Wolf in White Van (3 page)

3
There are games I’m prouder of than Trace Italian but it doesn’t really matter how I feel. Trace Italian is what built Focus Games, and if people know my name at all, Trace Italian is why they know it. It was my first idea; they say your first ideas are your best ones. I think it’s maybe dangerous to think that way all the time. But when I remember finally building Trace Italian, seeing how it was actually going to come together and really work, then I know what people mean about their first ideas being the best. There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.

I’d harbored the Trace concept for a long time—I think I was inspired by a commercial for an old board game called Stay Alive. It starred a bunch of kids playing on a beach; there were no adults around, and waves crashed angrily against rock cliffs nearby. The children pushed or pulled levers on a playfield, opening holes in the board as they did so; eventually all marbles on the board except one would drop out of play, and then the winner would announce, in a breathless voice that suggested he couldn’t believe his luck: “I’m the sole survivor!” It held my attention. As a child I wanted everything to be in
some way concerned with endings. The end of the world. The last Neanderthal. The final victim. The stroke of midnight. So children playing a game called Stay Alive on a beach with nobody else around, that spoke to something in me, something I’d maybe been born with. Of the many logos for imaginary products I would come to design throughout high school, Trace Italian was the first. I’d gotten the name from dry days in history class during a lesson on medieval fortifications: anything that involved the word
star
always sounded like it was speaking directly to me. The
trace italienne
involved triangular defensive barricades branching out around all sides of a fort: stars within stars within stars, visible from space, one layer of protection in front of another for miles. The
World Book
preferred the term
star fort
, which I also liked, but in idly guess-working
trace italienne
into English I’d stumbled across a phrase that had, for me, an autohypnotic effect.
TRACE ITALIAN
. I would spend hours writing and rewriting the name in stylized block capitals, reticulated line segments forming letters like the readout on a calculator. On notebook paper rubbed raw with erasures, the evolving logo resembled a department store’s name spelled out in dots and dashes on cash register tape:
RILEYS UNIVERSITY SQUARE
. The driving image for my game involved people running for shelter across a scorched planet. There was something on fire in the near distance behind them. Their faces looked out from the page toward their goal. The Trace Italian represented shelter, and it was shaped like a star. That was all I had.

It was later, lying supine and blind for days, faced with the choice of either inventing internal worlds or having no world at all to inhabit, when I started to fill in the details: how the
planet had been ruined (reactor five); how the cities had been emptied (mutant hominids from sea caves seeking out coastal cities for uncontaminated flesh, and continuing to move inland, spreading disease and killing innocents); where and how the surviving humans had built the Trace Italian (far inland, with their bare hands, from available materials cut and tumbled and hewn and polished over generations for several hundred years). How it rose from the landscape, bigger than its medieval counterparts, a shining structure on the plains, protecting the sprawling self-contained city underneath it, a barrier against the outside world and a sign to would-be intruders that its architects were people of great vision and design. Thinking of games as a way to kill time in history class had been one thing, but filling out the map and telling the story of every spot on it by myself, in my head, on my back: it was a refuge for me. I identified with the people I’d created to populate the barren landscape. I shared their goal: to find the location of the Trace Italian. Work through the ant-leg limbs of the star layer by layer until you find the shining heart. Get there at last. Stay there.

I identified with the seekers to the point of imagining myself as one among their numbers. Pushing myself against the wall-rail down the hall to the shower room, I would picture myself scurrying shirtless through the few gutted buildings that remained in the slumping cities, whistling signals to the others who crawled across the crossbeams; served lunch, I would imagine that I was foraging for untainted canned foods, coughing through dust that rose from the shelves of a grocery store on an empty block in a long-depopulated city. Lying in my bed, I would think: I have been wounded en route to the
Trace Italian. I am going to have to heal myself, or limp to safety. Get up. Get up. Get up.

One day one of the nurses caught me sketching a dungeon, one of the innumerable and potentially terminal signal stops on the road to the star fort, and she looked at it over the siderail for some time, scrunching up her brow. I could feel her, scrutinizing my work, her eyes following the spindly arms of a mutated star, and then looking at my face as my undistracted bandaged hands determinedly cornered right angle after right angle. I knew she wanted to ask what I was doing, but I had the advantage. Nobody liked to see me speak.

The way you play Trace Italian seems almost unbearably quaint from a modern perspective, and people usually don’t believe me when I tell them it’s how I supplement my monthly insurance checks, but people underestimate just how starved everybody is for some magic pathway back into childhood. Trace Italian is a mail-based game. A person sees a small ad for it in the back pages of
Analog
or
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
—maybe he sees the ad month after month for ages—and then one day he gets bored and sends a self-addressed stamped envelope to Focus Games, and I send him back an explanatory brochure. The brochure gives a brief but vivid sketch of the game’s imagined environment—no pictures, just words—and explains the basic mechanics of play: a trial subscription buys you four moves through the first dungeons, and five dollars a month plus four first-class postage stamps keep a subscription current. I boil down handwritten, sometimes lengthy paragraphs that players send me to simple choices—does
this mean
go through the door
, or
continue down the road
?—and then I select the corresponding three-page scenario from a file, scribble a few personalized lines at the bottom, and stuff it into an envelope. They respond with more paragraphs, sometimes pages, describing how they move in reaction to where they’ve landed. Eventually they recognize the turns they’ve taken as segments of a path that can belong only to them.

A player’s first move isn’t necessarily the truest or clearest view of that person I’ll get, but it’s often the most naked, because it takes a while to situate yourself within an imaginary landscape. When you respond to the initial subscriber packet with your opening move—when you come to the bridge—you haven’t had a chance to get much sense of the game’s rhythms, so you’re awkward, halting, more likely to overplay your hand. The open path at the overpass gives way to grand schemes, huge, multipart responses, whole narratives from within the canvas newly forming inside the player’s imagination. I keep myself out of it; I interpret and react, like a flowchart responding flatly to a person who’s asking it how to live.

I did it this way for years, mechanically helping people through the chambers of my original hospital vision, occasionally even typing out fresh moves one page at a time on an IBM Selectric, my face hot with bandages, the work distracting me from my circumstances. The advent of the internet looked like it would kill off the game, and I wondered what I’d do for work, but people will surprise you. By 2003—long after most of the magazines that had served as initial points of entry had stopped publishing, the few left displaying my ads to fewer and fewer subscribers—the number of dedicated players had risen to the mid-hundreds, none of whom were at
all interested in shifting their daily play over to video games or MMORPGs. My rate had risen with the times, to ten dollars a month. There were websites that scanned and posted as many moves as they could collect, but not many people interested in seeing the moves out of turn: the point was the play. And beyond all that, plenty of people had been involved too long to turn back. Their quiet fervor attracted a few new curious seekers each month, and the replacement rate was more or less constant—people sometimes grew out of the game or got frustrated with their progress, but a few more always came along to take their place. The core was committed. Their minds were made up. They meant to reach the Trace Italian. They thirsted for the security it offered, for the sanctuary of the interior.

The inside of the Trace Italian, of course, does not exist. A player can get close enough to see it: it shines in the new deserts of Kansas, gleaming in the sun or starkly rising from the winter cold. The rock walls that protect it meet in points around it, one giving way to another, for days on end. But the dungeons into which you’ll fall as you work through the pathways to its gates number in the low hundreds, and if you actually get into the entry hall, there are a few hundred more sub-dungeons before you’ll actually reach somewhere that’s truly safe. Technically, it’s possible to get to the last room in the final chamber of the Trace Italian, but no one will ever do it. No one will ever live that long.

I opened about a dozen envelopes today; the process has been the same for years. First, I open as many as I think I can take
care of in one sitting. Then I stack them on the floor by the desk, letters and SASEs still inside, and I sit down next to them. It makes me feel young. And then I deal with it all: methodically, almost mindlessly sometimes, one by one until there aren’t any left. Most days it’s all Trace Italian, but some days there’ll be stragglers: maybe the Pennsylvania kids who answered an ad in a yellowing magazine they’d found at the Goodwill just to see what would happen, and who now competed against each other in an otherwise wholly abandoned game called Rise of the Sorcerers. War game fiends playing through Operation Mercury for the third or fourth time. Or one of the seven people who still play Scorpion Widow, who may well keep playing forever somehow, no matter what happens to me. Two today. Sometimes I let my mind drift out a little: I try not to get carried away, and I have to be careful, but I wonder about them, the servants of the scorpion widow—who they really are, what they’re like. If they contemplate growing old along with their subscriptions. Maybe they’ll go missing one day, stuck forever in the sands where they made their last move. Gone. Who might they be elsewhere: in their rooms, alone with pencils, working on maps. Why they play, why they’re still here. What it means to them.

I sit there reading, and reading, and reading. I take the cash or checks they send and tuck them away into a money pouch I’ll take down to the bank once a month. Some players write long letters that narrate their next move in great detail, explaining why they’re doing one thing and not another, guessing at the perils of going the wrong way; others are just a sentence, or a fragment of one.
Leave silo and scope out street. Head for hills. Interrogate the traitor.

Decrypting the letters is like detective work, but it’s also like surgery: there’s a lot of connective tissue, and some of it’s wet and messy. People get invested in the game. They scatter details of their daily lives throughout their narratives; some friend who used to play the game but is gone now, God knows where—dead? lost? got too old?—will appear mid-letter, a ghost whispering an idea to the player as he writes.
If Jeff were playing, he’d probably attack the guard, but I’m not Jeff, so I’m going to wait until the guard falls asleep and remove the grating in the floor of the cell.
Things like that. Who’s Jeff? Did I know him? I extract the necessary information from the greater narrative, and I pull the corresponding next move from the filing cabinet.

Every move I send out begins with the same word:
You.
When I first wrote most of them, so long ago now that it’s incredible to think of it, I had in my mind only a single player, and of course he looked almost exactly like me: not me as I am now, but as I was before the accident. Young and fresh and frightened, and in need of refuge from the world. I was building myself a home on an imaginary planet. I hadn’t considered, then, how big the world was; how many people lived there, how different their lives were from mine. The infinite number of planets spinning in space. I have since traveled great distances, and my sense of the vast oceans of people down here on the Earth, how they drift, is keener. But
you
, back then, was a singular noun for me, or, at best, a theoretical plural awaiting proof.

I went through my plural
yous
now. I sent one guy off to find a brass bowl for the eventual gathering of venom from the jaw of the scorpion widow herself, and I let another sweat
through a long night on the beach at Crete, waiting for Nazis. I was taking my time about it, and I knew why, even though in my head I’d told myself: I’ll just go back to my life as it was, back to the land of spectral effects. Nothing is really different now.

I have a deep need for stasis and for the most part I’ve gained it, over time. Even after the recent assaults my shield zone remained fairly strong. So I wanted to be telling myself the truth about where, in the state of play, I stood this morning. But I’d recognized a postmark going through the pile, and I’d set that one aside, knowing what it was going to be about. I try not to be dramatic about my life, no matter what turns it takes. There’s nothing down that road for me. But I took a little breath, worming the tip of my index finger in under the seal and then ripping the envelope open down the side.