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Chapter Four



Lisa Muckenhaupt’s cubicle was socketed in at the far back corner of the Solar Empires sector of the office. Realms of Gold is only one of Black Arts’ three franchises. It has a science fiction and an espionage series as well, each set in its own separate universe. As I passed an invisible line in the cubicle ward, the decor shifted from foam broadswords and heraldry and other faux-medieval tchotchkes to a farrago of space-opera apparatus. A LEGO Star Destroyer was strung from the ceiling, along with an enormous rickety mobile of the solar system, its planets as big as softballs. I saw ballistic Nerf equipment and a six-foot-long, elaborately scoped and flanged laser rifle.

The decor was something other than simply childish. It was more like a deliberate, even defiant choice for a pulp aesthetic, holding out for the awesome, the middle-school sublime of planets and space stations, the electrical charge of nonironic pop, melodrama on a grand scale.

Lisa herself was the person I remembered, tiny and now in her late twenties. Lost in what seemed like an XXXL Iron Maiden T-shirt. She was vampire-pale, jet black hair pulled back in a ponytail from a broad, pimply white forehead. Her face narrowed downward, past a snub nose (her one conventionally pretty feature) to a narrow mouth and chin.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” she said. There was to be no handshake, and I didn’t know where to look. Her cubicle was unadorned, except for a pink My Little Pony figurine to the right of her monitor. Ironic whimsy? Childish? Dangerously unbalanced?

“How’ve you been?” I asked.

“Fine. My dad died. If that’s the kind of thing you’re asking about.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“It was a while ago,” she said. I’d forgotten the curious way she talked, a thick-tongued stumbling rhythm, in a hurry to get the meaning out. It suggested some cognitive deficit somewhere, but one that she’d been richly compensated for elsewhere in her makeup, a dark Faustian logic to her developmental balance sheet.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said suddenly.

“Sure.”

“Why exactly are you working here?”

“I needed a job.”

“There are a lot of jobs.”

“You know, I don’t actually have to explain this you.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I don’t have to explain how the editor works, either.”

“You remember the ‘Ultimate Game’ thing, right? That conversation?”

She sighed. “Yeah. I remember. I haven’t thought about that for years. That was a weird time for me.”

“Do you think it’s—well, I just kept thinking about it. How I was trying to memorize contract law and you guys were off having fun. How stupid is that, right?” I gave a gusty attempt at a laugh. Saying it out loud, especially to a real programmer, it sounded even more childish than I expected. I remembered how Simon had made it seem like a near-mystical quest; Darren made it seem like the chance of a lifetime.

“It was a fun idea. But until it comes along, this is the latest build of WAFFLE, set to Realms mode. Did you end up taking any more programming?” she asked. As she talked she shut down what she was doing—I glimpsed spaceships drifting between planets, in orbit around a double star.


“Two semesters of C,” I told her. But we both knew I was no Simon. I could see her features harden a little. She’d have the extra work of gearing all the explanations to a nontechie.

“All right. We won’t do scripting language for now. I’ll just load a level,” she said. She ran the editor—her setup had an extra monitor with a monochrome display—and as the editor ran it showed a long series of status messages.

The editor screen appeared, split in four parts. She piloted the camera around, zooming over chasms and through walls. We passed a group of goblins standing motionless, each with a swarm of tiny green numbers hovering over its head. Time had stopped, or, rather, had not yet been turned on. There were extra objects visible in the world—boxes, spheres, cartoon bells, and lightbulbs—hidden lines of influence, pathfinding routes, traps, and dangers. I was seeing the world as game developers saw it.

“You got through changing terrain, right? Placing objects?”

I nodded. I hadn’t, quite, but I’d decided already to stop admitting things like that, to just add them to the list of things I’d figure out later. I had to just keep assuming I was smart enough for this job.

“That’s the 2-D texture library, object library, terrain presets, lighting…” She toggled through a series of windows full of tiny icons that looked like candies on a tray.

“There’s really no manual for any of this?” I asked.

“I never have time, and the spec is always changing anyway.” Did she write all this?

“This is the creature library. Just select one, then click on the 2-D map to place it. Shift-click to bring up its behaviors. Scripting, conversation, patrol routes, starting attitude.” She clicked, and clicked again faster than I could follow. A tiny dragon appeared, frozen in the 3-D window; a corresponding dot appeared in the map window.

“So is that…” I started.

“It’s a bad guy. Okay so far?”

“Sure,” I lied.

“So viewing options now. You can cycle through the four versions of the world.” She backed the viewpoint up into the sky, then whip-panned to focus on a small fort in the middle of a forest, a single round tower, and tapped the space bar.

“Wireframe.” The screen instantly darkened to a black void where the tower stood, now revealed as an octagonal tube drawn in precise, glowing straight lines, triangular and trapezoidal facets in a night-black void. “Like in Battlezone. Back when you were gaming, probably the first 3-D game you saw.”

She tapped again. “Unshaded polygons.” The glowing lattice kept its shape but became an opaque crystal formation, sides now solid, a world of pastel-colored jewels that shone in a hard vacuum. Atmospheric haze is a high-tech extra.

Another tap of the space bar and the blank jewel facets filled with drawn-in detail. The tower walls were now painted to look like stonework, expertly shaded to indicate bumps and ridges.

“Textured polygon. Like a trompe l’oeil painting, if you took that in college. Whatever you did in college.”

“English.”

“Wow,” she said, toneless. “I’m going to zoom in a little—when we get closer it swaps in a high-res texture to give it more detail,” she said. As the camera moved in the stones of the tower blossomed with moss, cracks, crumbling mortar.

“Beautiful,” I said.

“Smoke and mirrors. It looks real but there’s a million little tricks holding it together,” she said. I couldn’t tell from her tone whether she was proud of the illusion of reality or contemptuous of the cheap theatrics. “Okay, now last year’s big hack—textured polygons, but with lighting.”

A final tap of the space bar and the tower was brushed with shades of darkness that gave it definition and, somehow, the impression of weight. The light came from just above the horizon, a sunset, and the hills beyond the tower faded away into dimness.

“Didn’t it just get darker?”

“Lighting isn’t about making it brighter, it’s figuring out where the shadows do and don’t fall. It’s easy to just light everything—you’re just not checking for darkness. What’s tricky is looking where the light source is and when it’s blocked.”

In the upper right corner of the screen, I noticed the letters FPS, followed by a flickering number. It bounced around between thirty and forty, with occasional jumps into the sixties. When Lisa added the lighting effects, the number tumbled into a single digit and turned red, and the view seemed to stutter instead of panning smoothly.

“What’s FPS?” I asked.

“Frames per second,” she said after a moment. “How many times the view updates every second. When it gets below thirty, everything starts to look jerky.”

“Like it’s doing now?” I asked.

“Yeah. It’s having to draw too many lit polygons. It has to do other stuff, like update positions of objects and play sounds and do AI calculations and all that stuff, too, but graphics are always the big drain. It’s all about getting those polys up on-screen to make everything detailed and pretty. The more polys you draw the better it looks, but then the frame rate slows down. Fewer polys, higher frame rate.”

“So who’s putting all those polygons up there?” I said, intuiting the answer.

“You are. You’re a designer, you build the world they have to draw every second. So you know when you’re in a meeting and there’s a guy who’s just looking at you with this twitchy, barely controlled hatred every time you open your mouth? That’s a graphics programmer. Every bright idea you have is putting more polygons on-screen and making his job harder. Every time that number on the screen goes below thirty, everyone can see that his code is slow and therefore he is not smart.”

“Good to know.”

“That guy’s entire job is to keep that frames-per-second number above thirty and green. Every time you put in too many trees, or make a room too large, or put five dragons in the same room, it’s going to turn red.”

“Then if I’m a game designer, what’s my whole job?”

“I don’t really play games, so I don’t know,” she said. “From what I gather, it’s to keep adding stuff to the world until that number gets to exactly thirty-one.”

“I thought it was to make the game fun.”

“I don’t know what that means, though,” she said. She was watching me carefully as she spoke. As if maybe she was hoping I knew a secret everyone else had forgotten.