A few hours before my meeting with Iris at the gaming convention, originally titled Denver’s Gaming Convention, I was getting to work. Sorry, but who is on the marketing team for this convention? Who titles the convention after the city it is in? Never mind, not important. Anyways, while currently unemployed after finishing the beta testing for Z-Project’s new open-world adventure game I took on some pro-bono work for a few buddies who were looking into breaking into the gaming market. Fortunately, and unfortunately, since Riverlight’s entrance into the gaming market, most of the large gaming companies have either merged with Rinc or closed their doors, except for a tiny few.

That means that the majority of the players in the field are small, garage-sized gaming companies with their indie titles. With the advances in technology, they are becoming quite impressive, except for the flying horses, and glitchy walls. Happily, I continue to hope for such glitches because that is my job to find them. And when I can’t find them, I sometimes create them. Don’t worry, I always fix it afterwards, but a man has got to eat. As I think back to my previous exploits, I begin to have a mental chuckle at one of my previous success stories. It was roughly 10 years ago.

I was just about to graduate out of high school, mind you, I graduated high school at the ripe mature age of fifteen. Now, I will just let you ponder for a second what that meant in terms of a social life. Are you done? Okay, so it was the exact opposite. I was what the kids are calling Gucci or dope, basically, I ran that school. All of the football and other sports kids who were failing school, I might have hacked into the school system to ensure that they would be getting the necessary scores to continue into college with some scholarships. As you can imagine, everyone wanted to be my friend, assuming that it would result in an extra grade bump. In reality, I just did it out of boredom, and maybe for the attention. However, the Denver Public School system was just not the challenge I needed. As a result, I started hacking bigger fish and eventually found my way into the world of gaming.

The gaming industry had everything I needed. From hacking into the companies’ servers to get early releases of video games, and even playing around in their code to fix glitches or create even better glitches. By my senior year of college, I had gained a reputation, but by not being a nimrod, I avoided trouble by signing all my work under the pen name Aspect. However, one day I was getting too famous and getting too much attention, so I started creating my own copycats. Let me introduce you to Aspect 2.0 and Asp3ct. Today, Aspect is mostly retired, and I believe Aspect 2.0 is working for the FBI, and no, I do not know who copycatted my copycat and ended up making more money than I do. Nonetheless, Asp3ct does pretty well for himself, but I have begun to enjoy the more honest living I make through being a game tester. Hopefully my mother stopped reading there because I most certainly use my other persona to help cushion my paycheck, sometimes. Okay, fine! I do it all of the time.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

Although, since this is for my good friend Shane, I wasn’t going to be adopting my created persona of Asp3ct and create a good reason for his company to pay me. See, sometimes I can be a charitable guy. However, there was no need for me to “find” any glitches since they were ever-present before my eyes. I decided to re-read the email from Shane, maybe he said something that can assist me, I hoped.

Hey Z,

It’s Shane, remember we meet at that gaming convention a few years back? Anyways, I was reaching out because I need your help. Several buds of mine and I decided to create a fun steampunk game, but we can’t seem to get the flying mechanics down for it to run. Would you mind giving it a look?

Thank you,

Shane

After re-reading this email, I decided that I simply needed to ignore the fact that I can see in the far distance an NPC, a non-player character, continuously walking into a stone wall. Like, who was I to tell a line of code what they should or should not be doing in their free time. Proceeding forward I decided to blast a couple of hours into the game.

“Thank the heavens that is over,” I proclaimed while stretching my hands over my head and hearing the satisfying pops from my spine. “Four hours, four damn hours.” It was exhausting work, but after playing the game for a few hours I saw what was wrong with the flying mechanics in their artfully named city, Cloud City. It then only took me a few minutes to find the error in their code, and now I can email Shane back.

Hey Shane,

So, I see what the problem is. I took a few minutes to get used to the game, and am looking forward to its full release, be sure to set aside a copy for me. I got a look at your code, and it would appear that the algorithm that drives the direction and velocity of the object is incorrect. Hope that helps!

Talk to you soon,

Z

With that little project done I decided to plug some more hours into some of my favorite gaming titles. Glancing down at my watch I saw that it was already 6:15, “Shit, I am going to be late!” Throwing myself out of my office that consisted solely of my desk and the three-screen wide gaming set-up, I jumped across the living room and into the shower. Somewhere along the way, I was able to shoot Iris a text.

Z: Hey, getting dressed. Can’t wait to see you!

Iris: See you soon! By the way, bring you’re A-game.

Alongside her text, she sent me a photo of her wearing my all-time favorite game: Skyrim. With that, I jumped quickly into the scalding hot water and rinsed off for the evening, but I began to stress out about which shirt I am supposed to wear. All I could say is that “she took my idea.”