Constellation Games (3 page)

In 1995 my brother Raphael gave me sole ownership of his Sega Genesis after he/we (mostly he) got a Playstation for Hanukkah. This was more a verbal agreement than a real transfer: we only had one television, so the Genesis just sat next to the Playstation. The Playstation was also a popular holiday gift that year for a lot of only children, and their Genesis games started showing up at yard sales for three dollars, or with the real tightwads, five. That's how I became a retro game collector at the age of eight, and that's how I stayed loyal to lovely 16-bit sprites when Raph had moved on to jerky, horrible-looking polygons.

One of my yard sale acquisitions was the RPG
Sun/Voice 2
. The cart I bought came with the former owner's saved game, right before the final battle. A saved game from the 16-bit era is only about one kilobyte of data, but it can represent up to sixty hours of some unfortunate kid's labor. And what did I do once I got home from the yard sale? I created a new game in the second save slot. I started getting up at five on weekends and spending hours re-creating that one-kilobyte file on my own.

Which is to say: I just spent the last six gruelling hours of my Saturday creating a last-minute binary patch for
Brilhantes 5
. The size of the patch is about one kilobyte.

Why do I resent all the time I wasted as a kid grinding in 16-bit RPGs, when what I'm doing now is basically the same thing? And why do we make the experience of playing games so much like the experience of debugging them?

[This post is friends locked.]

Howdy from São Paolo! The game company I contract for flew me steerage class to the yearly meeting. It's an opportunity for the makers of the pony games, the unlicensed sports games, the media tie-in games, to meet and greet and self-loathe. The hotel is the kind of thing Brazilians think Americans will like, and my presentation on "Five New Gestures For Minigames" brought down the house. And by "house" I mean "small conference room with carpet on the walls."

I'm spending a lot of time with my co-worker L., who is inescapable at these gathering and who I never see otherwise. L. manages the company's rapid response team. Every summer a dance craze sweeps South America and/or Europe, and within a week L's developers release a shake-yer-phone game to capitalize on it. They've got a stable of Flash minigames that they'll rebrand for you in two or three days because you forgot to put up a website for your TV show. And so on. L. is about seventeen and lives in São Paolo with his parents, so rather than get his own hotel room he's set up camp in ours.

L. was there all evening sitting in the cushy chair, typing on his netbook with one hand and his phone with the other.

My roommate Zhenya was sitting at the room desk, hacking on an unbranded soccer game. He'd cranked up the mass of the ball to that of a small asteroid, such that collisions with players sent the little polygonal men flying across the field. I didn't know if this was a bug he was trying to fix, if he was using it as an extreme case to flush out some other problem, or if he just liked watching the ragdoll physics.

I'm not crazy; I don't work unless I have to. I was chatting with Bai.

KThxBai:
what's happening?
ABlum:
i am using you as an excuse not to talk to my coworkers
KThxBai:
you don't like them?
ABlum:
i like them
i'm just tired of hearing games analyzed in terms of dlc upsell percentages

I peeked furtively over my laptop screen. L. takes downloadable content very seriously, and it's always sad when a kid finds out that his youthful enthusiasms are bullshit. Fortunately L. was still dual-wielding netbook and phone, taking no notice of my heresy. I smooshed my back deeper into the pile of pillows on the bed.

KThxBai:
dana says hi.
ABlum:
sure she does
how's the wikipedia project going?
did you find out that the constellation secretly wants to kill us all?
KThxBai
: the constellation is anarchists, bro.
you've seen the anarchists in austin. they couldn't hold a city park.
ABlum
: well food-not-bombs doesn't have fucking matter shifters
and terraforming equipment
though maybe they should
KThxBai
: there are 24 species in the constellation
you don't get that big by killing everybody
ABlum:
there are 35 contractors working for this company, and it still sucks
how about this idea?
all we ever see on tv is the aliens and the farang, right
what if those species have enslaved the other 22?

No one else could see my screen but I could see Zhenya's. His unlicensed soccer player nailed another one with FIFA-unapproved soccer ball and pushed him right onto a third player. The two blobs of polygons stopped being distinct players and stuck to each other, as if the ball was the Tar Baby. He'd definitely found a bug.

KThxBai:
let me show you an article i'm editing
the bbc sent up a deep sea camera today & got some footage of the goyim
ABlum:
the what hey?
KThxBai:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goy_(Constellation_species)
ABlum:
that's friggin awesome!
like a huge dolphin with its eyes gouged out

Zhenya ran for the ball, missed the kick, and smushed his own player character into one of his teammates. The camera jittered trying to follow the action as Zhenya's character, the ball, and everything connected to it loped frictionless around the stadium, merging with the polygons of everything it touched.

KThxBai:
most people do not say "that's awesome"
a more popular reaction is to scream.
the aliens and farang get put on tv because they kind of look like us.
and they have FACES.
versus Her, who looks like a swarm of beetles.
or an auslander, which if you saw it on cnn it would look like someone's transparent ball sack.
or zombie dolphin bro here.

A Russian trance beat reverberated between Zhenya's headphones like the ticking of a pulsar. His screen filled with writhing polygons: people in yellow and green uniforms stuck to each other and running in place, a blob of people with a soccer ball at its core. Zhenya scratched his lip, tabbed into his web browser and started typing details into the bug tracker.

"Graaaa!" said L., emerging like an angry sea monster from his electronic reverie. "Ariel, Zhenya," he with great gravity, "you need to come work with me. My guys can't read a spec, they barely know how to use the dev kit. I can't make deadlines with these fucking
caipiras
."

L. is always trying to get me to switch to his rapid-response team. Zhenya didn't even hear him. I always brush him off. Tonight I didn't brush him off. I imagined Brazilian women shaking their asses to my phone-dance games. Yeah, that's right, fully grown women using my software. It was like some wonderful dream.

"What do you want from me, exactly?" I said.

"Just be the guy who makes deadlines," said L. "I can't do everything myself. Dude, hey, c'mon. Come down here and live the good life."

"Yeah, on half my American rate."

"You know how cheap booze is here?" said L. (What impression do I leave, such that L. thinks my primary expense is liquor?) "C'mon, we'll have a blast!"

"I'll..." I said. "I'll think about it." I thought about it.

Once L. finally went home, I threw a small spherical fruit candy at the back of Zhenya's head. He swiveled around in his chair and pushed back his headphones.

"Hey," I said. "You've seen the Constellation on TV. What do you think of them?"

"Dude, I seen a lot of shit in my life," said Zhenya. He paused.

"Yeah?"

"And I don't know. Maybe they're no shit." He smiled. The idea that something might be no shit was really appealing to him.

I met a girl on the Internet! Her name is Curic and she's a fifty-year-old anthropologist from another planet. What's that, ma? No, I'm pretty sure she's not Jewish. In fact, since she's a Farang, she's not even kosher—no scales. (This according to my new favorite website, "Constellation Kashrut".)

Farang are the ones who look like a cross between otters, cereberophages, and sea urchins; so I don't think romance is in my future. Also, a few hours after we talked, the female part of her brain went to sleep and she became a man. So there's that to consider.

No, I don't get it either, as evidenced by the single stupidest message I've ever sent:

ABlum:
so are you female right now or what?

After the
Quexx
review and a few more rounds of interrogation up and down the tree of Smoke-Cursive's subminds, I finally got to talk to Smoke-Cursive itself, who quickly got bored with me and handed me off to an organic intelligence: Curic. Curic is not into video games at all, but she/he is really into asking people on the Internet what they want and then giving it to them. Kind of like the opposite of a camgirl. The catch is that, as one of Curic's contacts, my interactions with Constellation culture will provide fodder for her/his anthropological studies and (presumably) snarky blog entries.

Here's how I know Curic and I will get along:

Curic:
"Ariel" is a name from Shakespeare, correct?

Hallelujah! Apparently you have to be a space alien to comprehend the idea that a man might be named Ariel.

I was finally able to clear up a mystery:

ABlum:
so, not to get all fanboy, but around 4:15 of the "greetings" video, is the farang there playing a video game?
Curic:
What?
No.

There you have it! Later in the conversation I discovered that the Constellation does create things we would consider video games, but I can't have them. Curic could send me a submind of Smoke, the metafractal intelligence that runs the Ring City space station (and which screens Curic's calls), but that shard would be a legal person, and there's still no treaty allowing people from the Constellation to enter the United States.

We're going back and forth negotiating something for me. I'm probably going to end up with non-sentient emulators for "retro" games hundreds of millions of years old!

!!

!!!

!!!!!!!!

Curic:
Ariel, please give me your latitude and longitude to 5 meter precision.
I'm going to send you a data device compatible with Earth computers.
ABlum:
im in a hotel in sao paolo brazil
Curic:
Is a hotel a tall building with a flat roof?

Zhenya and I ran, up stairways, through service entrances.

ABlum:
on the roof. coordinates are [...]
Curic:
Stand back.

We looked up. A bright tiny star was visible against the black, between the horns of the crescent moon. Ring City. The space station. Curic.

We didn't say anything, just looked at the sky. Zhenya rolled a joint and we passed it back and forth. That's about how long it took.

Thump. The sound was almost lost inside the noise of the city and the drone of the rooftop HVAC. We used our phones as flashlights and found the package.

It was a cube of Constellation reentry foam the size of a DVD boxed set, radiating the heat of entry. The exterior was rough like a tongue from capturing friction and inertia. Zhenya and I dissolved the foam with tiny mini-fridge bottles of vodka. (Cheap liquor, my ass.)

Inside was a tiny white piece of plastic: a USB key. Printed on both sides was an emblem of a random starfield, and next to that, some English text: "Constellation Shipping".

Curic:
Do you have it?
ABlum:
yes

Yes.

L. saw us hauling ass down the hotel hallway. "Dudes, is there a fire?" he asked. "Or a hilarious prank?"

"My ET contact dropped a package on our heads," I said, waving the USB key as Zhenya fapped his card key in and out of the lock.

The key made shaky-shaky sounds as I plugged it into my laptop, as if it were full of sand. "What is it, what's in it?" said Zhenya, shuffling from one foot to another.

"He dropped it, as in launched it from the moon?" said L.

"Give me a damn minute," I said. "This is a multi-gigabyte XML document. Shit! It's written in glossolalia."

...Yumegolili ga beqabe wodoni...

"What in the fuck!" said Zhenya. "Ask the extraterrestrial what trick she is pulling."

Curic had sent a number of messages to my phone while we were running down stairs, and they now showed up on the laptop.

Curic:
I found a database of computer-simulated
games from the history of the Constellation member
species. It's twenty thousand Earth
years old but that's good enough for our
purposes, since we are limited to games of a certain
complexity.
I've sent you a facet of the database
metadata. When you decide you want a computer
system or some other facet of the metadata
(such as a manufacturer's catalog, government
proclamation, etc.) let me know and
I'll ship it to you.

"Ask about the gibberish!"

"Yeah, yeah."

ABlum:
so we've gotten the file off the device but it's all "babamamagaga"
Curic:
It's written in a standardized
language for sharing technical
information. (Simple Affect Metadata Exchange.)
I translated the 'field names' manually, and
used a new transliteration to get the rest into the Roman
alphabet.
But there is no automated English
translation yet.
Because it's the SAME of twenty thousand
years ago, a translator for humans to run on their
computers is not anyone's top priority.
ABlum:
ok i don't want to sound ungrateful, but what good is this to me now?
Curic:
Now is better than later.
The translation will get better as our concept
maps improve.
Ariel, I have many other contacts. I have to coordinate some more
shipments, so I may be slow to respond for a while.
Please let me know when you decide on a computer
system to investigate.

"So now we decide?" I said. "Let's just pick the first one."

"No!" said Zhenya. "Pick the one with the most games."

"Well, now you've made it complicated," I said, "so we might as well form a plan. Let's figure out the most influential human game system of all time, and we'll use the metadata to find a similar ET system."

"The Sega MegaDrive!" said L.

"Well, that was really cool, but—"

"The fucking Scorpion, man," said Zhenya, pointing at me.

"What's the fucking Scorpion, man?"

"Clone of the decadent ZX Spectrum. I learned to program on that thing. Man, it was the shit."

"You're obviously just going on nostalgia. We need objective measures. An influential system has—"

"Lots of games, like I said. The Scorpion had—"

"Hardware clones," said L.

"Games that had lots of sequels."

"Sales numbers, long lifetime," I said. "This is what I'm talking about. If the database includes records for these things, we can count the records without understanding the language, and without having a stupid argument about human systems. I'll write some data-mining scripts."

"Hold it, dude!" said L. "Once you start game-related coding, this becomes outside work. You need approval from your project lead." L. folded his arms. "Now, if I am your project lead, you'll get approval, no problem."

"You little punk!" said Zhenya. "It's tiny script!" L. just stood there, unmoved by human pity, totally devoted to the cause of employment contracts and mobile-phone rhythm games and DLC upsell.

"No, he's right," I said. I got out of my chair and picked up my laptop. "Excuse me a sec," I said. "I'm going to talk to my project lead."

"Ariel, do not give in to this punk!"

"I'm not giving in," I said. "I'm quitting this job."