I could feel the unease from everybody assembled. I was standing in an arcade full of gamers. Watching a character die on the screen when you could simply run up and start playing was maddening.
It was hard for me too—and I was the one responsible for it.
“In Space Ace, everything is binary,” I continued. “Each series of moves you make has only two possible outcomes: You make the correct moves in the correct order and you continue; you get it wrong, you die.”
I let that hang there ominously as I let my second life expire onscreen.
“These days, we have vast open-world narrative experiences, games that don’t follow prescribed quests or storylines, seemingly endless virtual lands and expansive storyworlds that we can move through and explore for months without experiencing the same encounter twice. But what if there was something bigger? What if there was an open-world experience so enormous and complex that its canvas for gameplay was the world itself? Perhaps even the entire universe?”
On the Space Ace machine, just before I was about to surrender the last of my three lives, I took control of my onscreen character （Dexter, who prefers to be called Ace） and guided him through what was left of the game.
Once I’d completed Dexter’s quest （defeat the villainous Commander Borf）， a brief victory movie played and then the credits began to roll. “This,” I said, timed perfectly with the reveal of the list of names on the screen, “is The Circle, circa the seventh iteration of the game.”
Everybody gathered around the machine for a closer look.
It was at this point that a couple of the newer attendees asked for their phones back so they could take a picture. I told them they could play Space Ace and take as many photos as they liked, but they had to wait until after the session.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Journey T-shirt said, raising his voice above the din of 8-bit audio that made up the sonic backdrop of the arcade.
I knew this guy was trouble.
Every once in a while I’d get somebody like this, a YouTube comment section complaint in human form, whose only reason for coming was to stir shit up.
Normally I’d try to impress him with The Prescott Competition Manifesto, but I had the feeling if I didn’t give this guy a little something extra, and soon, there was a risk he was going to get seriously unruly. With this kind of conspiracy-hungry crowd, one dissenting voice with imagination could result in an angry mob quicker than suggesting the Kennedy assassination wasn’t anything other than one mentally damaged man in a tower.
“You’re not really supposed to talk about Rabbits,” I said, lowering my voice a little.
Everyone stopped talking at the word “Rabbits.” I rarely referred to the game by its unofficial name during these sessions.
“Of course,” I continued, “speaking about the game in general terms is widely accepted—necessary, even—to attract new blood, but talking about specifics is out of bounds. Today, however, we’re going to shake things up a little.”
They were all paying attention now—even Journey T-shirt.
“The very nature of the game is secrecy, and the complex series of rules uncertain, but you can discover a great deal if you know where to look. An unexplained hacking challenge appears on a website that previously didn’t exist; a weird series of unnerving videos begins popping up on YouTube; the events of a short fictional horror story on Reddit are starting to come true in real life. Some or all of these things might be related to the game. How do we know? We don’t. We can only draw connections and hope we’re finding a way in.”
I pulled out my phone and a small portable projector box I’d purchased online for fifteen bucks. I was on my way toward the back of the room to switch off the lights when the room went dark. Chloe had been here for my presentations many times in the past, but I had no idea she’d been paying attention. So far, she’d hit every one of Baron’s cues flawlessly. I wondered how she was feeling. Had she been looking around the room for Baron’s stupid grin every ten minutes or so like me?
I dug through the images in my phone’s photo library and eventually found what I was looking for. Then I slipped my phone into the projector box, adjusted a small black slider, and two images of a painting appeared in sharp focus, side by side, on the back wall of the arcade.
“This is a well-known painting called Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth,” I said. “I’ve seen the original hanging in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’s beautiful—one of my favorite works of art on Earth.”