We partied the night away. Apparently, I didn't even need to turn in the quest for the game to register that I could now trade Gold with Argyle, and buy previously locked products.Argyle gave me my cut and I wasted no time in unlocking a few new alcoholic beverages as well as a couple of meal upgrades for us. We spent the night getting drunk on Appletinis and hard cider.
Eventually, I stumbled back to my room. “I wonder if there's a bed upgrades?” I asked, flopping down face first on to my hay-stuffed mattress.
A prompt appeared in front of my vision. “Bed Upgrades available. Basic Bed with modern mattress, 1 Emerald. Advanced bed, 5 Emeralds; adds well rested bonus of +5% to Stats for four hours. Ultra Deluxe Luxury Bed, 25 Emeralds; adds well rested bonus of +10% to Stats for ten hours.”
Last thing I remembered before spawning in this world was waking up in the lap of luxury. Sure, I only had 500 emeralds from when I had been frozen by a game error, and I wasn't likely to get anymore anytime soon, but this was clearly a change worth spending on. I bought the Ultra Deluxe Luxury Bed. Immediately I felt the bed shift beneath me. Gone was the pokey straw and burlap mattress. It was replaced by a divine pillow, down comforter, and the softest mattress that perfectly contoured to my body.
“Oh, I think I'm in love,” I said. Curling up under the fluffy, warm, ridiculously high thread count sheets. “I may never leave bed again.”
In the morning I discovered two wonderful facts. First of all, sleeping in an Ultra Deluxe Luxury Bed gave me a pretty awesome boost of to all Stats that I could delay for up to two hours to maximize the utility of the bonus. Second, this game did not simulate hangovers. I woke up feeling rested and refreshed and ready to take on the world.
I headed downstairs to the now familiar bacon commercial that greeted me as I entered the common room. “Class Skill ‘I can do That’ activated. SkillC Cooking gained. You have learned from a master. You have gained the Cooking Skill at an increased level. Cooking level 10 Adept. Looks like dinner is on you next time.”
This day just kept on getting better and better. “I’ll just have the basic bacon and eggs,” I said to the barmaid.
“Coming right up.”
“Wait,” I said to her, thinking about my bed. “If I upgrade to a better meal will that give me buffs for the day?”
“Well, of course.” The question brought brightness to her face, like it was her truest wish in all the world too help me with this information. “Meals purchased with Gold will give you a one time buff of up to 10% on Stats or 5% on experience gained.” Her eyes grew wider, and smile, even sweeter. There was some entirely unnecessary, yet distracting bouncing and jiggling with her next words that left me feeling more than little embarrassed for us both.“Meals unlocked with Emeralds will be permanently available at all eateries and can give you up to 15% on your Stats and up to 10% experience gain. Some specialty meals available for unlock at only certain establishments can give better or more unique bonuses.”
Looking at my emerald stash, I still had 475 of them. “Give me a menu of available meal upgrades,” I asked her.
“Of course,” she said as she mimed pulling a menu out of her back pocket, which immediately became a prompt in my vision. I already had a Stat boost from my bed. “Should I get an XP boost or a Skill boost... or would it be better to look for some of those specialty meals that she was talking about?”
Thinking it over, I made my decision. “I’ll take the Super Breakfast Burrito of XP gain.”
“Excellent choice, sir,” said the barmaid. Within moments I had the perfect combination of bacon, egg, cheese, and salsa with guacamole wrapped in a soft, yet crunchy tortilla.
“My god, this is so good.” I could easily spend all of my Emeralds just on food and luxury upgrades. Whoever invented this system was brilliant.
“You've got hot sauce?” I asked the barmaid.
“Spice level can be adjusted in this menu,” she said, gesturing at a spiciness level chart that ranged from ‘mild’ to ‘melt your face atomic'.
“I'll go medium.”
About that time, Argyle stumbled down the stairs. He had undergone quite the transformation. No longer did he wander in and out of the room, replaying the morning's bacon ad. He walked in with confidence, headed right over to me, and sat down. “Good morning, bro.”
“And good morning to you. So, no more noob?”
“No, now that you’ve helped me and we’ve fought together, it just doesn’t seem right.”
I smiled. “What's on our agenda for today?”
“Are you available to help me craft some more items?”
“Well,” I said, taking a big bite out of my breakfast burrito. “I was thinking about that. Uumm,. I think... Oh god. I think… yum. I think I owe you a lot for helping me out with that Jackalope fight. You finally helped me get past the level one block and so I can spare a few days to help you get ahead. But at some point I’m going to want your help with the other quests in this town.”
“Oh yeah. What are your plans, now that you are no longer railroaded into the basic quest?”
“Well, I was thinking... oh my god, this burrito is amazing. I need to do some exploring and some leveling. I really want to see what this game has to offer.”
“You've made up your mind to do an adventurer build, and not a crafting build then?” he asked, looking a little sheepish.
I smiled at him. “Crafting is alright, but I want to get out there. There's so much to see. So much to do.”
“I've been meaning to ask you...” he started, but stopped, fidgeting nervously.
“What have you been meaning to ask?” I prompted.
“It's well...” he looked down at the table. “Have you gotten any of your memories back?”
I shuddered, remembering the dream of the highway. “No, not yet. Why do you ask?”
“So... so you don’t remember anything? I mean, about your life outside or about what's going on out there?”
I had some images of camping. Of being cuddled up next to Kara in a sleeping bag. Of foraging for food.
“I’ve got some memories,” I said. “But it's all kind of hazy. I think I did a lot of backpacking, maybe? I don't know, most of my memories are of camping. At least the ones I can remember. Also, I think I was a student. I can definitely remember being in a classroom and talking to a professor. I don't know; it's still hazy. “
“College students. Maybe you were on break or something like that between semesters?”
“Maybe,” I said, remembering how hot temperatures were. “Maybe it's summer break and I was backpacking and then came here.” That didn't seem right at all, but it might have made sense. “Why are you asking?”
Argyle looked down at the table again. “Well, I was just wondering about what's been going on out there. I mean, I haven’t heard from…” he paused, and his eyes seem to grow watery, like there was tragedy he wanted to ask about, but couldn't bring himself to speak the words. “You see, there haven't been any new people arriving in a while and I was wondering…” his words caused a pit to open up in my stomach. “If Something was wrong out there.”
Something was wrong. I couldn't remember what, but I knew I was trying to run away from it. Whatever it was, it filled me with sadness and terror, loneliness and concern for my loved ones. A car stalled out on the freeway. Of shying away from busy places, malls, stores, cities, and avoiding something.
“Tell me the truth,” said Argyle. “Is the game a flop?”
“What!?” I asked, blinking in surprise with his question.
“The game. It seemed so promising and yet no one new has logged in in a long while. So, like, did the company go belly up? Or are people just not playing it? Maybe they are being diverted to a new noob town or… Is it a flop?”
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His questions stunned me into silence for a moment as I struggled to come up with a response.
“I knew it,” he said. “The game is a complete flop. You're the only person to log in in what feels like months and you've got that Platinum Membership. I bet you bought it for cheap because no one else was buying into the game.” He looked dejected and slouched back in his chair, crossing his arms across his chest.
“No, I got the platinum membership from being caught in the system error, remember. And wait, why would it matter if the game is a flop?” I rubbed my head in confusion.
“Well, so, I told you how I got into the game… And I told you about my girlfriend kicking me out and me losing my job,” he started, tapping his foot and rubbing the back of his neck. His eyes wouldn't meet mine. “Well, so, I figured if I could somehow make enough in game money, I could either keep paying rent on the pod after my term is over. Or maybe I could at least make enough money to get an apartment for a few months, while I go and look for a new job. But if the game is a flop, then no one is going to want to buy anything I make. The gold I make in game won't be worth anything on the outside if no one's playing, you know?”
“Some games crafters can make a lot of money by crafting and selling things...”
“But if there's no one to sell to, then I'm basically screwed. When I get out of here, I'll have no money. No job. No girlfriend. No way to help… I'll basically just be broke with no where to go. I won't have anywhere to stay. I won't have even any way of getting food, and that's not the worst of it.” His eyes fell, and I could see tears forming at the corners of his eyes.
He seemed to be getting worked up into a lather. His breathing got more rapid as he started speaking more rapidly. He started shaking his hands back and forth as he continued enumerating all the various ways in which his life would be over if he couldn't find a way of making money in-game. Just as he seemed right on the edge of a panic attack, he seemed to pause for a moment. He took an unnaturally deep breath, and a half smile crept across his face.
“You know what I need to do?” he asked, the smile broadening. “I need to get back to crafting.” The change was so stark, it took me a moment to wrap my head around. What was even going on?
“Crafting,” I said, not knowing what else to say.
“Yeah,” he said. “Too much time spent worrying about what I can't control. I need to get to crafting.” His eyes flashed with a manic gleam. I almost couldn't believe what I had just seen; how he had gone to from panic attack to excitement and enthusiasm for what, moments before, he thought would be a complete loss.
“It's the whammy,” a voice in my head said. “Man, it really does a number on you meatbags. You know, I think that’s the best part of getting out of my shop. I get to see how dopy your faces get.”
“What is this whammy you keep on talking about,” I asked Fez.
“Well, you see it's an executable kinesthetic subroutine the mental health AI came up with.”
“There's a mental health AI?”
“Of course there is. In this game, people feel real pain, granted at 25% of normal. They go into real-feeling dangerous situations and even have real-looking blood and brushes and even death. A sane person would run away in terror from fighting a giant dragon. So, in the alpha test, panic attacks were common place, but, you see, the immersion systems in games like this monitor you on all kinds of levels. The gameplay monitor AI was given the function to improve gameplay experience, and it was calculated that anxiety problems and trauma constitute a bad gameplay experience. It created an AI to deal with it. The human admins didn’t know what was going on at first, but they saw a steep drop of of anxiety cases and panic attacks, so they named the new AI a mental Health AI. Excellent branding decision if you ask me. So, if it judges that you're about to go into severe panic or other mental health crisis, it nudges you a little.”
“That looks like more than a nudge.”
“It was deemed within acceptable range of limiting freewill and game experience. It simulates the physiological experience of using relaxation techniques.”
“Relaxation techniques?”
“Yeah, the sort of thing you might learn from a therapist. I think it’s based on something called Diabolical, no Dialectical Behavior Therapy, thats it. You know, deep breathing visualizations, things like that. Especially deep breathing really seems to work.”
The description seemed familiar, like I had heard it before, but this seemed nothing like what I thought of as therapy. “How does that work? He doesn’t seem to be in control at all.”
“See, if we simulate it here, then your body does the rest. It starts calming down.”
“Hmm That's seems like a lot more than I might expect from just a simple deep breathing technique.”
“Oh, yeah. You know, the mental health AI has been at it for a while, iterating and improving, now it has all kind of emotion filters and amplifiers and this, that, and the other. You know, in the end, you go from a near panic attack to calm, ready for action. Then the game kind of nudges you to go and act. That way, you can feel the fear of facing down a dragon. Get right to the edge of what you can handle. Then the mental health AI activates and you're left with all the resolve you need to go and tackle whatever it is you're worried about. Really ingenious system.”
“But the game is basically manipulating our emotions.”
“Well, yeah, isn't that the whole point?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, isn't the point of all of this to manipulate your emotions? You play as some kind of a hero going on quests. Saving damsels and getting loot is all just to, you know, simulate some kind of an emotional experience.”
I had to pause for a moment because I honestly couldn't come up with any realistic or rational argument against what he was saying. “Yeah, but directly manipulating our emotions without our knowledge seems wrong somehow.”
“You humans go through all this trouble of creating this simulated world to mess with your emotions. Create AI’s with the capacity to trick you into thinking you’re talking to one of you, like it’s our whole reason for being. Only to balk when it actually messes with your emotions.”
“It just seems so direct.”
“Unlike beaming images directly into your brain?”
“That’s different.”
“Is it?”
“I don't know. There's just something about it that feels wrong.”
“How can I be wrong? It keeps people playing the game. It even boosts profit. Look at your friend Argyle over there. A minute ago, he was seized with terror. Now he's contemplating how best to tackle his day of crafting and he's probably even thinking, ‘you know, some of those thoughts I had before. They make a lot of sense. What I better do is spend more money to buy the tools I need in order to get ahead in this game.’ See, simple.”
“No, not simple.” I said. “Not simple. At all. It's unethical to exploit the technology like that.”
“Oh, I'm just an AI. I don't do ethics. That's definitely a meatbag kind of thing.”
I just could not believe what I was hearing. A whole system to exploit our fear and panic and turn it around into spending more time in the game, into buying gear and resources. It was too much to even contemplate. I looked down at the burrito in my hands, wondering if it had even been my decision to buy this today or if there had been some other manipulation technique the AI used.
“Look, don't be so sour,” said Fez. “Salespeople have been using emotional manipulation techniques since the dawn of time. Don’t get me started on politicians; like, it’s all they do. Creating artificial scarcity, selling people on tragedies, even tragedies that may never happen. I mean, how do you think the insurance industry even functions without manipulating you into thinking about tragedy? I mean, it's not like they ever pay out or anything. It's really a dumb investment.”
“You got a point there. I never…” I took a bite out of my burrito. “Oh my god. This is so amazing. What was I thinking about?” I looked over at Argyle. “Oh right. We were planning out what we're going to do over the next couple of days.”
Argyle seemed to snap out of whatever he was contemplating at the same time I did.“Alright. Let's do this.” We got up and waved goodbye to the barmaid who smiled in her contented blissful way and waved back.
“Come back again. Anytime. Your room will always be ready.”
With breakfast completed, it was finally time for what I'd been waiting so long for. Time to turn in my quest and finally level up.
Argyle wanted to keep crafting, so we agreed to meet up later, after I turned in my quest. Now that we had a stockpile of legitimate crafting components from our fight with the Jackalopes we were going to branch out from simple circlets. Argyle was hopeful that he could have a pretty productive day, even starting without me to help.
I could tell right away on my mini map that the city had changed. I could see several side streets that opened up and paths I'd never taken before were now open to me. The cart had been moved from the street next to the bakery. “Finally, new places!” Even the idea of just a few more blocks felt like stepping out of my house after being trapped inside for two years. Was it odd that I was also excited that there might be new advertisements? “This game is getting to me.”
“Hello, adventurer! Aah, it appears that you have completed a quest. Would you like to turn in your quest for rewards?” The clerk at the front of the Adventurers Guild paused with that frozen look on his face that I'd come to realize meant that he needed my input before he would move. I clicked yes on the prompt and 12 Silverberries disappeared from my inventory. “Congratulations, you have completed quest: Gathers Silverberries. Level up. You are level 2. Level up. You are level 3. Level up. You are level 4. Level up. You are level 5. Level up. You are level 6.”
Each one of these level up notifications came along with +2 to each of my Stats, +15 to Health, Mana, and Stamina. Along with the notifications there was also a rush of pleasure. I felt exhilarated. Like I had just taken a shower, run a mile and eaten an amazing meal all at the same time. It was intoxicating.
“Whoa, that was incredible,” I gasped, running my hands through my hair like I was in a shampoo commercial.
“Yeah, I don't know why, but for some reason that level of rush was put into place to help you humans incentive leveling up or something. Seems a little weird, but hey, everything you humans do seems weird to me. What else is new.” Fez had been sitting patiently on the edge of the counter, waiting for my antics to come to an end.
“Is it like that every time?”
“Not every time. The more levels you go up at once the better it'll be.”
“Even more reason to keep leveling up.” I was starting to feel a bit giddy from the rush.
I felt good. Really good. Like I could take on the world. Like I could take tackle a thousand Jackalopes single-handedly. “You know what Fez let's go adventuring. Let's go adventuring right now.”
“Aren’t you going to meet up with the dwarf to do more crafting? I was kind of looking forward to seeing you guys make more fancy hats. Hey, maybe you could pop in some shops and watch a few more ads on the way?”
“All that can wait! It's time to explore.” I would like to say that I didn't see the "mental resistance check failed" prompt, but I would be lying. Seeing it meant that I hadn't failed it by much, and I was aware that I was being manipulated. The reality was, I didn't care. Finally, I would get what I'd been craving since my first day in this game. I would finally, finally be able to explore the world, quest, defeat monsters, and level up!
I lifted my stick into the air and struck a pose. "To adventure!”
Gone were thought to the the outside world. Of being stuck, of finding Kara, of worrying about where she was, or if we were still together. Right now, I was ready to get out there and started adventuring for real. Nothing was gonna hold me back.