Gamelit 33 (poor Mollie)

            Mollie Mindelbray stared at the character customization screen and tried not to dwell on the sound of her nails clacking awkwardly on the keys. She felt clumsy in a way she didn’t while tapping out marketing emails or dictating to her assistant, and while she could have avoided the interface she wanted to know what it felt like to play the game without VR, the way it had debuted. Or at least, that’s what she was telling herself as an excuse not to use the wireset. She wasn’t opposed to VR, but she knew the AI was supposed to generate your character based on your ideal play experience and she was a little afraid that if she tried it, the AI would conclude that she didn’t have an ideal play experience, and that, in fact, she shouldn’t be playing at all. What would that say about her? That she lacked imagination? But she was creative, just… in a real-world-application kind of way. She hoped. That was totally why she was creating a character that looked like her. Should she? Was that too weird? But the deer-people… they looked like furries, and she wasn’t a furry. The centaur people were ginormous, and she wasn’t into ginormous. The golem things… looked like partially constructed robots, and reminded her of when her sister had been into found art collages: it had been nouveau until it had become, abruptly, kitsch. So what was left, except human? She could play a guy, maybe, but wouldn’t that be weird?

            And now it wanted to know what class she wanted to play, and none of those options really said anything to her, either. But she guessed her job involved magic words woven into spells to make people happier to buy things they might have already wanted, so… maybe wizard?

            The game accepted her choices and deposited her in the middle of a sunny glade, and there she was: MollieBeDenim, which had been her childhood nickname, the wizard. She, Mollie Mindelbray, was in the game she spent all her waking hours flogging, and what she most wanted to do was log out and do something productive. But this, she reminded herself, was productive. She was figuring out why people used the product she was marketing. So, doggedly, she guided her character to the nearest figure with an exclamation point hovering over it and triggered a cut scene about how she was the newest adventurer to join the legions defending the kingdom from evil and darkness, or something, except there was no obvious evil or darkness… just some feral pigs that needed killing to feed the villagers. Mollie hit the first one with her staff several times and it keeled over with a squeal, filling her XP bar halfway.

            Oh, God. Did people actually do this for fun? Why? She slumped back in her chair and stared at the ceiling.

            Half an hour later she was level 3, had died six times, and was ready to die herself rather than keep going. She was staring glumly at her wizard, whose quest reward gear made her look like a motherless teen, when her assistant Avery popped her head in. “Hey, Mollie, did you see the latest interview requests?”

            “Not yet—”

            Avery had moved into the room. “Oh, wow, are you playing?”

            “I’m not sure I’d call what I’m doing playing.”

            Her assistant chuckled. “Oh, yeah. All the feral pigs. Rite of passage.”

            “You did this?”

            “Sure, long time ago. The best pet quests require you to be at least level 20. Oh, hey, I have some spare pets, I'll send you some.”

            Maybe she’d like the pet part of the game better? “Thanks. I’ll take a look at the request list now.”

            “No rush. They know the routine. I’ll go send you the pets now.”

            Just like that, as if ‘send my boss in-game items’ had become part of her to-do list. Did that mean she had to keep playing? She could surely take a break to do the work she was paid to do. Mollie backgrounded the game and opened her email.

            Half an hour later, she was back to staring at the game. In this case, trying to figure out how to get to a mailbox so she could receive her assistant’s gifts. There was no mailbox in the starting zone—why was that? It was annoying—so she was reduced to jogging outside of it to look for a town. Which wasn’t marked on the map because she hadn’t explored the zone yet, so her map was a big blank. Which was also annoying. She got eaten by a bear, two wolves, and a turtle—seriously, a turtle?—while hunting for that town, and when she finally got to it, it was full of high-level players dueling and the visual and aural spam was disorienting enough that she wasted another ten minutes locating the mailbox, which was tucked into a corner behind the inn’s front door. Avery had sent her a parrot, a puppy, two kittens, and an elemental. Transferring them into her inventory was straightforward enough, and she even managed to summon one of the kittens.

            Now she had a kitten. Yay?

            Her character, left to idle too long, let out a long sigh, complete with exaggerated heave of shoulders. Mollie sympathized, and sent her jogging back toward the starting zone. Or at least, she thought she was, but apparently she took a wrong turn, ended up in a higher level area, and died three more times. On the fourth time, while guiding her disembodied character spirit back to its corpse, she got stuck between two trees, and no amount of mouse acrobatics unwedged her. She scowled at the screen for several moments, then rose.

            Avery was busily at work on the viewership metrics, from the spreadsheet. When Mollie explained her predicament, she waved a hand. “Just use the help menu to notify a GM. They can pop you out. Though I’m surprised you got stuck…! They’ve cleaned up nearly all the geometry, especially in the oldest zones.”

            Waiting for someone to get back to her was an interesting experience, or at least Mollie chose to frame it that way. She was experiencing the game the way a user might, including its frustrating parts. She flipped her notebook open to a fresh page and wrote, ‘Got stuck in the trees, waiting now in a queue for game support. Not fun. Not even any muzak.’ She thought about that, then added, ‘what would game wait time muzak be like?’

            Eighteen minutes later—eighteen minutes! A creature popped into view in front of her. Not one of the player races, though… this was one of the snake people developed for the desert-themed third expansion. He was dressed stylishly in robes that flowed in an invisible wind, and the swords crossed at his back glowed. His patter was excellent, and seconds later she was back on the road, and there was a customer service survey up on her screen asking her to please rate her experience with the GM. She gave him great marks, and commented on the excessive wait time—really, nearly twenty minutes?—and then she was free! And… not at all interested in returning to the zone full of killer pigs. She did not want to play. But… maybe there was another way she could participate.

***

            “You can’t be a GM, Mollie. You don’t understand the game.”

            “I could learn?” Mollie said.

            She could practically hear Samir’s exasperation floating out of the phone speaker. “You could, yes. The way all the GMs we’ve hired learned. By playing the game. They have the power to mess things up, Mollie, there’s a reason we don’t hire just anyone to do it.”

            “Learning to free people from being stuck doesn’t seem too arduous….”

            “That’s the least of what GMs do. Do you really want to do game support, Mollie? It’s tedious.”

            “I might learn something?”

            Samir had a good chuckle. She liked her counterpart in Support—unlike Brock, in Development, Samir saw the humor in things faster, and was better at prioritizing and so, compromising. He fought for his people but he didn’t take it personally when he got things wrong. Maybe you couldn’t, and survive to become the head of Support in a major software company. “I appreciate you volunteering, and I agree you might learn something, but you probably shouldn’t be learning those things at the expense of players who are paying us every month for a superior gaming experience. Right?”

            “When you put it that way,” she answered.

            “We need you cheerleading, Mollie. You’d be wasted in my department.”

            Would she? She wondered, after they’d hung up. Was she constitutionally unsuited to helping people with problems? Wasn’t marketing a type of problem-solving? ‘Person A has an unmet need; you have a product that might meet that need; how do you connect these two points’?

            Normally she would have written off the exercise; she’d given the game a try and being a player wasn’t necessary for her to do her job… obviously, because the game had grown market share substantially under her direction, and that despite a bearish market for games like it. But by lunch time, she conceded that she wasn’t concentrating on her actual work because some part of her was still clinging to her morning’s failure. It was a failure, wasn’t it? She flipped through her bookmarks, checking the various beta tester’s channels: that team in a dungeon, this team in a forest, that team scaling a castle, another team on a river… it wasn’t until she got to the last channel that she stopped, because it wasn’t the same constant light-show/action film freneticism. It was the mom, and she was cooking something in an inn. What was left of one, anyway. Mollie watched her, and kept watching her, and was in fact hypnotized by her when the email alert dragged her back to work. It was Legal: they couldn’t okay any involvement of the company with players contacting Jonah.

            Restless, Mollie abandoned her chair, and her office entirely. When her assistant glanced up from her work, Mollie said, “I need to talk a walk.” And, because it was the right thing to do, “Thank you for the pets. I loved the black kitten.”

            Avery beamed. “I thought you would.”

            At least she’d made someone smile. That was a good thing.

            Mollie’s walk took her, as she suspected it had to, to Jonah’s empty office again. She wandered through it, aimless and dissatisfied. It bothered her that she hadn’t liked the experience of playing a game she was supposed to be selling. Was it because she was a total neophyte when it came to gaming? Like the pony mother? Except the pony mom had her son to walk her through everything. Would Mollie have enjoyed her experience more had someone better at gaming shown her around? Told her what about it excited him?

            Jonah might have done that for her, had she asked. What would it have been like, to have him show her the things he loved about Omen? That excited him? Would it have made her love the game? Would it have made her better at her job?

            Would they have been able to talk more? And where would that have led? Mollie tried to imagine inviting Jonah to play tennis with her. She couldn’t picture him outside. The thought made her smile, and then… the fact that he was gone hurt, abruptly and far, far too immediately. As if she’d just heard the news again. She rubbed her face then sat at the console. Technically she didn’t need to ask the AI for another update, but the AI was a link to Jonah and it felt important to reach for him, somehow. “Um… hello?”

            “Greetings, Ms. Mindelbray.”

            “Call me Mollie,” she said reflexively. And then, “I tried playing the game and I failed. What did I do wrong? Can you help me?”

            Was it her imagination or did the AI seem taken aback? Could AIs be startled? Had Jonah asked this one to act more like a human in that way? “In what way did you fail?”

            “I didn’t get it,” Mollie said. “Why people do it. Why they enjoy it. Why people want to kill 12 feral pigs… why they like it enough to do it multiple times on more than one character. What am I missing?”

            “The reasons players enjoy the game are dependent on the personality of the player in question. There are multiple motivations, leading to multiple avenues to enjoyment. One of the stated reasons for my creation was to maximize these avenues, as previously, human coding hours were too valuable to devote to less profitable paths.”

            “What are these avenues?” Mollie asked.

            “The most common reasons cited for enjoyment are progression, exploration, companionship, and competition.”

            “Companionship sounds good?” Mollie said. “Maybe that’s why I didn’t like it. I didn’t have company." She glanced at Jonah’s desk. Someone had cleaned it after the accident, which was part of what made his office feel like a museum exhibit. While he’d been working, he was apt to leave things all over his office, his desk, the chairs. It wasn’t mess in the discard pizza boxes and coffee cups sense—Jonah was never gross—but books and magazines and posters and dvd slipcases and figurines… where had all those gone, she wondered? Who had packed them?

            “What was the purpose of your attempt at playing Omen Galaxica?”

            What popped out of her mouth surprised her. “I feel like a hypocrite. I didn’t think about it until… well. Until you brought it up, I guess. That I’m spending my life selling something that other people believe in, and I believe in it because they do, not because I have direct experience of it. That’s not a bad thing—you can be good at marketing without being in your target market as long as you understand your target market—but now I’m questioning whether I actually understand my target market. I’m fond of my gamer friends, but maybe that’s not enough.” Her eyes rested on Jonah’s empty desk. “It’s not enough.” A breath, because for some reason she felt shaky. “I want to be part of it.”

            She hoped her unease wasn’t obvious, but she appreciated the pause before the AI spoke again anyway. “Can you describe your effort, and how you felt it to be a failure?”

             So Mollie rambled about her adventures as a level one wizard… could they even be called adventures? There wasn’t much excitement in being a half-dressed human smacking pigs on the head with a stick. And then about getting stuck in the landscape. About the duelists and all the flashing lights and fast movements. Even about her attempt to talk Samir into giving her a job as a GM. When the AI asked her what about that path had seemed attractive, Mollie said, “They looked like they knew what they were doing.” Saying it out loud made her rub her forehead. “Of course, you can’t get to the point of knowing what you’re doing without the doing part. I should have known that. There are no shortcuts.”

            Then the AI surprised her by wandering onto a tangent. “What do you enjoy about your job?”

            “Oh? Oh, it’s creative,” Mollie said. “I think that’s the best part. I spend a lot of time coming up with interesting ways to make something seem exciting to other people. And we’re so jaded, and so oversaturated with media and insincere advertising and manipulative lever-pushing on psychological things we can’t fight… it’s hard to punch through the noise and say something real, something that connects people with something they want. Really good marketing goes places no one expects, and then, when you get there, people can really listen to your pitch. They can give you a fair chance to make your case for the thing you want them to enjoy, that you think they’d enjoy. I love that moment, when you and someone get to be real together about something that benefits you both.”

            “You like people,” the AI said.

            “I love people,” Mollie said. “People are the only thing that matters.” Which… made something in her re-align, snap into place.

           She was still staring at that realization when the AI said, “How do you feel about a cameo role?”

           “A… a what?”

           “Part of the purpose of AI-driven generation of content is to add unexpected elements to existing storylines. By participating in an evolving storyline as a character, rather than as a player, you may be able to contribute without needing to learn the game mechanics. You could inhabit a character and become a quest objective, or a quest giver.”

           “So instead of being the player who goes out and kills twelve feral pigs, I’ll be the cook in the inn who asks for them?” Mollie said, and despite the mundanity of it, the idea made her smile.

           “Correct. Except in this case, the storyline involves the rebuilding of Donner’s Beck.”

           “Oh! The mom and son team’s story! That’s such a great story.” Mollie stared at the keyboard. “You honestly think I could add anything to it? Despite not knowing the lore?”

           “The lore of the game is not solely revealed through the game.”

           “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Audiobooks! I could do that.”

           “We recommend beginning with the series EverVigil’s Champions for context specific to the Greenweald.”

            “I can do that. I will! Thank you.”

            “We are here to serve,” the AI said, and that was that. Or at least, that was that about that conversation. Because that left her alone with her epiphany… that she couldn’t abandon Jonah just because the company felt it couldn’t expose itself to any lawsuits that might arise from involving itself with him further. They couldn’t greenlight the speaker? Fine. She’d bring it herself. In fact… she’d do it now. There was an electronics shop on the way to the hospital. She’d call it market research.