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  “A sherpa crew.” Darla was incredulous. “People pay you to be a guide? Are these retarded people?” Seeing me frown: “What, you don’t like the word ‘retarded’?”

  “I don’t mind it, but some of the clients do. And the ones who do, really don’t like it.”

  Darla smirked in a way I would come to know well. “So this is one of those jobs where you have to watch what you say?” As if the concept of professionalism was the silliest thing she’d ever heard of. “Is there a dress code, too?”

  “No dress code. As long as you’re not sending selfies to the clients, you can dress however you like.”

  “I bet you’d like me to send you a selfie. Perv.” Smiling this time, like she enjoyed whatever my face did when she said it.

  I decided to try selective deafness as a tactic. “What’s your name?”

  “Darla.”

  “Darla what?”

  “Why, so you can stalk me on Facebook?”

  “Can you tank?”

  “Of course I can fucking tank.”

  “What about healing?”

  “If I’m feeling suicidal and want to bore myself to death, sure.”

  “Do you play any other MMORPGs or first-person shooters?”

  “Ooh, you are planning to stalk me! As soon as you log out, you’re going to Google ‘Darla’ and the names of any games I mention, see if you get a hit. Maybe find a nice picture of me to jerk off to, am I right?”

  Selective deafness wasn’t working. “I want to know what other games you play because we’re looking to branch out. Our client base is almost all Call to Wizardry players right now, but—”

  “You might be disappointed if you did find out more about me,” Darla said. “I mean, I could be a guy for all you know. A fat, disgusting old guy with yellow underwear.”

  “If you can tank as well as you dps, I don’t care how much you weigh. Or what your underwear looks like.”

  “Or I might be a kid. A twelve-year-old boy. What would that do for your perv fantasies?”

  “You’re not a twelve-year-old boy.”

  “How the fuck would you know?”

  “Because I used to be one. When a twelve-year-old boy plays a female character, he picks a human or an elf. Not an orc.”

  Darla glanced down at her avatar’s bust. Orc cleavage is not the stuff of typical schoolboy fantasies. “Maybe I’m a perv, too.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I think you’re a girl. The kind who used to get into a lot of fights in high school.”

  “Used to?” She raised an eyebrow.

  “It’s hard to judge with the fangs, but you look more college-age to me.”

  “You don’t even know if this is my real face.”

  “Also, it’s the middle of a school day in America right now.”

  “Who says I’m in America? Or maybe I’m cutting class.”

  “If you were, you wouldn’t suggest it.”

  This earned another smirk. “OK, Mr. Profiler,” Darla said. “Tell you what: You guess my age, and I’ll come work for you.”

  “How many guesses do I get?”

  “One, duh.”

  “All right,” I said, “but I get to ask you three questions, first.”

  “Yeah? And what do I get?”

  “If I guess wrong? A hundred dollars.”

  “Fuck you, a hundred dollars. How do I know you’ll pay?”

  I shrugged. “How do I know you won’t lie to get the money?”

  Darla thought it over. “OK. Three questions.”

  “On your tenth birthday,” I asked, “was the president of the United States a man or a woman?”

  “A woman.”

  “Which makes you at least eighteen. On your eighteenth birthday, what actor was playing Doctor Who?”

  “You watch that stupid show?”

  “What actor? You can look it up on Wikipedia if you need to.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t know . . . It was that Pakistani actress, Miriam whatshername.”

  “Meryem Halil? She’s from Wales. And her family’s Turkish.”

  “Whatever. Her.”

  “OK, so you’re either twenty-one or twenty-two. Last question: On your twenty-first birthday, if I showed you a meme of King Charles offering Camilla a hot dog bun, would you know what that was about?”

  Darla rolled her eyes. “Fine, I’m twenty-two,” she said. “That’s a really lame parlor trick.”

  “It’s a simple trick.” I nodded at her scimitar. “Like dps is simple, if you’re talking about the mechanics. But to do it under pressure, without stopping to think—that takes some skill.”

  “Plus, the Doctor Who nerdery really wows the ladies, am I right?”

  “I do all right with the ladies,” I said. “And I’m definitely a nerd. But to be honest, I’m not a Doctor Who fan. I think I’ve seen like three episodes.”

  “Well, that’s even more pathetic. You don’t watch the show, but you memorized the stars’ bios in case you need to guess someone’s age?”

  “I didn’t need to memorize anything. I told you, it’s on Wikipedia.”

  “You checked Wikipedia? Just now, while you were talking to me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. Bullshit.”

  “It’s a simple b-channel exploit.” I held up my hands, made tapping motions with my fingers. “You can’t type and talk at the same time?”

  “Of course I can—and I can read and talk, too. But I was watching you. You didn’t cut your eyes away. You were looking at me the whole time.”

  “My avatar was looking at you. I have a custom mod, You So Interesting. It keeps my avatar’s eyes focused on whoever I’m talking to, even if I’m checking a pop-up screen.”

  “This mod, it’s something you wrote?”

  “An old girlfriend.”

  Darla snorted. “That must have been some relationship.”

  “We didn’t use it on each other.”

  “You didn’t use it on her, maybe . . . So this is for your clients? You watch porn while you’re making your sales pitch?”

  “Mostly I use it to look things up on the sly. It helps me keep up my end, making small talk. And I always know the answer to game-related questions, even if I have a brain fart. Clients expect that. It’s part of the whole sherpa stereotype.” As I said this, I gave the Mom-and-Pop switch a push towards the Mom side. It was just a nudge, but Darla saw it, and she got it. And she laughed.

  “All right,” she said, “maybe you’re not a total loser . . . But I still think your clients are retarded.” She gave it a beat, watching my expression, then burst out laughing again. “Wow, you are going to be so much fun to mess with.”

  In hindsight, I suppose I should have recognized that as a red flag.

  But in the moment I was happy, because it meant she was taking the job.

  Chapter 5

  * * *

  problematic — A weasel word. “Problematic” can mean immoral, heretical, politically objectionable, bigoted, rude, harmful to children and small animals, bad for society, personally offensive to the speaker, or some amorphous combination of any of the above. The word’s vagueness makes it popular among the intellectually lazy: Whereas calling something “immoral” might require you to articulate—and defend—a theory of right and wrong, “problematic” expresses the same disapproval while offering nothing solid for an interlocutor to push back against. It also accords with the common belief that all right-thinking people share identical worldviews: Either you know intuitively what “problematic” means, or you are too stupid or wicked to deserve an explanation.

  See also: “mistakes were made,” shibboleth

  —The New Devil’s Dictionary

  * * *

  The day after my new computer arrives, I have my first game session with Mr. Jones.

  I’ve decided we may as well start at the top. I sign Mr. Jones up for a Call to Wizardry account and tell him to meet me in the Hall of Generation.

  Step o
ne in creating a character is to choose your race and gender. “Race” in this context means species, although, in a tradition that goes back to pen-and-paper RPGs, many of Call to Wizardry’s species are thinly veiled ethnic stereotypes. Humans are generic white people who live in medieval European castles and towns. Dwarves are alcoholic highlanders with funny Scottish accents. Goblins are greedy, big-nosed schemers who run all the banks. Orcs are dark-skinned marauders who worship death and love cutting innocent people’s heads off with their scimitars. And then there are the trolls: savage jungle creatures who talk like Jamaican ganglords, practice voodoo and cannibalism, and have a shuffling, stoop-shouldered gait that appears to have been motion-captured at a minstrel show.

  The popular internet term for this is “problematic,” but I don’t like to be coy. My specific complaint is not that it’s racist (although it is) or that it reinforces negative attitudes about minorities (it might, but let’s be serious—if fantasy role-playing games are your main source of information about minorities, the problem is you). No, what bothers me is that it’s such bad business practice. Black and brown people’s money spends just as good as white people’s, so why the hell would you insult them?

  Please note that this is not a rhetorical question. It would be one thing if Tempest had made a deliberate decision to alienate minorities in order to cater to people who still think Stepin Fetchit is comedy gold. That would be stupid, but at least there’d be a logic to it. But I doubt the explanation is that cynical. My guess is that the game design team just didn’t realize how offensive some of their worldbuilding choices were, and the guys who were supposed to check their work didn’t notice either. That may sound incredible, that otherwise intelligent businesspeople could be so clueless, but I see it happen all the time and it galls me.

  But that’s my ax to grind. I’m curious what Mr. Jones’s take will be.

  The Hall of Generation contains interactive models of the various races, so you can get a sense of what your character will look like. The sample troll is stirring a big cauldron as we approach. “I and I gon’ use your guts for me gumbo, mon!” he greets us—a line that always gets a healthy side-eye from Jolene. Mr. Jones has no visible reaction. This could mean that he’s using a translator, which would strip out the Bob Marley accent, or that he’s from a part of the world with different racial stereotypes. Or he could be an English-speaking American who just doesn’t think the way Jolene and I do.

  His only criticism of the troll concerns posture. “Do they all slouch like that?” he asks. I nod. “A pity,” Mr. Jones says. “Its size is quite impressive, otherwise.”

  We move on to the next model. The xiongmao are a race of anthropomorphic panda bears created as fan service for Call to Wizardry’s millions of Chinese players. They are another stereotype, but a carefully crafted, positive one. Xiongmao study kung fu and Taoist sorcery, revere their ancestors, and know a thousand and one recipes for stir-fried bamboo, but they do not have buck teeth or exaggerated epicanthic folds, and they can pronounce the “L” sound just fine. Most Americans find them either cute or silly. Mr. Jones, oddly, is contemptuous. When the model xiongmao presses his paws together and says, “It is an honor to meet you, adventurer,” Mr. Jones sneers, as if the bear were trying to pass off one of its own turds as dim sum.

  “You don’t like pandas?” I say.

  “They are overrated,” Mr. Jones sniffs.

  Mr. Jones does like elves, who are as tall as trolls and don’t slouch, but he decides they are “too skinny.” He passes on dwarves, gnomes, and goblins without comment. He admires orcs’ “fierceness,” but they, too, have posture problems. Humans earn another sneer, though he won’t share what he dislikes about them.

  In the end, he decides to become a plainswalker: an intelligent, bipedal buffalo. Culturally, plainswalkers are Native Americans of the Mix-and-Match tribe. They live in both longhouses and teepees, carve totem poles, send smoke signals, worship the Sky Father and the Earth Mother, and shed tears whenever they see humans littering. Physically, they are the largest of the playable races, which is the part that appeals to Mr. Jones. And male plainswalkers are both taller and more broad-shouldered than females, so his choice of gender comes as no surprise.

  The next step is to choose a class. In another throwback to pen-and-paper RPGs, your race determines your career options. Plainswalkers, for example, can be warriors and rangers, but not paladins or ninjas—the design team having apparently decided that talking buffalo ninjas are unrealistic.

  Mr. Jones wants to know which class has the best leadership skills.

  “What kind of leadership? You mean in combat?”

  “In general. But in combat, yes, definitely.”

  “You’ll want a tanking class,” I say. “For a plainswalker, that means either a warrior or a druid.”

  “What is a druid?”

  “A shapeshifter. For tanking, they can turn into bears with armored skin.” Mr. Jones purses his lips, and I clarify: “Grizzly bears, not pandas.”

  “Show me the warrior,” Mr. Jones says. The model plainswalker morphs into a warchief with a painted face and a massive eagle-feather bonnet that adds another foot to its already considerable height. Mr. Jones approves. “This is the one I want.”

  “All right,” I say. “The last step is to pick a name. Other players will be able to see it, if they want to—it’ll look like a movie credit that floats over your head—so there’s a length limit, but you can use any combination of extended Unicode characters you like. Don’t feel like you have to stick to the Roman alphabet.”

  “I will be Mr. Jones,” Mr. Jones says. There is a pause while he types this in. Tempest’s host server then checks to see whether the name is already taken, and also verifies that it does not contain any obvious profanities.

  The name is available. Mr. Jones locks in his choice. The model plainswalker steps off its pedestal and merges with Mr. Jones’s avatar. Mr. Jones becomes a gray-faced bipedal buffalo. A mirror materializes in front of him and he checks himself out. He’s pleased with his stature, but less so with his equipment: The big tomahawk the model was carrying has become a teensy stone hatchet, and in place of the war bonnet, he’s wearing a headband with a single feather.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell him. “You’ll get cooler gear as you level up.”

  “What about you?” Mr. Jones asks. “Are you going to create a character?”

  “I’ll be using an existing one. You need to be at least tenth level before you can party up for dungeon runs, so for now I’ll just observe and make sure nobody hassles you . . . Hold on a moment.”

  I switch to an alternate account and become Keebler, a 200th-level elf sorcerer. Mr. Jones looks me up and down, paying special attention to my wizard’s staff, which is capped with a hollow crystal sphere containing a bored-looking homunculus.

  “Nice walking stick,” Mr. Jones says, sounding jealous. “But you are still too skinny.”

  A portal at the end of the hall teleports us to Happy Valley, the starting zone for plainswalkers. The valley is lush and green and surrounded by a ring of cliffs that provide an illusion of safety; at its center is a lake, with a large teepee encampment on the eastern shore. We arrive just south of the camp.

  A questgiver named Chief Wampum waits to greet newcomers. “How!” he says, focusing on Mr. Jones. “Welcome, young warrior!”

  “Hello,” Mr. Jones says.

  Chief Wampum and I do not acknowledge one another. As a max-level character—and an elf—I do not belong here, and if I insist on talking to him he will just ask me if I’m lost. I keep my mouth shut.

  The chief tells Mr. Jones that he could use some help. Recently the tribe received a gift of blankets that turned out to be infested with gremlins. The gremlins escaped and are now breeding and making mischief along the southern lakeshore. If Mr. Jones kills ten of them and brings back their scalps, the chief will reward him with a better hatchet and a new pair of moccasins.

  “Very well
,” Mr. Jones says.

  “May the Sky Father light your way,” says Chief Wampum.

  We walk clockwise around the lake until we see the gremlins. They have invaded a fishing camp, punching holes in the canoes and knocking over the salmon smoker. I count about two dozen of them, but they respawn quickly and continuously, so no matter how many scalps are taken, there will always be more.

  Mr. Jones indicates the nearest gremlin. “I just hit it with my hatchet?”

  I nod. “Try to take them on one at a time. And when they die, reach down—the scalps peel right off, like decals.”

  “Very well.”

  While Mr. Jones works on his quest, I keep my eye on a trio of unpleasant-looking 200th-level characters currently harassing another newbie a short distance away. These guys are, literally and figuratively, trolls. Their screen names are BootFuqqer, Choaksondik, and CukULongtime; in place of their real facial features, their avatars sport skins of Al Jolson in blackface. Collectively they represent half a dozen violations of Section 8 of the EULA, which prohibits both obscene names and “racial insensitivity.”

  The EULA cops have their hands full running down hackers, bots, and sherpas, so Section 8 violators are a low priority. I could screenshot these guys and report them, but it’s unlikely they’d get even a temporary suspension. Instead, as a precaution, I shoot off an instant message to Jolene.

  The trolls’ current target is a first-level shaman named Medicine Girl. BootFuqqer stands behind her, screaming to break her concentration, while Choaksondik and CukULongtime run around killing all the gremlins in her vicinity. Because of the high respawn rate, they can’t actually prevent her from completing the quest, but they can make it a lot harder and significantly less fun.

  Though clearly frustrated, Medicine Girl does her best to go on with her business without engaging them. In between screams, BootFuqqer comments on the futility of this strategy: “You think if you pretend to ignore us we’re going to give up and go away? Think again!”

  “Can’t not feed us!” the other trolls chant. “Can’t not feed us!”