The Greatest Game
The night of Wednesday, December 12, 2007, and into Thursday morning, I spent several hours playing Quake II, Warcraft III and Mechwarrior III, and a little Thief. I’d spent an hour or so working on NaNoWriMo 2006 and the TV was on in the background. Once or twice the William Shatner Warcraft commercial came on.
Part of the NaNoWriMo 2006 project involves non-imitative Star Trek replicator type technology which is related to holodeck technology, and I was writing a scene that involved its use. (NB: Star Trek didn’t invent it first. I’d mention Venus Equilateral, but…)
I’m mentioning these as likely influences because when I went to bed, I dreamt.
When I dream, man, do I dream. And I dream in colour.
I’m in the back seat of a car being driven by an internet entrepreneur who wanted to invent or support a really good full immersion MMPORG. I think I’ll call him Mark. With us are two people I used to know years ago in real life who were actors. I’ll call them Sasha and Nina, although in the dream they had their real names.
We’re driving through a commercial area with garages and warehouses. We make a turn and go down a hill. It’s a dead end but there are fields behind the tin and plywood buildings which are almost like clean slums. The driver is following instructions he got from somebody. I say something like ‘It’s a dead end” but Mark says something like “No, this is right.”
We get out, go through a short maze between and around these buildings and find ourselves in a small field empty but for two things that looked like free-standing pay telephone booths without doors, and wider.
Mark and Sasha go to the booths and do stuff. Nina and I don’t. They come away with what appear to be chits or something about the size of concert tickets.
Then a door opens in the back of a garage and we go in. It’s like the TARDIS, bigger on the inside. Suddenly all around us are fantasy characters, and hardly any SF characters. It’s some kind of entry hall. There are line-ups and big monitors up near the ceiling showing scenes martial, domestic, or bucolic. There’s muzak but I couldn’t tell you what it was or what it was like.
Most of the people are wearing obviously homemade costumes made to emulate or imitate real characters. One is a woman costumed as a male, a bearded ancient Roman warrior with the leather-leafed kilt and so forth. She seems to be honouring a genuine character from a story or game but it’s obviously a home-made costume.
Among the real people though are characters whose costumes are perfect. One is an Anubis, well over six feet tall. He is glowing from within although he looks perfectly normal. The movement of his skin and fur and eyes are so perfect that he could have come from a race of Anubises, a veritable species that evolved somewhere. There are other similarly perfect costumes, all of different races and species out of myth-, legend-, and history-influenced modern fantasy literature and gaming. I remember a troll and something greeny and Gollumy.
Mark is amazed and is asking the air questions like crazy. Sasha and Nina are critique-ing the different gamers/players/characters, pointing and saying ‘Real. Fake. Good. Tacky. Nice try.” That sort of thing.
A tall blond human woman meets us, obviously expecting Mark but not us. She’s kinda snotty to Sasha, Nina and I. (Ed.: I don’t know how I know Mark or why I’m along for the ride, except perhaps as narrator and observer, hardly omniscient.)
Then we’re in area like a staging area or an introduction area. First many of the other costumed characters/players are with us but then it’s just the blond woman and us. This is Mark’s occasion, apparently. The Sales Pitch.
We’re on a kind of balcony in a dark room. There are more screens behind and above us showing what we are told is action in the game; again martial, domestic, or bucolic.
The area below our vantage point on the balcony is dark, but there are tiny, twinkling lights here and there, including a large smudge of tiny lights. The smudge marks the edge of a completely dark area between us and the area where all the lights are.
The blond says it will be dawn down there soon. Then it is.
Suddenly the entire surface below us is lit up. It’s part of a much larger continent. At first the entire surface is made up of triangular pixels that create a low resolution image of a continent seen from high above. The ocean near us, grasslands, forests, distant mountains are all made up of these pixels (like traditional gaming hexagons). Across the whole continent below us is the name of the game in huge stylized fantasy gaming letters. (I can’t remember what it was!) There’s some imperial sounding music, a fanfare, and all the pixel triangles begin to resolve down to greater and greater detail, and the logo fades.
Then we might as well be in orbit above this planet looking down and marveling.
The blond has not been very nice to Nina, is ignoring me, and now she’s fawning on Mark and Sasha. She asks them if they want to play now and asks for their chits. They give her the tickets they got from the booths in the field. Apparently they were designing/defining their characters. She tells them not to worry about the questions they didn’t answer, that the game will fill in the blanks, but they have to be prepared.
Suddenly Nina and I are watching characters in the game on huge HD monitors, but neither one of us is watching Mark or Sasha. Apparently you can pick absolutely any POV in the game and following any character or action you want, no matter how big or small. You can watch grass grow or kingdoms fall. I can’t remember what I was watching but Nina is watching a dog run around a mediaeval city. She seems to love the dog.
Switch to me watching Nina on a bench with her back to me, in a room away from the balcony room. Leaning against the bench she’s got a meter high flat rectangular object, transparent, with the outline of a dog in it, looking like a neon window display that isn’t lit. She’s talking earnestly to a small display on the wall in front of her. She’s obviously mad at the blond who has been snotty to us and she’s telling the monitor that. Somehow I know that she’s talking to at least part of the massive AI that’s in control of the full immersion technology of the game, and it’s sympathetic. (Ed.: maybe the blond has been snotty to the AI too…)
The AI is saying “I can press a version of her into the game or a version of the dog into reality. Is that what you want?” It obviously means ‘press’ as in a metaphorical use of ‘printing press’, in the context of a full immersion RPG with the equivalent of replicator/holodeck technology. (Ed.: nobody has used the term VR at all. Until now.)
I don’t know what happened after that.
I think – or want to believe – that the snotty blond was pressed into the game, in the middle of an unpleasant scenario, and/or that Nina got a real copy of the dog that she liked.
I wish I was still there though.