Three teenagers--Abraxa, Sash, Lilith--and one of them dreams of computers. In the dream the teenager is typing, the sky dark and a candle burning on the desk: blue light, red light, sandy brown hair concealed in a green hoodie with the name of a surf shop. Beside the teenager is a mug of soda, black and ninetiesish and advertising a radio station over whose frequency the teenager has painted a pentagram in red nail polish, a mug that''s long gone flat, but from which the teenager sips. The candle is the holder for a tea light, which in the dream seems to burn forever. Dreaming, the teenager programs while the candle burns forever. The teenager is using the computer to make a mosaic. The keyboard chooses colors, and each click places a tile. Click: cyan, click: green, click coral, click violet.
The teenager is drawing an ocean. How did they not realize this before? They are drawing an ocean and a shore. They are drawing a woman standing on the shore in a black dress: click gray, click silver, click black. Black on a computer is no tiles at all: no pixels, just dark, at rest. The woman in the mosaic is looking into the screen. If the teenager continues to click, the woman will become more and more real. She will become so real that she can move--she will turn around--the teenager will see her face. The teenager yearns for this.
And yet in the moment the teenager sees her face, something will come to a stop. The teenager gets up; they don''t want to finish the mosaic yet. They want to see the ocean, for real. With the speed of dreams, they are in their father''s car, driving to the ocean. (Did they steal it? Yes, they probably stole it: they''ve done it before; their shitty school friends came over to watch horror movies and play Super Nintendo games and drink punch made from powder, sugar, stolen vodka; the father puts his earplugs in; everything''s allowed.) The teenager is driving a stolen car, the candle burning on the dashboard. Travis Dark is playing on cassette. The houses of Venice, California, are bright.
The teenager parks the car on the sand. When they step out of the car, the tide has already risen: sand covers their bare feet, seawater washes it away. They walk, step by squishing step. All the colors of the mosaic are in the ocean, bright as noon, except the sky is void, erased. No one else is on this beach. The teenager thinks about Lilith and Sash, whom the teenager has never met, except online, except in dreams. Then the teenager places the candle in the sand, and the surf comes up to meet it, and water starts to flow between candle and sand. It''ll drown--or no, the wind will blow it out.
But then the tide rises--the surf comes in stronger--and the candle, rather than drowning, floats. The teenager on the sand watches the candle float away. The earth is curved, so certainly the fire will disappear soon behind the horizon. But it doesn''t. Instead, as it grows distant, it rises, rises until it joins the stars, which are just now waking up. 1. Querent The following is an FAQ for Saga of the Sorceress , forthcoming from the video game corporation Invocation LLC in 1998. You are a teenage girl, and you will always believe in your dreams, and that is why your video game will be released in 1998.
Everything depends on this. Here are some technical notes on the world of Saga of the Sorceress. The game is constructed in the CraftQ adventure game editor, available as shareware from Capitol Computer Programmers and widely distributed on Internet networks such as America Online. (This is where you--Sash--and your friends, the other two stakeholders of Invocation LLC, all independently downloaded it. You found it while searching for fan art from the Mystic Knights video game series; you changed your life.) All the objects in a CraftQ game like Saga of the Sorceress are constructed from fixed-width text. Think of a typewriter, the letter I taking up the same horizontal space as the W. CraftQ uses the widely adopted fixed-width text standard ASCII, which contains 256 total characters.
The first thirty-two ASCII values are normally invisible, reserved for program instructions, but CraftQ displays them as symbols. On many computers, char no. 2 is how a program represents the start of a text file. In a CraftQ game, however, char 2 renders as a smiley face. Char 2 is the CraftQ convention for representing a human being. Each of the 256 ASCII text characters can appear in one of sixteen basic colors: white, cyan, violet, green, red, blue, and so on. A game designer can combine two colors, one in the foreground and one in the background, to produce subtle, even painterly effects. (The player is traditionally shown as a char 2 smiley face, white text, blue background.
) A CraftQ game is divided into screens called ROOMs, and each ROOM is arranged in eighty columns and twenty-five rows of characters. A typical CraftQ room looks like this: [image placeholder - unable to include in this preview] A typical CraftQ room looks horrible. It doesn''t look like a game. Text mode is for the DOS prompt, for the point-of-sale computers you once saw at your father''s postal station while waiting for him to finish work. (Your parents have only recently begun to trust you to walk home alone: Anything might happen , your mother tells you. The last thing I need is you getting killed. ) Text mode is for banks, cash register displays, video store customer account systems. It''s absurd to make a game in text mode.
Text mode was never meant for games. Text mode graphics were out of date even when CraftQ was first released, around the same time as Microsoft Windows 3.1. The people who programmed CraftQ used text mode because they had no other choice. They wanted to make games, and text mode was the tool at hand for that. To a pioneer, a tool is anything you already own. To a pioneer, a tool is always beautiful. You understand that.
When you see text mode now, you don''t see a cash register. You see color--you see frescoes, mosaics--you see your future, all mapped out. When you''re making a CraftQ game, you are a body at a computer. Teenage body--gravity heavier on you now than before--squinting in the Brooklyn streetlight that comes through your living room window, once your mother''s asleep and you''ve moved aside the heavy curtains she uses to seal in the space: prying eyes, we don''t need them to see our business . Your cup of water with ice, which you keep on the floor so as not to spill on the keyboard. A notebook at your wrist for observations, lists of instructions. Good posture, wrists and fingers curved as if at a piano. Clarity of mind comes from good form.
A body is a filter, the one you sadly need in order to make a CraftQ game. Keep the filter clear. Try to forget its presence. Yet when you play a CraftQ game, you''re not a body anymore--you''re not Sash--you''re not anyone. You''re whatever the game says you are. You''re ASCII text, information: a smiley face, char 2, white on navy. And when you step in any of four directions, using the arrow keys on the keyboard of your aging PC--150 MHz burning at 166 overclock, fan blades whipping the air to cool the electric fire--the PC sound card renders a whispery tick tick tick. I''m talking about you here, and after, because you are the player in a game.
A game is an experience that happens to you. A typical CraftQ game can contain anywhere from one to almost ninety ROOMs full of friends, treasures, puzzles, or enemies. There are four default enemies, which the in-game documentation describes thus: [heart] WITCHES: They fire magic seduction spells at you, but don''t be fooled! [club] PYROS: They try to use their burning bodies to damage you. Who do they work for? [diamond] GOLDMEN: Their golden armor is so tough, it takes multiple attacks to bring them down! [spade] KILLERS: The most dangerous of all. Are they even human? There are other default objects, according to the in-game documentation: BLOCKS, TNTS, PYRAMID CIRCUITS, PARALYZERS, CLOCK SPINNERS, COUNTERCLOCK SPINNERS, GREENTEETHS, ZAPS, RAYS, COLLECTORS, GENDERSWAPS, ICE SLIDES, HYPNOSPIRALS, ILLUSION ZONES. All of these are useless to you. The CraftQ online community, in the seven long years since the initial release of CraftQ in 1991, has long since evolved beyond using the default objects and enemies. Seven years of teenagers just like you, all releasing games, playing games, writing games that respond to games: themes have evolved, fads, practices.
One teenager released a whole game of dos and don''ts when programming in CraftQ: don''t use the default objects near the top of the list. It''s social death to use the default objects. The themes of the games evolved, too: early games about solving puzzles in ancient pyramids and spooky islands giving way to games with real diversity of genre. The top CraftQ games of 1998, were you to really sit down and make a list (you''ve done this, but not recently; a flaw in your practice?) satirize banal TV shows, contain scenes of shocking and boundary-pushing graphic violence, explore modern sexuality. Sometimes, when you are lying in your bed unable to sleep, you think about analogies for the CraftQ scene in the larger tradition of human culture. Popular music: once the measure of a great performer was their ability to cover existing folk standards, yet sometime in the 1960s, individual songwriting became the norm. Visual art: once subject matter was determined by the church, later by the soul. Movies in the 1950s used to be boring studio productions, antiseptic and geared to the lowest common denominator; n.