Sadie got an email from Hannah Levin at the end of the weekend. Dear Sadie, I played your “game,” and I honestly don’t know what to say. It is disgusting and offensive, and you are a sick person. I’m cc’ing Dov on this email. I’m not sure if I will be able to attend class, because I’m too disturbed. This class is no longer a safe space for me.—Hannah
Sadie smiled when she read this email. She took her time crafting a reply: Dear Hannah, I’m not entirely sorry that you were disturbed by my game. The game is meant to be disturbing, and as I mentioned in class, it was inspired by my grandmother.
Hannah replied, Fuck you, Sadie.
Dov replied a couple of hours later, just to Sadie: Sadie, Haven’t played yet. Looking forward, Dov.
Dov called Sadie the next day. “So, we both know Hannah Levin is an impossible idiot, right?”
Dov had spent the last hour on the phone with Hannah, who wanted Dov to report Sadie to MIT’s Committee on Discipline. Hannah felt that Solution violated the student code of conduct, which prohibited hate speech. “I think I talked her off the ledge,” Dov said. “She is an incredibly tedious person. Who has time for people like this? But congratulations, Sadie Green, your game offended her deeply.”
“That’s crazy,” Sadie said.
“I guess she didn’t like being told she was a Nazi,” Dov said.
“You played the game?”
“Of course,” Dov said. “I had to.”
“Did you win?”
“Everyone wins,” Dov said. “That’s the genius of it, right?”
“Everyone loses,” Sadie said. “The game’s about being complicit.” Genius. Dov had said genius.
The idea of Solution was that if you asked questions and didn’t keep mindlessly building widgets, your score would be lower, but you would find out you were working in a factory that supplied machine parts to the Third Reich. Once you had this information, you could potentially slow your output. You could make the bare number of parts required not to be detected by the Reich, or you could stop producing parts entirely. The player who did not ask questions, the Good German, would blithely get the highest score possible, but in the end, they’d find out what their factory was doing. Fraktur-style script blazed across the screen: Congratulations, Nazi! You have helped lead the Third Reich to Victory! You are a true Master of Efficiency. Cue MIDI Wagner. The idea of Solution was that if you won the game on points, you lost it morally.
“Listen, I loved the game. I thought it was hilarious.”
“Hilarious?” Sadie had meant it to be soul crushing, disturbing.
“My sense of humor is very dark,” Dov said. “Screw it. Do you want to get coffee?”
They went to a coffee place in Harvard Square, near Dov’s apartment. Sadie hadn’t known if the meeting would be about Hannah’s complaint, but in fact, they didn’t speak of her. Sadie told him how much she loved Dead Sea, and she was able to ask him quite technical questions about rendering light with the Ulysses engine. Dov answered her questions and told her about designing Dead Sea, and how it had been inspired by his fear of drowning. Sadie spoke of her grandmother, growing up in Los Angeles, her sister’s illness. They discussed their favorite games, as children and now. Dov spoke to her as if they were colleagues, and this was thrilling for Sadie. She didn’t care if she got called in front of the Committee on Discipline for making Solution. For this moment, with someone like Dov, it was worth it.
Dov reached across the table and wiped a bit of coffee foam from her lip.
“I think I’m in serious trouble,” Dov said.
“Because of Hannah?” Sadie said.
“Who’s Hannah?” Dov said. “Oh, right. Her. I think I’m in trouble because I want you to come back to my apartment, and I know I shouldn’t do that.”
“Why shouldn’t you?” Sadie said. “I’d like to see where you live.”
It was the first adult relationship Sadie had ever had, though he was also very much her teacher. But as her lover, he was a much better teacher than when he’d just been her teacher. She learned so much from him. It was like having seminar all the time. He encouraged her to improve Solution. He showed her techniques he had for building game engines. “Never use someone else’s engine, if you can help it,” Dov warned. “You cede too much power to them.” She loved playing games with him, and having sex with him, and telling her ideas to him. She loved him.
She didn’t find out he was married until about four months in, as her sophomore year was ending. He said he needed to tell her something before this got any more serious. They had been planning for Sadie to spend the summer in his apartment.
He said that his wife was back in Israel. They were separated. That’s why he’d come to MIT. They both needed a break from the marriage.
“So, she knows about me?” Sadie asked.
“Not in so many words, but she knows about the possibility of someone like you,” Dov said. “Don’t worry. There’s nothing shady about it.”
And yet, Sadie did feel shady about it. She did not entirely believe Dov, and Sadie felt as if she had been tricked into behaving amorally. She had inadvertently ended up having an affair with a married man and even though she hadn’t known that at the beginning, she knew it now. And maybe, if she were honest with herself, she had known. Maybe she had been like the player in Solution. Maybe she hadn’t asked the right or enough questions because she hadn’t wanted to know the answers.
Still, she spent the summer with Dov. She loved him and was, at this point, a bit addicted to being with him. She did an internship at Cellar Door Games in Boston and she never told anyone at the company who her boyfriend was. Among game designers, Dov was famous, and she didn’t want it to get back to Dov’s wife. She was so busy concealing （and having） the affair with Dov that she didn’t feel like she made much of an impression at Cellar Door. She didn’t feel creative, and she was always the first one to leave.
It perhaps goes without saying that Sadie hadn’t only been protecting Dov when she didn’t reveal to her colleagues at Cellar Door who her boyfriend was. She had also been protecting herself. There were even fewer women in professional games than there were at MIT, and Sadie didn’t want to hobble herself before she’d begun her career. It was unfair, but attractive young women who had reputations for sleeping with powerful men acquired professional baggage. They sometimes found they had a difficult time being taken seriously when they moved on from those men. She did not want her unofficial résumé in gaming to begin with the words “Dov Mizrah’s teenage mistress.” As much in love as she was with Dov, Sadie was already imagining a future that didn’t have him in it.
In the fall of her junior year, she took Artificial Intelligence, and Hannah Levin, who she had not seen since Dov’s seminar, was in the same breakout recitation session as her. “I hope there aren’t any hard feelings,” Sadie said at the end of class. “I never intended to offend you.”
“Please. The only reason you make a game like that is to offend,” Hannah replied. “I didn’t pursue it because your boyfriend talked me out of it and I didn’t want it to come back and bite me in the ass someday.”