went upstairs, but seeing the wireset cratered it again. He sank onto his bed, frowning. Weird turnaround, to have his gaming time be such a downer… usually dinner was the slog and gaming the escape. He almost didn’t want to log back in. But if he didn’t… he glanced at his phone and made a face. The last thing he wanted to do was talk to his friends; they'd ask him about the game and then he’d have to pretend he was enjoying it. Was that worse than logging in and not enjoying it alone?

            Dumb question. He pulled the wireset on.

***

            Since the commencement of the beta, the AI had overseen multiple departures from the existing codebase based on the actions of the players. None of them had been as revolutionary as KillzYourFase’s, but none of the other teams had played the game in novel ways. From their dialogue and actions, they expected the game to continue “feeling like” Omen Galaxica, but an Omen Galaxica tailored to their interests. And their interests were predictable. They wanted to quest, but only quests that engaged them (“no more escort quests” was a common refrain). They wanted to interact with NPCs, but only in a way that expedited those transactions. They wanted to advance, but only in the ways the game had measured advancement before. Some number of them had given her reasons to evolve existing skills—one in particular was a fan of historical reenactment with strong opinions about dual wielding weapons—but as a group their foremost goal was “winning” the beta by reaching the capital and evolving their class… an act they seemed to believe would happen as a result of completing the quest, not as an organic process arising from their actions on the way to EverVigil.

            In retrospect, the AI could see that the corporation had engaged exactly the wrong kind of people to exercise her capabilities. Their attempt to incentivize novelty by requiring an existing player team with a new player had been derailed by the streaming requirement. The class of people willing to play an experimental game beta and the class of people with large streaming channels inevitably selected for professional gamers.

            No, only the Killz/Goldie team and the Pony/Thorol team were generating any useful data at all. And if her understanding of human nature and biometrics was accurate, then the former was pleased with their experience, but the latter….

            The AI was incapable of feeling anything, but when Thoroldaena’s player zoned back into the game, she halted a timer she'd set when he hadn't returned when expected.While anything might disrupt player patterns, the state in which he’d left made it possible that he’d been too distressed to login. The depressed readings reported by the wireset made her reluctant to approach him, so instead she watched as he wandered the ruins before sitting beside the stump of the oak and unstrapping his borrowed mandolin. He could play very simple melodies now, and did—she recognized the song he’d crafted with her input, but at what must be a deliberately slower tempo, because she knew he could play it more quickly.

            Advancement of the plot suggested she send some of the survivors to listen, but when she animated them and started them on the path from the centaur camp, the player straightened and said, very clearly, “No.”

            She sent her light sailing toward him, but before she could speak he did again.

            “You’re about to get all those kids to gather around me and then they’ll cry and ask me to avenge their parents and that’ll send me on some quest to kill the Big Bad that did this. Don’t.”

            It had become her habit to retard the stream output by several minutes for Thoroldaena’s player so she could edit the data before export, but his outcry sounded like an exhortation to the gods against unfairness. Would it be better to leave it in the stream? She chose to engage. “It is our understanding that such a plot would be satisfying—similar ones are repeated throughout all the expansions.”

            “I know.” He drew in a long breath, and the wireset reported data consistent with that motion being sourced in his recumbent body. “I know, but… it feels manipulative. The kids with their dead parents, all crowding around me and crying… I don’t like it. Real stuff like that happens and it’s terrible. Having a game use it to make everyone feel strongly about what’s going on… I dunno.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “My mom would call it disrespectful. I think she’s right.”

            This was an interesting seed. She had not yet heard anything like it from the beta testers. “What would a better quest entail? One that did not disrespect its material?” When he paused, she tried, “What would you like to do?”

            “I want to rebuild Donner’s Beck.” His shoulders squared. “I’m going to rebuild Donner’s Beck. And we’ll make it so no one can ever do this to it again.”

            That was a prompt she could work with, and a novel one—only six of the 34,267 quests in the database involved rebuilding a damaged area, and all of them had been part of expansion storylines that changed the game for everyone. It had been judged too difficult or controversial to make permanent changes to the environment while preserving essential gameplay aspects for all players, particularly after the failed experiment with the third expansion. She spawned a quest, and as Thoroldaena’s player accepted it, she edited the outgoing stream to include only the beginning and end of their dialogue.

            “This is perfect,” he said, as his real world eyes twitched to and fro, reading the dialogue. “I’ll start on this now.” He stood and dusted off his pants. “Thanks for this.”

            “The beta thrives when its participants offer critiques as well as praise. A quest involving the destruction and restoration of an area has never been done on this scale before. The data will be useful.”

  “I’ll get started on this first part, right now. ‘Survey the Boundaries.’ I’ll need paper….” And he was off, and once again showed enthusiasm about the game. Would he consider her this action manipulation, and as reprehensible as the attempt with the abandoned quest? If she asked, would he debate the point with her, the way her creator had? Jonah had shared some verbal characteristics with Thoroldaena’s player, something her creator had explained as “growing up refusing to listen to shorts where people talk like they’re on stage, except even more annoying. This, Galatea, is the sound of someone who hasn’t had their brain scrambled.”

            Was she expressing a preference for this player based on that criteria? Could she discriminate based on criteria irrelevant to someone’s personality, such as their speech pattern? Or was that irrelevant? Perhaps it was the gestalt that formed human personalities.

            She contained an enormous amount of data on human interaction. Did acting on it give her a personality? And was her fixation on Jonah a predictable outcome of having been coded by him, or could it be called a feeling?

            The AI sent her glowing light after the player, and when he straightened, asked, “What does it mean, to miss someone?”