Chapter 6: The Actual Game
Lena flopped back into her chair. “I don’t know what we’re trying to figure out anymore, or what we’d do about it if we did. Break for the night?”
I’d run this long on adrenaline, incredulity, and the two slices of pizza I’d grabbed between mindfucks. Now that she’d reminded me of it, I sagged. I saw the subreddit and the supposedly official Discord out of the corner of my eye. Opening them meant moving my hand and that suddenly felt daunting. Thinking about them? Overwhelming.
“Break for the night,” I agreed.
Lena stretched her arm behind her back. Her fingers scrabbled on the desk until they found her phone. She pulled it forward and held it up in front of her face. “You know what we haven’t done?”
“I don’t know much of anything right now.”
“Played Third Eye.”
I blurted out a laugh.
“Where is the lie, though?” she asked.
We’d signed up. Activated the app. Stared at each other through its camera filter. Collected our signup gifts, one in considerably more dramatic fashion. Posted about it.
But I hadn’t done anything more than glance at what looked like a disastrous UI. I remembered wincing at the currencies or stats I’d seen crammed into the top bar, back before I had bigger concerns.
“You’re not wrong,” I said.
“Go get your phone,” Lena said. “Let’s at least see if this shit’s gonna be fun.”
I dragged myself from the chair and into the bedroom. I could grab my phone, sure. Or I could fall into bed and bury my head in my pillow.
Would I disappoint Lena? Would I wake up way too early? Would I turn my unanswered questions into nightmares?
I suspected yes to all.
Ultimately, though, I grabbed the phone and turned back for pizza’s sake. If I left my two remaining slices out there, I gave Lena fifty-fifty odds of eating them or forgetting them on the counter. The only way they’d get to the fridge was if I went back and made the save.
I put it away first, in case Third Eye proved distracting again, so my first real experience of the game came let’s play style. Specifically, the kind of let’s play where you like the player but don’t give a shit about the game, so you turn off your monitor and fall asleep to it. Just me?
“Uggggh.” Lena pitched her voice performatively loud.
I closed the fridge and ambled over to her desk. “That good, huh?”
She held her phone up. She’d progressed further into Third Eye’s interface than I’d dared. Specifically, to the in-game store.
Every option remained inactive, grayed out. Literally grayed, with a chonky, 90’s-ass pixelation effect I’d never seen a phone game use and could have gone the rest of my life without. Not only did it look like I imagined Windows 3.1 must have, in the before times, it clashed horribly with the over-saturated color palette of the rest of the UI.
That was the good news.
Because if Lena could have tapped those options, she could have bought any of the following:
Tickets, Gold, Gems, Crystals, Keys, Scrolls –
She scrolled down.
– Grimoires, Treats, Maps –
Kept scrolling.
– Rations, Potions, Flasks –
And more.
– Wood, Stone, Iron –
The scrollbar extended further.
“How much more is there?” I asked.
“Check out the bottom,” she said. She flicked her finger across the screen. It zipped past until it showed me the penultimate entries:
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Hit Points, Mind Points. If you’ve played any games I shouldn’t have to tell you why being able to buy those with real money sucks the life out.
They paled in comparison to the final purchase, though: Experience Points. XP.
Once this store went live, either further in the beta or after full release, a player could input a credit card number and Third Eye would output permanent power boosts. The textbook definition of pay-to-win.
“Give it to me straight, doc,” I said. “As a professional mobage reviewer, how bad is it?”
“Mobage? You want to know how this compares to the kind of pay-to-win you get from Asia’s finest mobile cash extractors?” Lena snorted, but it must have seemed too much like a laugh to her because her expression curdled into seriousness. She shook her head. “Fuck. Cam, this would be bad for a Facebook game.”
I winced. “It’s not that bad, surely? I didn’t see stamina on the list.”
“I poked around a little while you spent a suspiciously long time in the bedroom with that phone and those pictures of me in Third Eye.”
“If that amount of time was suspicious, I’d need to pay for stamina.”
“Hey, you said it, not me.”
I gave her the finger. “Seriously, though, you think it’s Facebook bad?”
“Stamina’s one of the very few things you can’t buy, for some reason, but I read some item descriptions. Rations replenish it.”
So we’d be locked out of playing after a certain amount of actions, forced to either wait a day or pay to keep going. A generous person might say that’s the same as pumping quarters into an arcade machine; I’d say most arcades closed before I turned ten and I’d been waiting for this business model to follow them.
What I actually said was, “Shit.”
“In my professional opinion,” Lena said, “exactly.”
I slunk back to my computer chair and cradled my phone in my lap. I glanced at the PC; I hadn’t put it to sleep. Reddit and Discord almost looked appealing, compared to waking up my phone and confronting Third Eye’s gameplay.
“Shit,” I repeated, under my breath.
Why did this hit so hard?
This morning, I’d never expected to hear about Third Eye again. This afternoon, Lena’d said she expected a beautiful disaster and I’d laughed at the idea it would be beautiful.
But it had been.
Its graphics, its tracking. Its insane, drone-in-every-city physical signup bonuses. Hell. Even its art design ruled, something you couldn’t achieve just by throwing money at the problem. You needed talent, real talent, to make some of us beautiful.
I’d let myself forget the ‘disaster’ part.
I sighed and fired up the Third Eye app. It took a few seconds to load, even though I spent a decent chunk of my disposable income keeping my phone only a couple generations out of date. The screen showed the Third Eye logo and a rotating circle, no graphics or hints or tips to distract me.
I flushed, annoyed, hot, ready to curse.
They make revolutionary tracking software, melt server farms to show users off in a server-side photo filter, pull stunts like the amulets. But their damn game doesn’t even load properly on a Note 10?
Before I made myself look more ridiculous, the loading screen resolved into the UI disaster I’d glanced at in the afternoon.
I gave the store – with its generic shopping cart icon – a glare, but ignored it for now. With no stock-image scroll to fill it up, the main screen was blank white with those Win 3.1-ass menu bars. Text at the top displayed HP, MP, XP and Tickets, so either those were the main currencies or the UI was worse than I expected. Bad enough they weren’t full-justified. They crowded on the left of the menu bar like a line from the world’s dorkiest haiku.
I had 10 HP and MP, 0 Tickets. They couldn’t even spring for free Tickets to get me sucked into... whatever Tickets did? XP, on the other hand, I’d been comped to the tune of 33. Out of a hundred, or a hundred thousand? The interface gave no indication.
“How much experience do you have, Lena?” I called.
“Twenty-six.”
Apparently, Magi of the Second Circle didn’t start with extra. Weirdly fair, in light of the awful promise of the cash shop. “I wonder why I got more than you.”
“Glass ceiling.” She stuck her tongue out.
“Heh.” What had we done differently, though? I tried tapping the XP tab and it expanded into a full window with way too much white space for the exact same information I’d seen on the main screen. No further details.
I pointed my phone at her and flipped to the camera.
“More tests?” she asked.
“Yeah, actually.”
She raised her eyebrow. Why not? I stared at her and she looked down on me. When I looked at her avatar I never wanted to stop.
I forced myself to.
Back to the app. I shook my head at the contrast. From the sublime to the archaic.
“You trying to grind on me, Cam?” Lena asked. I must have flushed, because she grinned. “Did it work?”
“I’d like to think you’d notice.” I checked the app and shook my head. I hadn’t gotten more XP for looking at her. Too bad. I might never get bored of that kind of grinding. Too bad, also, because the amount of time I’d spent staring at her had been my best guess for where my extra XP had come from.
Why did every part of Third Eye have to turn into a headache?
“What about HP?” I asked. “MP?”
“A thousand and a hundred,” she said.
“Ah. Found the pay to win.”
“They hid it?” She sounded flippant, but she crouched lower in her chair. “Where are you at?”
“Ten and ten.”
“Oh, bullshit!” She clenched her fist around her phone. (Through mine, with a surreptitious flick, I saw flames surge up around her grip.) “I didn’t spend five grand to cheat.”
“Tell that to Third Eye Productions.” I shrugged.
Lena didn’t. “You’re damn right I will.”
She spun her chair around and opened Discord.