( John POV )

I collapse wearily into the sofa with a muffled thump, trying not to spill my hot chocolate onto the cushions - or myself for that matter. I lean back and close my eyes for a moment, blowing carefully across the mug, waiting for it to cool.

A late finish, and absolutely foul weather as I marched back from the station. Yeah, I’ve earned a moment’s peace and quiet. After taking a few minutes to relax and enjoy my drink, I decide that I’m in the rare mood to just zone out and watch something, with no effort required. I look for the remote. Inevitably, I’m sitting on it; It’s been that kind of day. I flick the TV on.

“Oh, you’re going to watch “Mission: Briefing”? You haven’t done that in years!”

“The talkshow? Actually, I wasn’t planning to, I was just thinking of channel-hopping. Just until I finish my drink.”

“Until you finish that drink? Yeah, right. You’re already on your second cup, and you always start binging the stuff after a difficult day. Want to talk about it?”

“Nah. Not difficult in an interesting way, just long and full of tedious detail-work. And the kitchen suppliers still haven’t got back to me with the final models for the latest range, so I’m probably going to have to redo a bunch of work when they’ve inevitably changed stuff. Y’know, business as usual.”

“Oh well. Sometimes you get days like that. Seriously, watch the talkshow, it always used to cheer you up. Actually, I just checked, and this weeks episode’s about Throughout the Ages. They’ve got Aric on as a guest, believe it or not!”

“Wait, Aric plays TtA? I mean, back when we played together he was really hardcore about MMO stuff, I wouldn’t have thought it’d be his sort of thing. Hell, given how often I still end up seeing ‘The Beholder’ on the global leaderboards, I wouldn’t have thought he had enough hours in the day for it!”

“Remember, TtA is deep-dive, not just shallow-dive, and pretty damn deep at that. The time dilation is insane. Even that first weekend, you were only in-game for maybe half an hour, real-time. And subjectively, that was weeks. Not to mention that they’ve increased the dilation even further since then. I mean, you’re pretty dedicated, but on average you’ve only spent about four minutes logged in per day over the past week.”

I concede the point with a nod. Time dilation is really weird. So much of my life seems to be spent on Jurno at the moment, but actually very little time has passed. I’m starting to understand why it’s not recommended to spend too much time in deep-dive, though - it really screws with your sleep patterns, digestion, all those basic biological cycles. I’ve already cut back significantly after I had a few horrible migraines.

But hey. I’m a gamer, and an MMO player at that. I once spent a month living on crisps and Monster Durian, and if that didn’t kill me then a little time dilation is tame by comparison.

“Yeah, alright. Sounds interesting.”

I open up the search bar, but Jade just flicks the video onto the screen before I’ve had time to type anything in.

“Welcome back, viewers! This week, we’re deep-diving into a world of empires, magic, politics, and far too many elves! That’s right, you asked for it and we provide: today’s subject is Throughout the Ages! This is Mission: Briefing, with Evelyn Hunter!”

The camera pans across the applauding studio audience to a wicked synthrock riff. Hunter takes to the stage, looking as stunning as I remember. I distinctly recall having a huge crush on her when I was a teenager, along with every other boy of my generation. And plenty of the girls, too.

“Hi everyone! I’m Evelyn Hunter, and this time we’re looking into something of a sleeper hit! Yes, everyone rather wrote off Throughout the Ages as a niche interest, but the word-of-mouth for this game has been insane, and it’s time we paid it some attention!”

I zone out for a while, as the show covers the basics of the game for the viewers who haven’t heard of it. Man, this is really bringing back some memories. Nowadays, I tend to get my info on upcoming games from Jade, who scrapes forums and social media for anything relevant and makes recommendations based on what she thinks I’ll like. She hasn’t been wrong in a long time.

It’s one of those funny things about being paired with a human-tier AI: after a while you forget what it’s like not to be able to cheat at life. All those little conveniences, those smart efficiencies, the intelligent applied predictions… They add up.

I jolt out of my reverie as the show cuts back from some basic gameplay to the stage.

“Well, I did promise you all a special guest-host today, didn’t I! Yes, we’ve got one of modern gaming’s most consistent characters, the vanquisher of many an MMO leaderboard, a beloved pundit and respected adversary, back on the show for the sixth time! Please welcome He Who Sees All, the conquerer of the Grand Necropolis, and Champion of the City of Bones... it’s Aric Miller, aka The Beholder!!!”

Cue more audience footage as the crowd goes wild. I note wryly that at least a third of the audience seems to be Aric’s fans, predominately women, all screaming their heads off. He hasn’t even entered the stage yet.

Aric and I only played together briefly, at least half a decade ago, but it was always pretty clear that he was a cut above the herd. He’s a good player, true, but more importantly he’s a great leader and well known as a brilliant strategist. Whatever the big MMO of the moment, whatever the gimmick, whatever the meta, ‘The Beholder’ is almost certainly playing some weird, underutilised strategy that seems complete shit until his guild rolls to the top of the leaderboards with it. Then everyone copies it, of course, but by that time he’s doing something completely different.

The camera cuts back to the stage as Aric climbs the steps from the wings to the couch set, waving and smiling at the audience. He’s short and stocky, chocolate-skinned, with handsome features and a jawline like a shovel. He’s in good shape, I note, better than when I last saw him on anything, with a few more tattoos and a better dress sense. Mild fame has been good for him, and I’m surprised by how cheered I am by that. He makes a sharp contrast with Evelyn, who towers over him while weighing about half as much, and with a skintone that suggests that she’s never seen sunlight.

I’m struck by how much more adult they both look than the last time I saw either. I’ve grown up, and so have my contemporaries. Christ, I hate this existential shit.

They fistbump and sit in their respective places, and it’s comforting to see that the show’s kept its telltale lack of formality. That’s something perpetual in gamer culture: it’s hard to take formality seriously when your subculture revolves around competing in utterly contrived and absurd ways, and you have to keep a sense of humour to deal with the bullshit that plagues online matchmaking. After about ten seconds, the audience finally calms down enough for the pair to say anything - presumably the studio’s equipped with riot-control water-cannons for this purpose, or something.

“Aric, it’s lovely to have you back on the show!”

“Always a pleasure! And there’s plenty to talk about with this week’s topic - I’ve been having a lot of fun with Throughout the Ages.”

“Excellent! Aric, you’re best known for incisive insight, and being able to dissect a game faster than anyone else, so I’m really eager to pick your brains about development so far. Let’s start at the beginning; TtA had a pretty bumpy start, didn’t it?”

“Definitely a few bumps on the road, that’s for sure, although I think that’s inevitable with such an ambitious project from a relatively small and unknown team. Honestly, it’s amazing the game works at all - it’s really innovated a lot with both the use of deep-dive tech, and with the AI. But yes, some serious teething problems.

To run through some of the highlights, there was an unfortunate problem with Kraken pathing - basically, they’d just roam up and down the rivers, which are major player hotspots, eating everything in sight.”

“That’s actually hilarious.”

“Yeah, pretty funny. Unless yours was one of the tribes that got eaten, of course. Apparently one player managed to use the issue to her advantage by calling a conclave right next to the river, luring in the Kraken, and then having her centaurs scatter as the rest got eaten. A nice strat, if you can pull it off!”

The footage swaps to an edited replay; Kraken tentacles throwing huge chunks of turf into the air as it sweeps up helpless tribespeople, doomed warriors silhouetted against the conclave pyre, centaurs waiting out of range, preparing to hunt down any escaped stragglers. As Aric continues over the top, I can’t help but feel slightly appalled. It seems plenty of players haven’t made the same connection with the AI characters I have. Or maybe they’re just more ruthless.

“Unsurprisingly, the centaur player’s now highlighted on the official website as having the most tribe kills so far, and some of the players have put a real-money bounty on defeating her! Brutal, but very effective! “

“Yeah, the game certainly doesn’t seem to pull any punches! Personally, I kinda’ dig that.”

“Me too. It certainly adds a lot of tension - the player knows they’re playing for keeps, which is always a great motivator. Unfortunately, there was one bug in particular which made the game pretty unplayable for a lot of people.”

“Ah, the flood of giant spiders.”

“Exactly the one. Easily done, just a couple of zeroes of error somewhere, but as a result a particular species of giant spider was reproducing at a rate of one a minute, rather than one every 60 days.”

“Ooh, that sounds bad.”

“No kidding - and because of an oversight where they could produce a net gain in calories by eating one another, it wasn’t even hard-capped by how much food they could find. By the time they reset the relevant areas of the map, it was basically an unending horde of metre-high tarantulas from horizon to horizon, stretching from the mountains to the coast, most of them fighting one another. Exponential growth at work. Against tribes wielding wooden spears, well, none of the players stood a chance.”

“I believe you yourself lost a tribe to the spiders?”

“I did indeed, but I’m happy to say that I lasted longer than anyone else in my area. Thing is, you get a very small number of tech points for killing monsters - of which there were plenty, obviously. It’s designed to compensate players for expanding into new territory, even if they lose a few fertile tribe members in the process. Anyway, I managed to get a pretty long way up the tech tree, get some decent defences going on a mesa, generally create a pretty difficult fort to break. I was hoping my tribe could hold out until the devs patched the issue, at which point I’d have half the continent to myself, but in the end the spiders burrowed into the aquifer and came up through my wells. Just before I reached steel-working, too! Game over.”

Aric laughs boomingly.

“Still, nevermind! Plenty more new challenges, new opportunities!”

“It didn’t sour you against the game, then?”

“Quite the opposite, actually! I was pretty impressed by how dynamic the game systems were, and how well they coped with something so utterly unforeseen as an infinite spider invasion. It ended up simulating the whole thing pretty well in a way that made sense, with all the problems you’d expect - right the way down to the mental health of tribe members, who reacted pretty much how I’d expect normal people to react. It was kind of amazing!”

“Wow, that’s actually really cool! Still, while it’s impressive the game worked through it at all, doesn’t it seem a bit strange that something like this wouldn’t be caught in testing?”

“Well, it’s actually pretty interesting! I’ve been in contact with one of the devs, and apparently most of the creatures have quite a few values which are subject to minor mutation generation-on-generation - including reproduction rate. And this, as it turns out, was an edge-case issue, where somewhere along the line a spider was born with way too short a cooldown time, and it escalated from there!”

“So the whole problem stemmed from a single mutant spider?”

“Yep! Well, that and the cannibalism bug, which they’ve also fixed. But yeah, the point of it all is that, with systems this huge and multilayered, you can’t possibly test for every bug. Well, not on a game development budget, anyway. Still, the devs have promised that they’re substantially improving their partial-rollback systems, so if we get problems like this in future, they’ll be able to fix it far faster, and with much less collateral damage. Shame, I liked Spider Holdout.”

“Well, I guess that’s at least some reassurance to the playerbase. I’d hate to lose a tribe to a bug, especially if I’d worked on it for weeks! But they can roll bugs back now?”

“Basically, yes. In both senses! On the whole, it’s a good thing this happened right at the beginning - there’s now a system in place, which is good as people get increasingly invested.”

“Moving on, given that you did lose your tribe, what happened then? Did you have to move to a new game on a different server?”

“No, actually - the dev’s solution is much more elegant than that. Essentially, the devs have a bunch of ‘source’ servers running, with loads of AI-controlled tribes on them, quietly building their own histories and moving up the tech tree. When a player loses, the game server copies one of these tribes over from somewhere empty on the game map and gives it to the player. To control. Obviously, an AI-controlled tribe is going to be less advanced and worse off than a player-controlled one, but it’s a good starting point. A setback, but recoverable.”

As the talkshow continues, I zone out, considering a sudden realisation.

The goblin player we eliminated… they know where we are. It would be quite possible for them to come back, eventually, and try and get their revenge.

Oh well. It’s only a game. You’d have to be pretty petty to do that. Or really psychotically angry.

I’m sure it won’t be a problem.