2
PROFESSOR SAMUEL ANDERSON SITS in the darkness of his small university office, his face lit grayly by the glow of a computer screen. Blinds are drawn over the windows. A towel blocks the crack under the door. He has placed the trash bin out in the hall so the night janitor won’t interrupt. He wears headphones so nobody will hear what he’s doing.
He logs on. He reaches the game’s intro screen with its familiar image of orcs and elves torqued in battle. He hears the brass-heavy music, triumphant and bold and warlike. He types a password even more involved and intricate than the password to his bank account. And as he enters the World of Elfscape, he enters not as Samuel Anderson the assistant professor of English but rather as Dodger the Elven Thief, and the feeling he has is very much like the feeling of coming home. Coming home at the end of a long day to someone who’s glad you’re back, is the feeling that keeps him logging on and playing upward of forty hours a week in preparation for a raid like this, when he gathers with his anonymous online friends and together they go kill something big and deadly.
Tonight it’s a dragon.
They log on from basements, offices, dimly lit dens, cubicles and workstations, from public libraries, dorm rooms, spare bedrooms, from laptops on kitchen tables, from computers that whir hotly and click and crackle like somewhere inside their plastic towers a food item is frying. They put on their headsets and log on and materialize in the game world and they are together again, just as they have been every Wednesday and Friday and Saturday night for the past few years. Almost all of them live in Chicago or very close to Chicago. The game server on which they’re playing—one of thousands worldwide—is located in a former meatpacking warehouse on Chicago’s South Side, and for lag-and latency-related issues, Elfscape always places you in the server nearest your location. So they are all practically neighbors, though they have never met in real life.
“Yo, Dodger!” someone says as Samuel logs on.
Yo, he writes back. He never talks here. They think he doesn’t talk because he doesn’t have a microphone. The truth is he does have a microphone, but he’s worried that if he talks during these raids some wandering colleague out in the hall might hear him saying things about dragons. So the guild knows really nothing about him except that he never misses a raid and has the tendency to spell out words rather than use the accepted internet abbreviations. He will actually write “be right back” instead of the more common “brb.” He will write “away from keyboard” rather than “afk.” People are not sure why he insists on this reverse anachronism. They think the name Dodger has something to do with baseball, but in fact it is a Dickens reference. That nobody gets the reference makes Samuel feel smart and superior, which is something he needs to feel to offset the shame of spending so much time playing a game also played by twelve-year-olds.
Samuel tries to remind himself that millions of other people do this. On every continent. Twenty-four hours a day. At any given moment, the number of people playing World of Elfscape is a population about the size of Paris, he thinks, sometimes, when he feels that rip inside him because this is where his life has ended up.
One reason he never tells anybody in the real world that he plays Elfscape is that they might ask what the point of the game is. And what could he say? To slay dragons and kill orcs.
Or you can play the game as an orc, in which case the point is to slay dragons and kill elves.
But that’s it, that’s the tableau, the fundamental premise, this basic yin and yang.
He began as a level-one elf and worked his way up to a level-ninety elf and this took roughly ten months. Along the way, he had adventures. He traveled continents. He met people. He found treasure. He completed quests. Then, at level ninety, he found a guild and teamed up with his new guild mates to kill dragons and demons and most especially orcs. He’s killed so many orcs. And when he stabs an orc in one of the vital places, in the neck or head or heart, the game flashes CRITICAL HIT! and there’s a little noise that goes off, a little orcish cry of terror. He’s come to love that noise. He drools over that noise. His character class is thief, which means his special abilities include pickpocketing and bomb-making and invisibility, and one of his favorite things is to sneak into orc-heavy territory and plant dynamite on the road for orcs to ride over and get killed by. Then he loots the bodies of his enemies and collects their weapons and money and clothes and leaves them naked and defeated and dead.
Why this has become so compelling he isn’t really sure.
Tonight it’s twenty elves armed and armored against this one dragon because it is a very large dragon. With razor-sharp teeth. Plus it breathes fire. Plus it’s covered in scales the thickness of sheet metal, which is something they can see if their graphics card is good enough. The dragon appears to be asleep. It is curled catlike on the floor of its magma-rich lair, which is set inside a hollowed-out volcano, naturally. The ceiling of the lair is high enough to allow for sustained dragon flight because during the battle’s second phase the dragon will launch into the air and circle them from above and shoot fiery bombs onto their heads. This will be the fourth time they’ve tried to kill this dragon; they have never made it past phase two. They want to kill it because the dragon guards a heap of treasure and weapons and armor at the far end of the lair, the looting of which will be sweet vis-à-vis their war against the orcs. Veins of bright-red magma glow just under the ground’s rocky surface. They will break open during the third and final phase of the fight, a phase they have not yet seen because they just cannot get the hang of the fireball-dodging thing.
“Did you all watch the videos I sent?” asks their raid leader, an elf warrior named Pwnage. Several players’ avatars nod their heads. He had e-mailed them tutorials showing how to defeat this dragon. What Pwnage wanted them to pay attention to was how to manage phase two, the secret to which seems to be to keep moving and avoid getting bunched up.
LETS GO!!! writes Axman, whose avatar is currently dry-humping a rock wall. Several elves dance in place while Pwnage explains the fight to them, again.
Samuel plays Elfscape from his office computer because of the faster internet connection, which can increase his damage output in a raid like this by up to two percent, usually, unless there’s some bandwidth-traffic problems, like when students are registering for classes. He teaches literature at a small university northwest of Chicago, in a suburb where all the great freeways split apart and end at giant department stores and corporate office parks and three-lane roads clogged with vehicles driven by the parents who send their children to Samuel’s school.
Children like Laura Pottsdam—blond, lightly freckled, dressed sloppily in logoed tank tops and sweatshorts with various words written across the butt, majoring in business marketing and communication, and who, this very day, showed up to Samuel’s Introduction to Literature course, handed in a plagiarized paper, and promptly asked if she could leave.
“If we’re having a quiz,” she said, “I won’t leave. But if we’re not having a quiz, I really need to leave.”
“Is there an emergency?” Samuel said.
“No. It’s just that I don’t want to miss any points. Are we doing anything today worth points?”
“We’re discussing the reading. It’s information you’ll probably want to know.”
“But is it worth points?”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Then, okay, I really have to leave.”
They were reading Hamlet, and Samuel knew from experience that today would be a struggle. The students would be spent, worn down by all that language. The paper he had assigned was about identifying logical fallacies in Hamlet’s thinking, which even Samuel had to admit was sort of a bullshit exercise. They would ask why they had to do this, read this old play. They would ask, When are we ever going to need to know about this in real life?
He was not looking forward to this class.
What Samuel thinks about in these moments is how he used to be a pretty big deal. When he was twenty-four years old a magazine published one of his stories. And not just any magazine, but the magazine. They did a special on young writers. “Five Under Twenty-Five,” they called it. “The next generation of great American authors.” And he was one of them. It was the first thing he ever published. It was the only thing he ever published, as it turned out. There was his picture, and his bio, and his great literature. He had about fifty calls the next day from big-shot book people. They wanted more work. He didn’t have more work. They didn’t care. He signed a contract and was paid a lot of money for a book he hadn’t even written yet. This was ten years ago, back before America’s current financial bleakness, before the crises in housing and banking left the world economy pretty much shattered. It sometimes occurs to Samuel that his career has followed roughly the same trajectory as global finance: The good times of summer 2001 seem now, in hindsight, like a pleasant and whimsical daydream.
LETS GOOOOOOOO!!! Axman writes again. He has stopped humping the cave wall and is now leaping in place. Samuel thinks: ninth grade, tragically pimpled, hyperactivity disorder, will probably someday end up in my Intro to Lit class.
“What did you think about Hamlet?” Samuel had asked his class today, after Laura’s departure.
Groans. Scowls. Guy in the back held his hands aloft to show his two big meat-hook thumbs pointing down. “It was stupid,” he said.
“It didn’t make any sense,” said another.
“It was too long,” said another.
“Way too long.”
Samuel asked his students questions he hoped would spark any kind of conversation: Do you think the ghost is real or do you think Hamlet is hallucinating? Why do you think Gertrude remarried so quickly? Do you think Claudius is a villain or is Hamlet just bitter? And so on. Nothing. No reaction. They stared blankly into their laps, or at their computers. They always stare at their computers. Samuel has no power over the computers, cannot turn them off. Every classroom is equipped with computers at every single seat, something the school brags about in all the marketing materials sent to parents: Wired campus! Preparing students for the twenty-first century! But it seems to Samuel that all the school is preparing them for is to sit quietly and fake that they’re working. To feign the appearance of concentration when in fact they’re checking sports scores or e-mail or watching videos or spacing out. And come to think of it, maybe this is the most important lesson the school could teach them about the American workplace: how to sit calmly at your desk and surf the internet and not go insane.
“How many of you read the whole play?” Samuel said, and of the twenty-five people in the room, only four raised their hands. And they raised their hands slowly, shyly, embarrassed at having completed the assigned task. The rest seemed to reproach him—their looks of contempt, their bodies slumped to announce their huge boredom. It was like they blamed him for their apathy. If only he hadn’t assigned something so stupid, they wouldn’t have had to not do it.
“Pulling,” says Pwnage, who now sprints toward the dragon, giant ax in hand. The rest of the raid group follows, crying wildly in a proximate imitation of movies they’ve seen about medieval wars.
Pwnage, it should be noted, is an Elfscape genius. He is a video-game savant. Of the twenty elves here tonight, six are being controlled by him. He has a whole village of characters that he can choose from, mixing and matching them depending on the fight, a whole self-sustaining micro-economy between them, playing many of them simultaneously using an incredibly advanced technique called “multiboxing” that involves several networked computers linked to a central command brain that he controls using programmed maneuvers on his keyboard and fifteen-button gaming mouse. Pwnage knows everything there is to know about the game. He’s internalized the secrets of Elfscape like a tree that eventually becomes one with the fence it grows next to. He annihilates orcs, often delivering the killing blow to his signature phrase: I just pwned ur face n00b!!!
During phase one of the fight they mostly have to watch out for the dragon’s tail, which whips around and slams onto the rock floor. So everyone hacks away at the dragon and avoids its tail for the few minutes it takes to get the dragon down to sixty percent health, which is when the dragon takes to the air.
“Phase two,” says Pwnage in a calm voice made robot-sounding from being transmitted over the internet. “Fire incoming. Don’t stand in the bad.”
Fireballs begin pummeling the raid group, and while many players find it a challenge to avoid the fire while continuing their dragon-fighting responsibilities, Pwnage’s characters manage this effortlessly, all six of them, moving a couple of taps to their left or right so that the fire misses them by a few pixels.
Samuel is trying to dodge the fire, but mostly what he’s thinking about right now is the pop quiz he gave in class today. After Laura left, and after it became clear the class had not done the assigned reading, he got into a punishing mood. He told his students to write a 250-word explication of the first act of Hamlet. They groaned. He hadn’t planned on giving a pop quiz, but something about Laura’s attitude left him feeling passive-aggressive. This was an Introduction to Literature course, but she cared less about literature than she did about points. It wasn’t the topic of the course that mattered to her; what mattered was the currency. It reminded him of some Wall Street trader who might buy coffee futures one day and mortgage-backed securities the next. The thing that’s traded is less important than how it’s measured. Laura thought like this, thought only about the bottom line, her grade, the only thing that mattered.
Samuel used to mark up their papers—with a red pen even. He used to teach them the difference between “lay” and “lie,” or when to use “that” and when to use “which,” or how “affect” is different from “effect,” how “then” is different from “than.” All that stuff. But then one day he was filling up his car at the gas station just outside campus—it’s called the EZ-Kum-In-’n-Go—and he looked at that sign and thought, What is the point?
Really, honestly, why would they ever need to know Hamlet?
He gave a quiz and ended class thirty minutes early. He was tired. He was standing in front of that disinterested crowd and he began to feel like Hamlet in the first soliloquy: insubstantial. He wanted to disappear. He wanted his flesh to melt into a dew. This was happening a lot lately: He was feeling smaller than his body, as if his spirit had shrunk, always giving up his armrests on airplanes, always the one to move out of the way on sidewalks.
That this feeling coincided with his most recent search for internet photos of Bethany—well, that was too obvious to ignore. His thoughts always turn to her when he’s doing something he feels guilty about, which, these days, is just about all the time, his whole life being sort of barnacled by these layers of impenetrable guilt. Bethany—his greatest love, his greatest screwup—who’s still living in New York City, as far as he knows. A violinist playing all the great venues, recording solo albums, doing world tours. Googling her is like opening this great spigot inside him. He doesn’t know why he punishes himself like that, once every few months, looking at pictures late into the night of Bethany being beautiful in evening gowns holding her violin and big bunches of roses and surrounded by adoring fans in Paris, Melbourne, Moscow, London.
What would she think about this? She would be disappointed, of course. She would think Samuel hasn’t grown up at all—still a boy playing video games in the dark. Still the kid he was when they first met. Samuel thinks about Bethany the way other people maybe think about God. As in: How is God judging me? Samuel has the same impulse, though he’s replaced God with this other great absence: Bethany. And sometimes, if he thinks about this too much, he can fall down a kind of hole and it’s like he’s experiencing his life at a one-step remove, as if he’s not leading his life but rather assessing and appraising a life that weirdly, unfortunately, happens to be his.
The cursing from his guild mates brings him back to the game. Elves are dying rapidly. The dragon roars from above as the raid unloads all its best long-range violence—arrows and musket balls and throwing knives and electrical lightning-looking things that emerge from the bare hands of the wizards.
“Fire coming at you, Dodger,” says Pwnage, and Samuel realizes he’s about to be crushed. He dives out of the way. The fireball lands near him. His health bar empties almost to zero.
Thanks, Samuel writes.
And cheers now as the dragon lands and phase three begins. There remain only a few attackers of the original twenty: There’s Samuel and Axman and the raid’s healer and four of Pwnage’s six characters. They have never reached phase three before. This is the best they’ve done against this dragon.
Phase three is pretty much like phase one except now the dragon is moving all around and opening up magma veins under the floor and shaking loose huge deadly stalactites from the cave’s ceiling. Most Elfscape boss fights end this way. They are not so much tests of skill as of pattern memorization and multitasking: Can you avoid the lava splashing up from the floor and dodge the rocks falling from above and watch the dragon’s tail so that you’re not in the way of it and follow the dragon around its lair to keep hitting it with your dagger using the very specific and complicated ten-move attack that achieves the maximum damage output per second necessary to bring the dragon’s health bar to zero before its internal ten-minute timer goes off and it does something called “enrages” when it goes all crazy and kills everyone in the room?
In the throes of it, Samuel usually finds this exhilarating. But immediately after, even if they win the fight, he always feels this crashing disappointment because all the treasure they’ve won is fake treasure, just digital data, and all the weapons and armor they’ve looted will help them only so long, because as soon as people start beating this dragon the developers will introduce some new creature who’s even more difficult to kill and who’s guarding even better treasure—a cycle that endlessly repeats. There is no way to ever really win. There is no end in sight. And sometimes the pointlessness of the game seems to reveal itself all at once, such as right now, as he watches the healer try to keep Pwnage alive and the dragon’s health bar is slowly creeping toward zero and Pwnage is yelling “Go go go go!” and they are right on the verge of an epic win, even now Samuel thinks the only things really happening here are a few lonely people tapping keyboards in the dark, sending electrical signals to a Chicagoland computer server, which sends them back little puffs of data. Everything else—the dragon and its lair and the coursing magma and the elves and their swords and their magic—is all window dressing, all a fa?ade.
Why am I here? he wonders, even as he is crushed by the dragon’s tail and Axman is impaled by a falling stalactite and the healer burns to ash in a lava crevice and so the only elf remaining is Pwnage and the only way they’re going to win is if Pwnage can stay alive, and the guild cheers through their headsets and the dragon’s health ticks down to four percent, three percent, two percent…
Samuel wonders, even now, so close to victory, What is the point?
What am I doing?
What would Bethany think?