Your World

I was two years old when my dad first set his iPad before me and asked me to pick between ‘Diego’s Interactive Adventure’ and ‘Cat in the Hat’ in ebook format. Five days later, Diego had emerged with his secret treasure from the Volcán volcano but the Cat in the Hat hadn’t even entered the house. Plain reading and static pictures couldn’t compare to moving, controllable characters, shifting camera angles, sound effects and the thrill of acquiring treasure.
I learned to read on a need to know basis. Missions frequently came via celebrity announcers whose inflections were far more engaging than the text transcript at the bottom of the screen. When the occasional online player tried to trash talk me without a mic, I read his l33tspeak well enough to call out his mama for raising this dwarf orc bore. By the time I hit thirteen, my parents set me up with the slickest computer setup. Duel monitors, a Dvorak keyboard that took gamer commands twice as fast as querty, 7.1 surround sound speakers and a rumble seat with blinker lights to notify me of offscreen radar action.
Dad understood the importance of a strong gaming background. He had grown up resenting granddad’s weekend hiking trips and lowly technician status. He respected granddad for building his own efficient house heating system, long lasting dim lights and laundry shoots that weaved tunnels from every upstairs room into the basement laundry bin. But granddad hadn’t taken enough control over his environment. Dad still woke up occasionally to find spiders on his bed, webs under the staircase, birds chirping incessantly outside his door. After a frightful incident in which he tried to fell a tree with an aluminum baseball bat and instead broke his knee, dad vowed his life to conquering nature.
He became a computer programmer. And bred me to be his greatest creation.
Imagine me as either too thin or too fat, either one would be equally accurate. Developing my body didn’t compare to stimulating my mind. I absorbed strategy and colored lights. I trained my fingers to click CMD+F4+F6 within an eighth of a second after noticing a red flash screen side, thereby launching a camera change and counterattack. Reaction time challenges tested me to respond in milliseconds to situations which took average players a minute. By my seventeenth year alive, I ranked among the top ten MMORPG speed demons.
This was the first time doubt crept in to my world view. In those few seconds between logging off and falling asleep, I wondered how much further I could go in virtual reality. In an average lifespan of eighty years, and the possibility of endless life promised by research in biotic bionics, was I destined to peak before twenty?
Fortunately, these issues disappeared the moment I logged back in. At high levels of play, my mind focussed intensely on incoming attacks, touch typing dozens of commands in every virtual step. Most people thought a keyboard held symbolic letters and numbers, but I only saw 101 input buttons. The average user notices the design of their costumes and weapons, picking whichever seemed to fit their favorite trait, while I factored in the speed and random variance. I memorized the exact sequence of monsters in the cavern of cataclysm even though I couldn’t tell you how many buttons were on the shirt I wore. I couldn’t even tell you its color.
The game designers found me in-game one day and offered me a consultant job. Thus began my transition from world mastery to world building. It came easily enough. I told them wherever their stats were out of balance, then suggested details they overlooked. Mordock Mountain should have snow that slows you down. Loud spells should cause an avalanche. You should not be able to harvest tangerines in wintertime. And so on. By merely pointing out the missing details, the legions of programmers in store tripled the world in a year.
They showed me unfathomable user data. Over fifty million people subscribed every month, averaging five hours of daily gaming each. Assuming they had forty hour work weeks, the average subscriber preferred to spend all his or her free time in game. Outside, they were mild mannered, ordinary, commercial laborers. Inside, they were adventurers, heroes, idealists whose dreams (as defined by programmers) came true.
The bigger our world became, the more users joined to fill it. My attention to detail, fleshing out all existing zones, kept the game from growing stale. Satisfied users spent their sixty bucks not on new releases but on four more months of game time. The world kept getting bigger, as I drew inspiration from maps and atlases, improving on earth’s ratio of water, land, and city space to accommodate ever more people. Unlike the real world, the average user would get bored of his residential city in a few weeks, and of visiting cities even quicker. They dreamed of traveling the entire world. That’s what our business model was built on. I began to dread the idea of people reaching the end before I could expand it.
The doubts in my head shifted from worries of too much life to not enough. I cursed sleep from taking me away from world creation. I imagined developing a cure for sleep. It only got in my way.
I enlisted game designers to join our universe rather than develop their own. We promised them more money than they’d receive from indie publishing, and increased the novelty and size of our world exponentially. We opened up the world to a variety of genres — puzzles, fighters, shooters — anything 3D, fantasy and better than reality.
A decade later, our game had survived three console generations and a quintupling of computer power. Video game retail stores resembled dinosaurs on their last legs toward extinction. Downloadable patches and roms replaced them. If I knew one thing about users, their bodies were mere accessories. Keep them entertained, and they would follow you to the never-ends of the earth.
I retitled the game for accuracies sake. Your World. For be honest, if you didn’t have to work in their world to keep paying the bills, would you ever leave (y)ours?