one man play

The phone vibrated, and he felt seen from his front left pocket. It’s a notification from a game: mana refill. “One of my favorite games,” he thought aloud, convincing himself. The game’s energy mechanic time-delimited his play. He could use the app for approx. 45 minutes until his energy points were depleted again, after which he would have to wait 24 more hours for them to replenish. “The System” was finally running reliably, enforcing structure on his play, keeping track of the multiple apps with their dissonant timers and overlapping rhythms, so the games were never away for more than a moment. 

The energy system in ‘Trials of Barraqir’ (“The hit turn-based strategy RPG. An epic quest through a fantasy realm full of darkness and intrigue. * This game is free to download but offers optional in-app purchases. * Internet connectivity required to play. Data charges may apply. * You must be at least 13 years of age to download this application. * May include advertising. * We permit third-party partners to collect data from this app for marketing purposes. For more information about our ads, please see the “How we use your data” section of the Privacy Policy”) was represented by a green lightning bolt symbol. Every turn or upgrade you spend one mana, and you gain them at a rate of 20 per 24 hours. 

His games are important to him. Not only do they indefinitely stave off boredom, they also carve out and preserve fragments of a world that no longer exists. They’ve become subsets without a set. They allow for creative problem solving within an arbitrary boundary. There’s not much else to think about anymore. 

Work used to absorb a lot of that surplus mental energy. It relieved, in a way. Like carefully opening a valve to release the pressure from thoughts accumulated overnight, or an untangling of knotted subjectivities and consciousnesses by slicing clean-through with an icy knife of economic activity. But now that everyone else is gone, the economy is in the tank. 

There’s no more work, but rather than admit defeat, he still kept track of global economic data by hand in a series of notebooks. Most global expenditures the past few quarters have been his losses gambling on ethereum slots (they all have stupid names like Candy World and Sexy Lady Slots. He seemed to have the best luck on Cow Millionaire). He’s pretty sure the slots are rigged, but hitting a jackpot is the only hope for an economic recovery. Besides, they’re all that’s left to call out and welcome him in, everything else having been perfectly designed to keep him out. 

Walking down the street today you might not be able to tell what happened. The skyscrapers still glisten, the billboards still flash with movie trailers and car salesmen, jingles decorate passing time for nobody in particular. But any attempt at access as he followed the parallel lines of commercial detritus would see him rebuffed at the door by security (automated security, of course. Systems without operators). 

He couldn’t get his biometrics on company whitelists to scan past their locks without fuck-you-money, the type you can only get nowadays from getting lucky on the NCIS: Dayton ™ Official Litecoin Game. Global spending on entrance fees (semi-marginal amounts of cryptocurrency transacted in order to verify identity on the blockchain upon entry) had to be hard-capped in his  last recession, making him nervous about dipping back in. He couldn’t afford anything powerful enough at Red’s (Weapons and Explosives LLC, still has a confederate flag behind the window, presumably will forever) to blast his way through the resolute SecureGlass exteriors. Thus all the banks, nice grocery stores, luxury goods dealers, and gentrified apartment blocks were left completely untouched, though not for his lack of trying. He got into a couple corner stores with lockpicks.

Despite being fossilized by their emptiness, these places somehow made him feel less lonely. Being surrounded by mystery prevents solipsism, even when you’re titling a graph of your gambling wins and losses as “Global GDP” in a college ruled composition book. Walking down the street he could know that he was still the target of surveillance and security, that he was why the walls stood, that he’s the person for whom the glass gives a reflection. Without him these monuments of civilization would probably wither and die. 

The empty world-city was his own potemkin village. Deception is comforting when it implies an internally logical progression, starting with intent on the part of another then leading to goal-oriented action. It’s the only bit of intersubjectivity left. The resistance from hostile social architecture was steady, constant, more like an embrace than a casting out. 

Besides the energy-system free-to-play games and the rigged crypto-gambling games, there were some obligatory games. Every four years he got an email about elections. He had to wager on who he thought would win. Whoever was wagered on most was named winner of the election. Once he hit term-limits as president, senator, parliamentarian, Count, Duke, sherriff, coroner, zoning commissioner, and alderman, there was nobody else to fill any positions in government, so he just sends those emails to spam. 

Every month his power bill and gas bill were emailed to him. He could either pay the standard rate, or Spin the Wheel. He always spun. A roulette wheel would appear on the screen, poorly rendered, on which half-plus-one of the spaces represented a lower price than his standard rate, and the remaining values were higher prices. The odds on billette were weighted based on carbon footprint. It was a digital casino subsidized by the state meant to incentivize climate-optimal behavior (before you ask, obviously just incentivizing this action with a utilities discount equivalent to the Expected Value of the Wheel’s average outcome wouldn’t work). He won a nice discount a few months ago.

As he was opening his gas bill, the phone buzzed in his hand. he opened up the notification from Bullet Chess (Challenge yourself online against other people or over 100 different levels of AI in intensely fast games of chess!). The yellow timer in the top left of the UI indicated he could play 10 more games today. He couldn’t play anyone online, but he beat the AI Wes yesterday so he could play Molly today. The different AIs were named to differentiate their varied strengths and were all programmed with different playing “personalities,” some more aggressive, some had unique opening repetiores, etc, and they sent different stock messages as the game went along. You unlocked more AIs as you beat them in escalating order of elo rating. It was incredibly lonely.  

It’s so lonely, he thought, because the games can only keep him company by implication, trying to talk to him directly fucks up the whole arrangement. In order to be a game, there has to be a void at the bottom. You can cut out your little slice of the world to fool around in, but the foundation must be abstract, meaningless, otherwise it’s too real to be fun. Language is a game resting only on silence, fun implies seriousness, meaninglessness meaning, subset the set, and a game implies the world. 

His phone buzzes again. What a joy it is to be known by another. Pizza’s here, let’s go. Just a cheap pie left by the door. He heard the delivery drone approaching, but it’s still nice to wait to be told that it’s there. It reminded him of the restaurant-management game Silvio’s Pizza. 

He was about to see a revelation. A non-diegetic one, as if the camera had been out of focus or the soundtrack had been out of key the whole time, and he finally noticed. It came about suddenly, there was no build-up, no sequential progression, no logical progression. 

The pizza box. It wholly occupied his consciousness, which is to say, his consciousness became empty, leaving only a directedness, which dissolved into coextensivity with the object. Just for a flash, the box was itself, elusive, sublime, its sides always out of view, incapturable. 

Just as surely as the box stood on a nonvisible structure holding up the currently visible aspects: as surely as every bit of the box was tangible, touchable, would bear weight, even though this could only be tested a fraction at a time: as surely as the box concealed a pizza, indicated by the smell and temperature, and historical pattern: so too it concealed its own past. 

He saw all that antedated the finished box, the ink, the plastic. He saw before him the rigid incarnation of a process, a making objective of the subjective, a material encoding of economic relationships, of domination and extraction, of assembly. Something traded this object for ETH, something had the box’s component parts, someone put it together… 

Wait- someone? 

Whoops. By having food delivered, he stumbled upon a peephole through which he could faintly trace the outline of another person. The revelation about the pizza box unmasked a hidden operator. There’s got to be a world out there, a world that isn’t empty.

In a delirious fit of discovery, I bolt outside. 

Are these people? It smells out here, they must be. Society is back. I rush to the familiar windows of the CherryTone corporate headquarters and press my face to the glass. There are people in here. They’re walking, no, gliding along the floor. They’re so elegant. They have places to be. Wherever I look through the glass pane, I can see people only in my peripheral vision. They look ethereal, vague, hazy in the corner of my eye. The focused center of my vision can never quite reach them, they dart away too fast. I pound on the window and none of them hear. 

I turn away from the window. I see bustling streets, the pavement shifting under the elaborate dance of flesh. It’s all so familiar. I reach out to try to touch someone but they narrowly elude my grasp every time. 

I feel drunk. I run down the busy street, bumping into no one, seeing out of the sides of my eyes, ecstatic.