RECORD SCRATCH

It all began when I was creating my character. I was what you'd call a casual gamer. Sure I played Skyrim and Fallout and some flight simulators and the usual. When I was a kid I'd played my grandpa's 8-bit bangers like Paradroid or Archon till my fingers bled and I dreamed about the games. But then I grew up.

SLIGHTLY LOUDER RECORD SCRATCH

Thinking about it, I do need to briefly go back a bit further than the character creation screen. Because 'it all began' in the previous bit isn’t doing a very good job. So here: It all began when ThetanSoft came out with this VR headset/game world called BetterVerse. It was amazing, immersive, tapped right into your brain, yadda yadda yadda. You know all this. But do you remember that ducking ghoul of a Senator from Alabama? The absolute ducking worst pink in the history of pinks.

What is happening with this text editor? Why won't it let me curse? Note to self: check the settings before hitting publish.

So this guy, Ted Todd or whatever, he's suddenly all over the media. Like 13 of the top 20 news stories are about him. So I click on one and it's Ted Todd - before his arrest, obviously - saying the BetterVerse is cool and he loves it and it's a great example of American tech and etc etc but he's worried about people being in there too long. He proposes a one-hour a day limit until we can study the effects immersion has on the brain and its chemistry. And a weird thing happens. People on the left start saying 'huh good point' and people on the right are like 'oh sounds like a thing'. And then ThetanSoft says, 'yeah no biggie we can work around that' and boom! You can only play an hour a day.

Now you'd think sales would plummet but they go ducking mental. Stratospheric. Partly because it opens a new demographic: middle-aged fatties who can't play games because they just can't afford to lose 3, 4, 5 hours a day getting in a Bubble Bobble trance. An hour a day and then it kicks you out? Hell yeah! Anyone can sell that to their partner. Sign me up!

What's the opposite of a record scratch? Hmm. Well, we're back in the previous bit where I was talking about my character selection. I've bought myself a headset and a two-year subscription. At this point, I don't actually know all that much about the game. From what I've heard there's loads of things you can do. Obviously the main thing is to fight orcs and that kind of jazz. But you can also craft. Trade. Inherit your grandfather's farm in a quaint town full of people you can marry. Be a pirate. Be a conservationist. Play tennis. Go into dungeons.

So in the setup area I spend ducking ages making the avatar look like me, but the sort of me I want to look like. You know, a bit less belly and a bit more bicep. Checking how I looked when walking. Doing the James Bond gun barrel scene. Making my voice juuuuust a fraction deeper. I must have been doing that for half an hour because the headset told me I only had 30 minutes left! I hadn't even seen my starting zone yet! I wanted to see the graphics, test the physics, all that!

So when the creation wizard (led in those days by an actual wizard who quickly became as despised as Clippy the paperclip - look him up, kids) said 'right let's talk about combat' I was like 'well I want to be the absolute coolest motherfather who ever walked the streets of whatever my starting city is called' and the wizard was like 'what does cool fighting look like to you?' and I was like 'huh kung fu probably' and he was like 'there's loads of players with martial arts builds' and I was like 'can you show me some options no-one has chosen yet?' and he was like 'I ducking love that question, bro' and then I got a list. And one stood out right away and I was like 'yes yes yes bro' because we were calling each other bro a lot by then.

OPPOSITE OF RECORD SCRATCH

So the albino Bannerman is cackling and walking towards me and I sigh and take out my weapons. Weapons, you say. Plural? And I reply, yes, weapons. Fifty-two of them!

And I can hear one of you groaning because you already know what's coming. You, son, go right to the top of the class. You've got what it takes. The rest of you? Shame on you! Shame on you! Boo!

ABM comes at me and I SNAP my wrist and out FLIES the seven of hearts. It whizzes gorgeously through the air and in microseconds it DEVASTATES the ABM with a stunning TWO hit points of damage. The red bar above his head moves... not an inch.

ABM stops. For a moment it's like looking at a real human. His green eyes go up the way ours do when checking our screens. You can almost see him reading his combat log. Yes, that hit really did two damage. No, there's no poison effect, no extra debuff. Yes, this moron is really going to throw playing cards at me. No, they don't explode or do anything cool. ABM sighs like a guy who doesn't want to be at IKEA and has been told to get a cart.

He comes at me again, but his heart isn't in it. He's having an existential crisis. I'm scaling cards at him left and right, hitting his knuckles, his knees, hoping beyond hope that he'll have a ducking OFF SWITCH. But no, I'm just doing 2 damage, again and again. His health bar is actually getting shorter, but he still has way more than half. He swings his sword at me, and I duck and run away. This is normally the moment when Nikos yells, "Run away! Run away!" and can hardly breathe from laughing at me. But he's out of the fight. He's in Heraklion watching me run around a cemetery looking for some Holy Hand Grenades or levers to pull or some other way to win the fight with no combat skills.

Finally, I'm down to my last card. Obviously it's the ace of spades and this one does double damage. I hop onto ABM's coffin - this annoys him - and fling the ace at his freaky little head. His green eyes flare, then begin to fade, and he falls to the ground. Somehow, I've won!

"Where's the rest of those counts?"

It's Leonie! Some guy in Melbourne finished watching porn for the morning, freeing up enough bandwidth for her to get up and jam a blessed silver arrow right into ABM's skull. Stealth bonus! vs Undead bonus! Piercing bonus!

Slowly, the rest of the team get to their feet. In BV, you only die for real if the whole team dies. It's a good system. We only get an hour. We don't want to be respawning in our starting city all the time.

"That was close," says Nikos.

"Too close," says Jack. For a moment, I feel like he's talking to me. Then I realised he's talking about me.

Five Minutes Later

We'd looted the area, completed the quest, yadda yadda yadda. We were sitting around a fire. We had a few minutes until we'd get portalled, and we were talking about level ups, skill trees, and the quest items we'd received. The others got useful gear: an improved sword; bracers; a new spell; a mystical crystal. I got a shippy skill book that no-one had ever heard of and no-one could think of a possible use for.

Jack coughed awkwardly. I knew what was coming. I felt like ship anyway. "Um... Billy-Bob. You know we all like you. You're... well, you know what you are. You're great. But ah. You're sort of useless."

I wondered who would come to my defence first. Turned out, it would be me or no-one. "I set off those traps." That was a rare example of me being useful - intentionally setting the traps off by curving my cards around a column in a way Leonie couldn't with her arrows.

"That was good!" said Nikos, nodding, smiling fondly.

"And I solve most of the puzzles." There was a painful silence. "What?"

Jack looked away. Catalina said, "We let you do those to make you feel better. We know the answers. You're the only one who doesn't watch people streaming the game. You've solved maybe two that we didn't know the answer to."

"Oh." There wasn't long left. Should I rage at them? Tell them I'd spend the rest of my life plotting my revenge? Reader, if you're thinking that, get therapy. What I did was, I grinned at them. "All right, then." I moved around the circle, shaking everyone's hand. "It was fun. You're good people."

To my everlasting surprise, Jack stood and gave me an enormous bear hug. Looking back, I think he'd been dreading cutting me and appreciated the fact that I'd made his life easier. "You too, comrade. If you ever find a pack of exploding cards, get in touch."

I laughed. It had been a long-standing joke between us. But there wouldn't be any more private jokes. I was out of the gang.