The Fountain
852 Words
The village fountain was in the center of the main square, exactly where fountains belonged.
I sat on its stone edge and let myself stop moving, which my body received as extremely good news. The cobblestones around me were warm from the afternoon sun. The water behind me made a sound I had pulled from a royalty-free library and cleaned up in post, and it was, I had to admit, a good sound. Restful. The kind of ambient detail that worked.
I had sixty-three HP and ten copper coins and no immediate path to improving either number that did not involve going back into the forest in my current condition. My options were: wait and let natural regeneration do its one-point-per-minute work for the next several hours, or go back out there injured and under-equipped and hope the next encounter was easier than the last one.
I had designed the next encounter. It was not easier than the last one.
So I sat by the fountain and watched my HP tick, and I thought about things I had been avoiding thinking about since I woke up in a meadow that was not supposed to be real.
I thought about the kind of person I had been six months ago, a year ago, three years ago when I started building this world. I could see him clearly from here, that version of Lee Zhang, sitting in conference rooms and dismissing feedback with the particular confidence of someone who had decided that his vision was more important than other people's experience of it. I had called it conviction. I had called it artistic integrity. I had called it understanding the audience better than the audience understood itself.
Marcus had said the death mechanics were too hardcore. I had laughed.
Priya had said the healing system would frustrate players. I had overruled her.
ThornwickPlays had filed three paragraphs about hunger penalties. I had marked it working as intended and moved on without finishing the report.
Eleven beta testers had flagged the pain feedback. I had called them casual gamers who did not appreciate true difficulty, in an internal Slack channel, in a message I had not thought twice about sending.
I tried to remember if any of them had quit the beta after that. I thought at least two had. I had not followed up.
The fountain water moved in the same loop it always moved in, the particle system cycling on its forty-second timer, and I watched it and tried to locate the part of myself that had sent that Slack message, that had sat across from Priya in conference room B and used the word authentic like it was a shield, and I found him more easily than I would have liked. He was not far away. He was the same person who had sat in this situation and immediately started cataloguing his strategic advantages, who had responded to waking up in a nightmare by making a list of Easter eggs.
That was not nothing. The Easter eggs were real and the knowledge was real and the advantage mattered.
But it was also, if I was honest about it, the same instinct. The instinct to be the smartest person in the room even when the room was trying to kill him. The instinct to turn everything into a problem he could solve from the outside, with information and analysis and the comfortable distance of someone who had never had to live inside the consequences of his own decisions.
He was living inside them now.
My HP ticked to sixty-four. Then sixty-five. One point at a time, patient and indifferent, the system doing exactly what I had told it to do.
I thought about what Respawn was going to be, out there in the real world, when it launched. Fourteen thousand beta testers waiting. Pre-orders in the six figures. Players who had paid real money to experience a world I had designed to be brutal, unforgiving, and impossible to win, and who did not know that last part yet. Who were going to find out the way I had found out about the healing system and the pain feedback and the hunger mechanics: by living inside it.
I had thought that was the point. I had defended it in pitch meetings and design documents and that Slack message I now wished I could unsend.
Sitting on a fountain edge in my own game with bandages on my ribs and ten copper coins in my pocket and no clear path forward, I was not sure I still thought it was the point. I was not sure what I thought it was anymore.
The answer I had been building toward, the one that had been assembling itself quietly since Gareth's face and Priya's notebook and the sound of my own voice coming out of a man who wanted to kill me, was not a comfortable answer. It involved being wrong about things I had been publicly, confidently wrong about for three years.
But in the game world I had created, I might not get a choice.
- Writer
