Chapter 8: The Bottom 1%

“PVP,” I said, and ‘PVP?’ I posted.

“What, in Third Eye?” Lena asked.

AlephLambda: Yes, you’ll have many exciting opportunities to engage with other players as we roll out new features during the beta period. :)

“That wasn’t in the Kickstarter,” Lena said. She must have pulled up the page on her computer to check, because she added, “Yeah, not a peep. Dammit, this makes the pay-to-win shit so much worse.”

No argument from me. I cared less than her how much whales could pay to get ahead of minnows like me in an essentially single player game. A competitive game, on the other hand, felt like absolute garbage if you could buy your way around game balance.

OldCampaigner: What if I’m not interested in PVP?

AlephLambda: Aren’t you? :)

I understood now why Lena found AlephLambda’s emoticons mocking.

OldCampaigner: Not in an ARG.

Forget the business model, how was the gameplay model supposed to work?

OldCampaigner: I want to cooperate to figure out the puzzle.

AlephLambda: Oh, cooperation will be vital to your success! :)

OldCampaigner: How am I supposed to cooperate and compete at the same time?

I hit enter and sent the line, but when I read it back, I started typing another without waiting for a response.

OldCampaigner: Wait.

AlephLambda waited.

OldCampaigner: It’s going to be like a team scavenger hunt?

AlephLambda: I’m not allowed to tell you that. ;)

It was going to be like a team scavenger hunt.

My fingers flexed over my keyboard. Hovered over my phone, where Third Eye waited. I felt hot, the heat radiating from the nape of my neck, down my back, up my head, brain deep, and I was pretty sure it didn’t come from the on-again off-again furnace in the apartment.

Possibilities spooled out in my mind.

What does an ARG need? First, it needs a mystery, a hook, something to make you want to poke at it. Second, it needs clues clear enough that you can meaningfully poke. Third, in a seeming paradox, it needs clues obscure enough that you have to poke.

Therein lies the problem.

You haven’t really made a game, by most definitions. You’ve made a puzzle and crowdsourced the solution.

In the human brain, correlation does equal causality, no matter how much we logic ourselves into saying otherwise. People will believe coincidences aren’t, every time. So when something genuinely isn’t a coincidence, they’ll guess it right even if it’s absurd.

Now multiply that by however many players the ARG successfully hooks. Individually, they believe everything is connected. Collectively, they put together a wiki to prove it. Then they winnow down all the clues and red herrings and solve your ARG in a month, instead of the year it was supposed to last to tie in to the release of some shitty movie that’s way less interesting than the ARG itself.

But what if they didn’t make a wiki? Not a public wiki, anyway. What if they found clues and shared them with only a select few teammates, while actively trying to obscure them from every other player?

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Now you’ve taken a puzzle and turned it into a goddamn tournament.

I’d never played an ARG like that, but as a kid, I’d played the analog equivalent.

Summer camp had not delighted me. I’ll swipe left on kayaking, hiking, rock climbing, orienteering, and, yeah, call me a shithead but also on being volunteered to clean up campsites after tourists trash them. All of which I’d been dragooned into four summers in a row.

Scavenger hunts, though?

If you bury some biodegradable tokens in the middle of a forest and tell me the team that finds the most wins? If you put me on a team with the other kids in my lodge, including one girl who’s my first really brutal crush, all of whom have spent the last week and a half learning to regard me as a surly, nerdy, socially cancerous little shit?

I will kayak, hike, rock climb, orienteer, sleep under every star, make every fire, and sweep your whole freaking campground to lead that team to victory.

In case you’re wondering, I led, we won, and for my efforts I was rewarded with being ignored by the rest of my lodge the second the counselors handed us our trophies. How much did I love team scavenger hunts? I threw myself into them the next three years anyway.

I said, “Shit.”

“Now what?” Lena asked, from right over my shoulder.

“Shit!” I jumped in my chair and shot her a glare. “Don’t sneak up on me.”

She laughed like I’d made a joke, then leaned over me and peeked at my screen. “What’s got you jumping, anyway?”

You, I thought. But I nodded to the screen. “This is starting to sound really cool.”

She cocked her head. “And that’s bad?”

“If we’re trying to stay mad at Third Eye.”

“No worries. I can stay mad at anything.” She scanned the last exchange of messages. “Team scavenger hunts sound fun?”

“You ever try one?” I asked.

“Oh, sure. I used to go out with a squad of my schoolmates every weekend. We called ourselves the ‘teenage Lena sure loves tromping through the poison ivy with a bunch of assholes’ club. Weirdly specific, in retrospect.”

“Right. Stupid question.” Lena had been homeschooled through her high school years, and from what I gathered had very much preferred it. I shook my head. “I always liked them. I think you would, too, if you let yourself. Maybe not the wilderness parts. Or the teamwork, especially the teamwork where you have to rely on somebody else. The competitive puzzle solving, though, you’d dig.”

“I will solve the shit out of a good puzzle,” she said. “Also, get super frustrated if anybody else on my team fails to.”

“I’d be prepared to suffer your wrath, but for that to happen, I’d have to fail.” I held a straight face longer than anyone should have to. Whole seconds! Eventually, though, Lena stopped glaring and started giggling. Worth.

She hugged my shoulders and rested her chin on the top of my head. She felt so warm and I was burning up. Were we both running fevers? Where would we have caught something? Or were we just loopy from all the crazy Third Eye shit we’d dealt with?

I knew my cheeks and chest would be flushed bright red, so I craned my neck forward to hide them without dislodging her.

I felt warm, maybe too warm, but this was nice. I closed my eyes and let myself relax.

So of course, a Discord chime snapped us both alert.

I was still on my DM with AlephLambda, but they hadn’t sent me any more messages. I put most of my servers on mute. With Lena hugging me, I knew she hadn’t sent me anything. My brother Benji had a server set up for our extended family but almost nobody used it – oh, who was I kidding, if I had super mute I’d use it on that one.

Which just left the Official Third Eye server.

Either somebody there had @’ed me – why? – or one of the people tagged Developer had posted a notification to the whole server.

I cracked an eye open and peeked up at Lena.

“Let’s get the bad news.” She groaned, stretched, let go of me. She bopped my shoulder. “Just remember.”

“What?”

“You’re the one who made me save my rockets.”

“Since when can I make you do anything?” I clicked over to the server.

It was a notification. As expected.

VisibleFromSpace had posted it. From what I’d seen, scrolling through the server backlog, it and the two lines before represented their first words on the server. I almost smiled at their handle and avatar combo again, but then I read their messages.

VisibleFromSpace: I’d like to personally thank all of our backers who’ve made the first day of the Third Eye beta such a success. Your enthusiasm and curiosity bowled us over.

VisibleFromSpace: Unfortunately, they’ve also bowled our resources over! We’re working hard to expand our capacity in preparation for launch, but in the meantime, we’ll need to gauge how much we need. With that in mind:

Those lines weren’t marked as notifications. Not everybody needed to see them. They just contextualized the final line.

VisibleFromSpace: At the end of each game day, the bottom 1% of users will have their beta access suspended until launch. Thanks for your patience.

Then they went offline, and the server went haywire.