While waiting for Bairn, we decided to start a fire and cook our catch from that morning. Initially, I had tried to clean the fish like I had been taught to do all my life, but it proved unnecessary. As soon as I chopped off the head, each transformed from a perfectly lifelike Rainbow Trout into a very large fish stick, breading and all.
Therefore, we skewered and roasted them like we had the panther meat the night before. Within minutes, the outside was a golden brown, and the inside was flaky, boneless, and delicious.
“What did you think of Nia,” I asked, swallowing my final bite.
“Smart. Gorgeous. Terrifying,” Miguel said succinctly.
I was actually referring to the revelations she had provided, but his description was spot on. Her ability to pivot on a dime when confronted with our presence, having obviously had this world to herself for so long, was intellectually astonishing. We had encountered new information slowly and in pieces – and with each other to discuss it with – and I still always felt like I was several steps behind whatever I was supposed to understand.
I thought about her quick calculations of what she would need to do and the time it would take, and I realized she would – at that moment – still be frantically scouring the news, less than a minute into her research, while we had eaten, slept, dressed, crafted, learned, and developed.
I let myself linger on the phenomenon. I had kept thoughts of the time distortion at bay, largely because their ramifications would be too extensive and massive to deal with. But this particular instance was soothing. The real world had always felt too fast, particularly as friends and family had passed me by in the last few years. It was nice to finally have a little extra time.
“You?” Miguel asked.
“Me what?” I responded, still lost in thought.
“Nia,” he responded, accustomed to my mind wandering.
“Oh, yeah. What you said,” I answered. “Most of what she told us scared the shit out of me, but I’ll feel infinitely better when she gets back. If she comes back. The world is starting to make a little more sense, but it would be amazing to fill in the thousands of remaining gaps.”
“Speaking of gaps,” Miguel answered. “This would usually be where the NPC advisor returns to continue our tutorial.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “But I’m not sure how much he knows, really. He said we’re the first outsiders, aka players, he’s met. And didn’t he say his grandfather’s grandfather? How many generations would pass in three years?”
I began trying to do the mental math: roughly a thousand IRL days, with a day equaling a minute, but in reverse, carry the two, so…
Miguel was watching my eyebrows furrow and brain melt as I briefly tried counting on my fingers.
“If her conversion is constant,” Miguel said patiently, saving me before I had an aneurysm, “it would be over a million years. That’s obviously not true. So it must vary. Maybe depending on player presence, or server downtime, or any number of variables.”
The unknowability actually made me feel better. The math would have killed me.
“Ok. Cool. Well, while we don’t know how long dwarves live, we do know it’s been five generations,” I said, trying to get to something solid – “since his great great grandfather met players.”
“That’s assuming his relative didn’t get the player list from some boot paper,” Miguel added. “Could be five generations or ten or fifty. It doesn’t really matter at this point, right?” he asked, genuinely looking for confirmation.
I nodded hesitantly, still wanting a handle on how long the game had evolved without programmer supervision.
“What I think matters most,” he continued, “is that a lot has changed, but that this world we’re in was an actual game. The best we can do is sort out what’s original and what’s new – if we have any hope of playing it correctly.”
That part I agreed with.
Unfortunately, even after our meal and math and thought experiment, Bairn still hadn’t returned. This was definitely a "game is broken" issue, since he had already listed all the other sites we needed to see, so we decided to look for him.
We were feeling a little safer with our newly acquired strength, and by the classic rules of gaming, this first location would essentially be “base.” The cobblestone streets and medieval houses should be empty of enemies, traps, or other dangers – at least during the day.
Still, with the world broken and Nia’s “knife’s edge” warning, before setting out, Miguel decided to craft a few arrows for his quiver, and I sharpened my wooden sword on a grinding stone.
Of everything Bairn had mentioned – the loom, the tanner, the cemetery – the forge was my first priority. Even a sharpened wooden sword is still made of wood.
However, neither of us could help entering the first standing building we found. While the dwarf had not mentioned a library, there one stood, inevitably with a wealth of desperately needed information inside.
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We pushed open the door and were greeted with the smell of ancient paper – tomes and scrolls stacked in wooden shelves from floor to ceiling and in every direction. As we stepped softly along the rows, I traced my fingertips along bindings even more ancient than those in Nia’s cottage. Every few feet, some mesmerizing title would be illuminated with shafts of light from the broken ceiling.
The First Dailish Conquest
The Three Kingdoms of Eyverluth
Banishing the Wyverns to the Wilds
As I reached to take The Three Kingdoms, hoping it would explain the three cities Miguel had seen upon arrival, I stumbled over a stack of books that went sliding across the floor in front of me, moving much more smoothly than they should have.
Glancing down, the light from the shiny surfaces were almost blinding. As my eyes adjusted to a laminated finish, a title came into focus.
“Maslow.”
It was the only word on a relatively modern book cover.
And seeing a "book" was strange. RPGs were only supposed to have tomes. They should be leather bound and have almost illegible calligraphy on them. They should glow with magic or be tattered by time. But this? This was a glossy paperback like you’d see at the airport. Confused, I picked it up and flipped to the first page.
The image in front of me was ultra strange and totally familiar.
It should have been a map of Middle Earth. It should have been the lost history of a fallen kingdom. It should have been a love letter from an orc to a dragon. But instead, it was a pyramid, and one I knew really, really well.
It was Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need.
“What’s it about?” Miguel asked, having just walked up behind me.
“Psychology,” I answered.
I could feel his eyes roll.
“Dude,” he said with disgust, “there’s cool shit literally everywhere, and that’s what you pick up?”
“Yeah,” I said emphatically. “That’s the point. Everything else on these shelves is ancient and obscure. It’s lore and magic and fantasy. A book on modern psychology shouldn’t be here.
Miguel only mentioned Psychology or Anthropology when making fun of my doubly useless double major in the Liberal Arts. And because I lived in my parents’ garage – separate door or not – I usually let it slide. But of all the books in all the libraries in all the hyper-real-worlds-integrated-into-a-capsule…this subject showed up in mine. He could sense the intensity of my gaze.
“Fine,” he said. “Tell me.”
For years, I had listened with great interest – if not complete understanding – to Miguel discuss algorithmic trading platforms that managed risk through diversified domestic and foreign ETFs, but he never wanted to hear about Psychology.
But now he had to.
“It’s the fundamentals of basic human psychology, specifically about how our needs evolve, but only if the previous needs – those at the bottom of the pyramid – are met.”
I felt him yawn.
“Dude, it’s actually pretty interesting,” I insisted. “And now that I think about it, it’s pretty much built into most RPGs – especially survival RPGs. It’s just one of those things that’s so prevalent that we don’t even know it’s there.”
“For example?” he asked.
“For example, the most basic needs are Physiological. We’re just trying to stay alive. And for most of human history, we rarely thought beyond that immediate demand. It’s so important, and so time-consuming, that people never got any further than: eat, drink, make babies. That’s it. For millions of years. And strangely, maybe because those needs are now easy to meet, we play video games that make them hard.”
“Huh,” he said, mulling it over. “Eat, drink, hook up, shoot things in the face.”
“Cool,” he added, meaning it.
It was the most enthusiastic he’d ever been about ancient human history or universal mindsets.
“And the second level?” he asked.
“Well, to some, it’s an extension of the first. It’s ‘Safety,’ but for Maslow it was less immediate than ‘don’t starve.’ It would be longer-term goals like good health, amassing resources, and ensuring personal security.”
“Base building and healing,” he commented.
“Exactly,” I said, genuinely excited for the first time since our arrival. “I mean, this book is precisely what we’ve been going through and wishing for, but even if the book hadn’t shown up – these needs and hardships would have seemed perfectly normal. That’s what games are.”
“Wow. Yeah,” he said, letting the pyramid collide with every RPG he had ever played. “Interesting. What’s next?”
“Love and Belonging.”
“Ugggh,” he responded.
Miguel didn’t like the soft stuff.
“One, everyone wants to be loved,” I insisted. “Two, it doesn’t necessarily mean the rom com version. It just means that we want – need – to be accepted by society. And evolutionarily, of course we do. If someone was neglected by their tribe or ostracized by society, then they died. That simple. They were literally thrown to the wolves.”
“Okay, I get that. And in games?” he asked.
“In games, we choose a race, or join a guild, or create a raiding party. It’s why there’s always a knight, a rogue, and a mage. We can’t do this alone.”
“Arguable,” he commented. “But yes, often that’s true. Next?”
“Esteem – once these other needs are met, then we want to be respected, which is a step beyond being accepted.”
This one he got. He had always loved being respected by his peers. Or his teachers. Or his bosses. Everyone, really. Respect was Miguel’s currency of choice – so much so that he didn’t even comment.
“Next?” he asked.
“Self-actualization and Transcendence.”
“Sounds stupid,” he responded quickly.
“Ignore the terms then,” I suggested, annoyed. “If you have food, water, safety, love, and respect – then you can want even grander things, like a legacy. Or God. Or meaning. Essentially anything that isn’t really necessary.”
He turned this over in his head, nodding his acceptance.
“It’s like our conversations about poverty,” I continued. “You can’t have an existential crisis if you’re having an actual crisis.”
“Okay. That I get,” Miguel conceded.
In twenty-eight years, that was our first full psychological discussion. I thought it went quite well.
“So what does that mean for the game, and why the hell is there a shiny new book in this medieval world?” Miguel asked.
“As for the second one, I have no idea,” I admitted. “Regarding the first, I think it’s a roadmap, but it’s one we’ve already been following.”
I paused.
“So…this book wasn’t meant for us,” I thought out loud. “It’s not part of the game. But we were looking for evolutions, not additions.”
It didn’t make any sense, but I said it anyway.
“It must have been put here for everyone else.”
“Who else is there?” Miguel asked.
It registered.
“You mean NPCs??? You think this book is a new set of instructions for all NPCs.”
When he said it like that, it sounded insane. NPCs had very basic coding. It was all “If…Then.” If a player does X, then you do Y. If another NPC does A, then you do B. Their behavior looked complex, but it was actually a finite number of programmed responses to a finite number of planned behaviors. But Maslow’s hierarchy would be an organic, ultra complex, very human-like evolution of thought and action. It would literally change everything.
Which was probably why the game was broken.