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Chapter Sixty-Three: TMC Metagame Competition
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Taberah went down to the computer room, looking for something to do. He found a cool portal, and spent half the day fascinated by looking at different layerings of the human body. He particularly liked looking at a forearm end-on, with only the skeletal and nervous systems visible. It was fun, but something in his mind was still itching.
Then he heard a herald announce:
TMC. TMC is short for TMC Metagame Competition. The objective of this game is to devise the best new computer game; players' work will be judged according to their popularity in testing votes. Points are awarded for originality, quality of game concept, quality of artwork, and another category specified by game designer. Past winners may be seen at...
This had Taberah's undivided attention. He went, sat down, and spent three hours' total playing different winners, and then, after going through the next day's classes (now less interesting to him, although he tried to concentrate), began to think in the morning.
They want something original. This culture values novelty over repetition; what can I give that is truly original?
Taberah remembered his time as a court jester, in which his role was to stand on his head, both literally and figuratively -- exalt the abased or pull down the exalted. Pleasure filled his mind, as if he were meeting an old friend. All games that I am aware of are competitive; one wins by defeating others or possibly by gaining a high score in surmounting an obstacle. What of a game in which there is no defeating others and in which the player is not constrained by any predefined goal?
Taberah left the computer room and began pacing in the forest. He could say those words, but what did they mean? Trying to describe a game without a conflict seemed like trying to describe a statue without a shape.
There are a great many ideas that might as well be original because of how hard people have worked to forget them. What is the one idea that is now escaping my attention, the one thing that was the air I breathed in the Middle Ages but which people do not understand now? I can't think of it -- what is the one symbol of -- symbol! -- these people live in a world of symbols, but not as I do. It is a world of meager, half-dead symbols that do not have the courage to be. For them nature, the world is stripped of symbolic lore. A lion is not a reminder of courage -- or maybe it is the one surviving exception. They see just a yellow mass, a predator -- it is like seeing shape without color.
How can I make symbolic meanings visible to them? How can I make a text speak to people who are illiterate? What if they could look at the green in a pane of a stained glass window and -- they can. I can make an annotated virtual world -- a cathedral and forest, full of plants and animals -- in which, when the objects are touched, a voice tells what they mean.
Aed has shown me enough that I can begin working on this now.
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Firestorm 2034 >
Chapter Sixty-Three: TMC Metagame Competition
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