Tutorial
Two rules,” the tank in the driver’s seat said. “Don’t swear and don’t say nothing about the music.” He tossed a granola bar into my lap. “Tell me if you need to use the bathroom.”
He started the engine and the car filled with gospel music. Elvis gospel music.
“You saw me crying in the chaaaaaaaaapellllllll . . .”
The other tank climbed into the passenger seat and sighed. Apparently he had to follow the rules too.
“They call me Command and him Conquer,” the driver said. As if they weren’t intimidating enough.
From the backseat I noticed that Command kept his poofy hair tied back in a neat bun, while Conquer let his roam free. Conquer also had a much bigger equator. They looked strong enough to tame a rabid ox, let alone my weak ass. I wouldn’t be able to escape them if I tried. Besides, the backseat had no door handles.
“We got one more pickup,” Command said, throwing the gear into drive.
The car rolled forward. My stomach took a moment to catch up.
My dad waved from the porch. I looked away.
While Elvis sang another song—“With arms wide oooooooopeeeeeennnnnn”—Command drove east to the rich side of Salt Lake. We pulled up to a three-story house with dozens of windows. Command climbed out of the Oldsmobile and knocked on the front door. A pretty woman with sad eyes answered, and they went inside.
The car cooled and made ticking noises. I surveyed the neighborhood. If I could leap over the front seat and out the driver’s side door before Conquer clamped on to my ankle, maybe I could get a running head start and hide behind the shrubbery. After he and Command gave up the search, I’d walk downtown and camp at Mandrake’s, sleeping in their alcove, washing up in the bathroom, and working on my charming conversation with the waitresses until my date on Thursday. Hopefully they’d have some after-dinner mints.
I had nothing to lose. I would bolt in three . . . two . . .
“You thinking about escaping?”
Conquer adjusted the rearview mirror to meet my eyes.
“Yes,” I said.
“They all do.” He chuckled and stretched. “This ain’t no video game.”
The tension uncoiled in my legs. “Thanks for clearing that up.”
A minute later Command exited the house, leading a skinny kid with tattoo sleeves.
“The hell?” Conquer said under his breath.
I may have been suffering from gamer’s squint, but this kid looked like he’d just been pulled out of an iron lung. It seemed the only thing preventing him from falling dead in the driveway was Command’s supporting hand.
Command opened the backseat door, and the kid slumped in next to me. His head was shaved, his ears gauged, and his arms writhed with homemade tattoos—frayed wires spitting electricity. The kid looked like an electric warlock . . . with only one hit point left.
“Two rules.”
Command repeated the business about swearing and music and then tossed another granola bar over his shoulder. It hit the kid in the chest, but he didn’t even flinch. His dark eyes, slumped head, and drooping lip made me briefly reconsider my argument that it was impossible to be addicted to video games.
Briefly.
“So,” I said. “What are you in for?”
The kid was already asleep.
Command pulled onto the freeway, and we headed west, across the tracks, and through the industrial side of town. Soon the city gave way to salt flats, and the pit in my stomach deepened. Just as an Arcadia character steps on an ill-rendered piece of ground, slips through the game’s polygons, and hurtles into the black unknown, I was falling through the world. My beautiful fantasy world of trumpets, dancing buildings, and cotton candy skies was being replaced with the pant of air-conditioning, the slimy feeling of vinyl against the back of my neck, and—“Hrr . . . Hrrmph . . .”—the smell of vomit every time we stopped to let the electric tattoo kid throw up.
Three Elvis-Sings-Gospel songs later, we came to a small casino town, cruising under a large sign of a mechanical cowgirl kicking her giant neon leg. We didn’t stop there. We continued on through the desert until even the out-of-service gas stations disappeared, and then pulled off the main road and kept on driving.
Dunes rose up around the car in dull waves.
“You’re not going to make me dig holes, are you?” I asked.
“Nope.” Command chuckled. “We’re just going to make you have fun.”
That sounded so much worse.
The sun dipped in the sky, and the electric warlock slumped into the middle of the seat. I remained wide awake, mentally mapping every turn, road sign, and the size and slope of every dune. I was determined to know exactly where I was imprisoned and how to find my way back.
But as the desert stretched on, I realized it would be impossible to walk back. Not unless I wanted Thursday’s date to be a crow feasting on my belly meat. After that unpleasant realization, I just kept an eye on the electric warlock’s drool, slowly creeping toward my leg.
Finally, as Elvis sang of coming to the garden, we arrived. The rehab facility was a windowless, cream-gray box of a building, nestled among dunes that stretched to the horizon.
It looked as lonely as a LEGO lost in an infinite sandbox.
Command parked in a dusty lot, pulled my suitcase out of the trunk, and opened my door. He escorted me to a white entrance, which opened without a key. Clearly, everyone here knew the walk back to Salt Lake would be impossible. Command gestured inside. I took one last glance toward the east. The desert would have stretched on forever, were the sky not there to stop it.
I went inside.
Like a stage right out of BioShock, two concrete hallways stretched left and right along the building’s outer walls—one long, one short, both flickering fluorescent. The place smelled like rusty pipes and hummed like dead static.
Welcome to Rapture, I thought, and a darkness opened inside me.
Conquer practically carried the electric warlock in after us.
“Kid’s not doing so hot,” Conquer said, lightly slapping the warlock’s cheek.
“Take him to the Fairy Fountain,” Command said. “We’ll get him guilded later.”
Conquer hefted the kid’s body down the short hallway, and Command put his nose three inches from mine. “Do I need to give you a cavity search?”
My butt clenched. “Um, huh?”
“Games are pretty small these days,” he said, walking closer and pressing me against the wall. “Tamagotchi, iPod Touches.”
I swallowed. “I might have a big butt, but I don’t use it for storage.”
He smiled. “Just messin’.”
He knelt down, unlaced my shoelaces, and took them. In case I tried to play cat’s cradle with them, I guess.
He led me down the long hallway. “Time to meet G-man,” he said.
“The bad guy from Half-Life?” I said, laceless shoes flapping off my feet.
Command chuckled. “That’s what the players call the clinical director. Don’t tell him why. Game talk is forbidden here, but the guy’s never played a video game in his life.”
We passed doors stenciled with different symbols: a candle, a music note, a cauldron, a computer chip. At the end of the hall, Command stopped and pointed up a staircase to a metallic door.
“Good luck,” he said.
I swallowed and scaled the stairs.
How the hell did I get here?
How the hell did I get out?
I had to convince them I did not belong.
If this was the meeting where the clinical director decided whether or not someone who’d been committed was truly addicted, whether there had been some kind of mistake and this kid should be immediately released so he could go on his date with the cute girl from the car wash, then I was ready to be the most well-adjusted gamer he had ever met.
This would require me to be a charming person . . . which I was not.
I smoothed my Super Mario Bros. shirt and opened the metal door.
“Juuuust a moment,” a slim man in a gray suit said. He was sitting at a small desk, pressing a row of stamps onto an inkpad, one by one.
The office looked like it had been built for epileptics. No loud colors. No sharp corners. No decoration of any kind. Not even accreditations. There was a desk and two chairs, and that was about it.
“Done!” The director stood from his desk, lightly punching at his hip to get all the way upright. His bright green eyes fixed on me. “Jaxon,” he said, in a voice that was warm but all business. He came around the desk and offered his hand. “Welcome to Video Horizons, the first video game rehabilitation center in the West.”
I shook his hand.
And even though I was exhausted . . .
Even though I felt stripped and humiliated and out of my element . . .
Even though I was terrified about not making it to my date . . .
I smiled.
“Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.”
“Really?” The director took a step back and gave a pleased frown. “No one’s ever said that before.”
His teeth looked like they’d never been flossed, and I could smell moss when he spoke.
I smiled again and shrugged. “How often do I get a free desert vacation? Ha-ha.”
The director shook his finger at me. “I like your attitude. Have a seat.”
He gestured to the chair opposite his desk while easing his stiff hip into his. I sat. The fluorescent lights fizzed.
Over the years I’d picked up a couple of sales tactics from my dad:
1. Be passionate about the client’s interests.
2. Mimic their actions to make them feel you’re relatable.
3. Use humor as a lubricant.
4. Act like a normal human being for once in your life.
That last one was personal advice for me.
“I’m the clinical director here at Video Horizons,” the man in the suit said. “My name is John Borno, but everyone here calls me G-man because I’m the master of games.”
“Pleasure, G-man,” I said.
He smiled. “I like to personally greet each of our players when they first arrive.” He made a circular motion with his hand. “Give a rundown on how this place works.”
Players? Hadn’t I been committed there to stop being a player?
“Lay it on me,” I said.
“First of all, Jaxon, we encourage players not to use their real names while here. This allows you to retain patient confidentiality when you return to the real world and maintain a healthy online presence.” G-man dropped the business voice. “But it also means you get to come up with your very own player name. It can be anything you want. Anything.”
“Ooh!” I said, trying to sound enthused. “Um, gosh, this is exciting. How about . . .” I drew a total blank. That is, until a three-tailed fox helicoptered through my head. “Miles Prower?”
“Love it!” G-man said. He clicked a pen and wrote it on a chart with about a dozen other names. Then he stared at the name. “Oh! I get it. Clever wordplay.”
“Thought you might like that.”
“Well, Miles . . .” He leaned back into his chair. “Video Horizons opened about two months ago. We don’t even have a logo yet, but our population has practically doubled every week due to the ever-climbing number of kids who are afflicted with an electronics addiction. You might be asking yourself, is it really that many?”
“I was asking myself that,” I said.
Actually, I was wondering what Serena would think if she could see me right then. She’d probably throw her Schwinn at me and run.
“Up to thirty percent of youths are addicted to video games,” G-man continued. “It’s a growing concern in our society. That’s how we were able to earn enough grants to acquire this old military training center.” He smiled at the fluorescent lights as if we were in some pleasure palace. Then he grew serious. “Humans spend more than three billion hours a week in the gaming world. If you were to add up all the time players have spent in World of Warcraft, do you know how much it would amount to?”
Six million years, I thought.
“No,” I said.
“Six million years,” he said.
“That’s crazy,” I said.
My dad had fed me the same statistic. I’d probably contributed a couple of years myself.
“Video Horizons is focused on slowing that number’s growth,” G-man said.
“An admirable mission,” I said.
“I’m glad you think so,” he said.
“I do think so,” I said.
I didn’t. G-man didn’t understand gamers. And he certainly didn’t understand me. When the real world rejects your efforts for sixteen years, when you’re mocked at school, when you can’t get a date, when you don’t get picked for sports, when your knowledge of Japanese gods is worthless, even frowned upon, it’s hard not to turn to a community where your talents are appreciated.
Also, you get to kill dragons.
“You’ll find that we’re a bit different from a regular rehab,” G-man said. “Video game addiction isn’t as serious as a drug or alcohol addiction, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a major concern. Especially if you’ve been playing some of those games that have no end. I think you know the ones I’m talking about.”
I exaggeratedly rolled my eyes. “I do, unfortunately.”
The Wight Knights were probably so pissed at me right then, trying to battle through Skyscrape Arena without their trusty tank who had been torn away from the world and hurtling to . . . whatever the hell this place was.
“But don’t mistake us for strict disciplinarians,” G-man continued. “We’re not trying to re-create the video game recovery facilities they have in China. You know, with the militaristic drills, and flashing colorful lights into your pupils at six a.m.”
“Thank goodness for that!” I said, faking a chuckle.
“No, we actually try to have some fun here at Video Horizons. We operate on a revolutionary system that appeals to a gamer’s sense of success. We are going to try to reprogram your behavior by breaking your game habit with—get this—another game. Think of it as the PlayStation 5 of addiction therapy.”
“Wow,” I said. “You are really speaking my language.”
He narrowed his eyes and leaned over his desk.
I leaned in too.
“We’ve devised a system where players such as yourself earn experience points.”
“That sounds like a video game,” I said, coloring my voice with intrigue.
“It is like a video game. But it’s the video game of life. Instead of leveling up pixels and polygons, ones and zeros, you are going to level up”—he swiveled his finger in my direction—“you.”
“Me?” I said, touching my chest.
“You got it.”
So Video Horizons had gamified addiction therapy. It wasn’t a terrible idea . . . so long as I didn’t have to do it.
G-man reached into a drawer and took out a scrolled-up piece of paper printed and cut to look like ancient parchment. He quickly scribbled something at the top and then slid it across the desk. Below “Miles Prower” written in shitty cursive were five columns labeled with pictures of a brain, a ball, a paintbrush, a sandwich, and a smiley face.
“We have all kinds of classes and activities here at Video Horizons,” he said. “Music, racing, martial arts, cooking, and many, many more that I don’t want to spoil for you. . . . Spoiler alert!”
“Ha!” I said, even though he had somehow, impossibly, misused that phrase.
“For every real-life skill you pick up within these walls, your teachers or guild leader will stamp your scroll with a certain number of experience points.” He pointed to the stamps on his desk, each with a different number on its handle. “A thousand points for eating a healthy meal, two thousand points for painting a picture of a pretty sunset, ten thousand points for playing a whole song on a guitar. You’ll also receive points for laundry, food prep, doing the dishes, stuff like that.”
“I actually do all my own cooking and cleaning at home,” I said.
“Excellent,” G-man said.
I didn’t tell him it strictly involved Hot Pockets and paper towels.
“You may think it’s strange that we’re substituting one game for another,” he continued, “but if our point system gets you addicted to running and cleaning dishes instead of playing games, so be it. Once you’ve earned enough points to sufficiently ‘level up’ ”—he actually did air finger quotes—“you’re free to go home. Any questions?”
I dreaded the answer to my first question. But I had to know. What was my Bowser? What was my Deathwing? What Video Horizons final boss did I have to defeat to get back to my date?
“How many experience points do I need to . . . level up?”
G-man gave a sly smile. “One million, of course.”
My shoulders must have deflated, because he put up his hands defensively. “I know that sounds like a lot. But think of all the skills you’ll pick up. Think of all the people you’ll impress back home. We believe the life lessons you learn here at Video Horizons will give you a much richer life in the real world. I mean, how many dates will the highest Pac-Man score get you, right?”
I tried to smile but felt my eye twitch. This was too much. I’d already scored a date without this place and its stupid experience points.
“And, uh,” I said, dreading another answer, “how long does it take the average player to earn a million points?”
“Let’s see . . .” G-man tapped his desk and considered the ceiling. “The fastest player did it in just two weeks. But she was a former Olympic athlete, so she killed in our tournaments.”
My skin went cold at the word. I was certain these were not the kind of tournaments I’d be good at.
G-man teetered his open hand in the air. “But I’d say it takes your average player about four weeks.”
Four weeks? I imagined all the suitors Serena would charm between now and then. Suitors better suited than me.
This was it. It was time to close the sale. I had to convince G-man that I was so well adjusted he should let me go right then. There had to be a series of things I could say, a specific path through our dialogue tree that would get me out of this.
“Have you ever locked up someone who didn’t belong here?” I said. “Someone who had a dad who just wanted to get rid of his kid so he could hang out with his new child bride . . . or something?”
G-man considered me for a moment. “If we did take in a patient—sorry, player—who shouldn’t have been committed . . . I believe it would become quickly apparent that the individual was well-balanced physically, mentally, and emotionally.” I swear his eyes flashed to my man boobs for a second. “After the first week’s assessment, we could have a conversation with his or her parents to find out what the real trouble was.”
Dammit. I didn’t have a whole week. This meant I’d have to compete. Not only compete but destroy this Olympic athlete’s record by earning a million real-life experience points in four days. I could do it though, right? This couldn’t be that hard. What did an Olympic athlete have that I didn’t, anyway?
G-man showed his mossy teeth. “The important thing is that you have fun.”
No. It wasn’t.
“What if I win in four days?” I asked.
He gave a flat smile. “You won’t.”
“What if I do?”
“The game is built so that players who are ahead—your jocks, your geniuses—will be given a handicap, and those kids who might be lagging behind a bit will be given bonuses. We want everyone at Video Horizons to feel like a hero.”
Great. Like Mario Party. The most unfair game ever created.
“You got somewhere to be?” G-man asked.
I put on the biggest grin I could muster. “Nowhere but here.”
“Tell you what,” he said, “if you win in four days, I’ll drive you out of here myself. Deal?”
I nodded. “Deal.”
“So, player Miles Prower,” G-man said in a nauseatingly enthusiastic voice, “are you a bad enough dude to earn a million points here at Video Horizons?”
He’d said the facility had opened just two months before. That meant the game was brand-new. It was still in beta. It had to be broken in places. All I had to do was find those broken areas and exploit them.
I smiled. “How many points if I polish your desk right now?”
We both laughed.
“Oh!” G-man reached back into his drawer. “We don’t want to forget these.” He handed me a map and a class schedule. “This is how to find your way around, as well as a breakdown of points. Aaaaaand here’s your adventure pouch.”
He really meant faux-leather fanny pack.
“Cool,” I said. I stretched the adventure pouch’s strap to its limit, clicked it on, and then got up to leave.
“Oh, Miles. One last thing.” G-man pulled the cap off one of the stamps. “Every day, I’ll give you a thousand points if you high-five me with a positive attitude.”
He held up his hand.
I hated high fives. But I needed any points I could get.
I smiled big and swung my hand . . . but it whooshed through open air. At first I thought I’d missed, but then I saw that G-man had dropped his hand at the last second.
“But with so many slaps a day, my hand can only take so much.” He put the cap back on the stamp. “I think I’ll save my high fives for players who are a little less sarcastic.”