The Narrator

The visitor smiled without parting his lips.

“Our problem, Mr. Haplish, is that it’s more than just a narrator. You’ve made a recursive evolutionary algorithm that builds worlds and stories, and you apply it to everything in your game. Sure, nothing special. But what we don’t quite understand is how it works so quickly. And what we don’t quite like is how you’ve encrypted it.”

He leaned in, but Haplish remained calm.

“It’s a trade secret,” Haplish said. “I’ll give you a clue. Take a look at the cesium in the USB dongle. It’s not just a gimmicky random number generator.”

“You’re lying.”

“You know what? Don’t look there. Look down here.”

With that, Haplish produced a tiny handgun. I flinched as it went off. My ears hummed. The visitor, his face a frozen twitch of surprise, slid off the chair.

“Well, that was stupid,” I said, too frightened to keep it to myself. Maybe I was talking about my decision to come here.

“I always thought someone else would make a big thing of it,” Haplish turned to me, wiping the gun and placing it in the visitor’s coat pocket. “Like an announcement on stage, in front of cameras and dry ice. Instead, it really is mine. Just a freeware download. Angel investors. No-one’s paying a dime, even for the stick. We figure we can throw ads in once we’ve got a few million in the game.”

“But it’s not multiplayer,” I said.

He stared at me blankly, as if I had said nothing and he was waiting for me to speak.

“No, but that’s just because of the encryption,” he finally said. “No-one gets to see how the narrator works so fast.”

He calls it Ebert, just to be clever. Ebert, the Narrator, is Haplish’s limited, single-minded but effective and inscrutable proxy for the authorial voice in his simulation of the world. It dynamically adapts the playing environment to the player, making the world around him seem pregnant with both meaning and meaningful choice. It starts with abstractions, upon which are built generators and systems, with which are built places, people, relationships. Unlike the real one, however, it is constantly changing, adapting to the player’s decisions so as to maintain the Narrator’s essential control of the state of the art. Some believe that the entire simulation is deterministic, a fractal or L-system protuberating into a model of human interaction: the Cesium stick purportedly shows otherwise.

“It’s time for you to go,” Haplish said, staring deep into me, as if trying to read my thoughts.

I know enough to see that there is an inherently solipsistic heart to it all that makes the illusion possible, and that this is really why there’s no multiplayer: the whole game has to be built around the protagonist. Paranoia is also why Haplish’s ostensible goal, to make genuinely interactive art, won’t ever happen: he can’t tolerate the existence of any author but himself. Haplish is so disturbed by the Narrator’s limitations he will illegally encrypt his product and kill to maintain the silence. I know that I’ve made an enormously bad decision coming here. I knew it the moment EA’s patent lawyer turned up.

As interviews go, it’s been an interesting one. And we’ve not even finished the coffee.