World Damage Control

I

I slept in a gaming café on campus and dreamt of killing spiders in empty apartments. I played wd_cornfield usually, the third most popular map for World Damage Control at the time. Xcsis, N3mo, and I all mained AUG HBAR with Steyr sight and armor piercing rounds. The competing clan was named after a series of rare SCP entries. They found our general brand presentation to be edgy and pretentious. I once met a member of the SCP clan, 161noqlip, at a convention. He commented on my unkempt facial hair, saying that I looked like a “Mexican asshole”. He was an avid reader of Mein Kampf in his adolescence but had settled down to rare Black Metal/Noise tape Youtube since. The leader of the clan posted surrealist memes on social media in his free time and lived with his mother.

I knew the owner of the gaming café from secondary education. He let me play and live there for free, even wash myself with the employee sink, but I was forced to leave whenever his little brother visited because I made him cringe. I would find a corner in the student union center during these intervals and play tower defense games on my phone until the battery died. Then I would stare at people.

World Damage Control was a multiplayer shooter with survival sim, survival horror sim, real-time-strategy, turn-based, and Battle Royale elements, among a few other genres I never accessed. The only mode was Team Deathmatch. Maps were designed to become increasingly unplayable as time went on through a series of randomly generated degenerative effects. These would remove or distort not only the physical objects in the map but players, projectiles, lighting, and sound. An unlucky player might be enlarged such that they were always visible as a giant in the sky and their hitbox was everywhere with the same time-to-kill as normal. Players might be deafened with amplified footstep sounds or abruptly launched to the other side of the map with a different, often useless weapon loadout. A “tagged” player might find a double of themselves revealing their location repeatedly in say-to-all chat messages for a round. The most frustrating effect was known as “bullet heaven”, which made all projectiles during a round bounce off surfaces indefinitely, meaning that only a few choice shots could be made before it was impossible to stay alive for longer than a few seconds.

I had enrolled at the metropolitan University with my major undeclared about a year before. I discovered World Damage Control in my second semester and became obsessed, playing for 48-hour periods and sleeping for 16. I missed attendance for several months and failed all my exams. I was removed from the dormitory and my parents kicked me out over the Summer after I spent most of my financial aid on a laptop with 128GB of RAM and a 12th Gen Intel® Core™ that was later stolen from me. I don’t remember the details of our argument.

wd_cornfield was set as its name implies in a cornfield. The center of the map held labyrinthine crop formations resembling Chinese characters if viewed from a bird’s eye heightmap. A notable feature of wd_cornfield was the lack of visibility. It was set at midnight without a moon in the sky. Blindfiring and its accompanying “meta” were unavoidable. This was also the map where I first saw the lights.

II

They appeared almost as soon as a match started. They were spherical and fast-moving. I commented on them in team chat, but no one responded to me. I thought them funny at first and in keeping with wd_cornfield’s theme. They would descend from above the enemy spawn and drown my screen with continuous pulses whenever I made direct eye contact with them. By the end of any match where I saw them, I would have a negative kill-death ratio and a migraine. I looked at my reflection in the window once and saw that my eyes were red and inflamed.

I took a break from multiplayer for a while. I informed my clan leader in the Discord server and he replied “ok”. I practiced with bots in another popular map, wd_glasscity. It had the largest quantity of breakable windows of any user-created map in World Damage Control. Unpredictable sonic booms would reverberate from the sky, shattering windows throughout the match. The player received no damage from broken glass. I began to develop tinnitus and a compulsion to pick my ears until they were bleeding, which was abnormal for me. I was soon unable to play WDC at all. 

I attended a TEDx talk on campus during my dry spell. The speaker was one of the founders of a successful digital arts and comedy website. It was known for hosting funny and sometimes offensive pictures, as well as what is known as original content. He was dressed in a blue shirt and gray khakis, sported a dirty blonde crewcut, and was of average height. The title of his talk was “G4 Era Nihilism: Social Decline and the Survival of Inner Experience in an Age of Sterility”. Near the conclusion, he displayed an internet meme on the projection screen. It showed two male figures, one balding and unattractive, and the other resembling a model. The balding figure appeared to be screaming in a manner reminiscent of the Edvard Munch painting. The attractive figure had a cool demeanor. The unattractive figure had a long caption above him regarding, inter alia, the magazine Esquire, masturbation, transsexuality, and something called “bachelorism”. It is not clear in my memory. The attractive figure had a caption above him that read “Me when I when [sic] transcend complex sociopolitical collapse through aesthetics and self-cultivation”. He explained how this summarized his worldview. I left the talk somewhat confused and later heard that it was controversial. 

I was barred from the gaming café due to my inactivity. 161noqlip let me live with him for an indefinite time. He performed a lengthy dramatization of an SCP entry he composed and afterwards made me watch some reaction videos about his work. These were made by veteran members of a creative writing forum not directly affiliated with the main SCP wiki. They criticized his lack of character development, his tendency to reference too many unrelated things (kitchen sink mentality), his juvenile humor, the fact he sounded embarrassing, the way he posted on the forum, his grammar (distinguishing between their and they’re, you’re and your), and that all his protagonists seemed to be unemotional voyeurs and egregious self-inserts, or what are nicknamed “Mary Sues”. He would frequently pause the video to explain to me or himself that these were not examples of lazy writing but consistent aspects of his personality, or to shout a racial slur. I found his arguments more compelling. He seemed to understand himself well. I complimented him on how much he had investigated himself since we first met, and he claimed he didn’t know what I was talking about.

III

I had a dream while living with 161noqlip unlike any I ever had before. I was walking home with a group of people through wd_glasscity. Unlike in the game, the shards on the ground cut into my skin and somehow made their way into my ears. There was a shard attached to a long piece of wire by a structural adhesive lodged in my left ear that I could not remove. I found this experience to be extremely upsetting. We turned a corner into a plaza between three buildings and saw a beautiful woman exiting a maintenance hallway. A man’s voice began to speak in my mind and my vision darkened. I saw echoing white circles trailing in snakelike patterns through the blackness. They amassed and hardened into a mosaic of glass flowing with gray clouds and hundreds of reflected eyes. I could feel myself lying on my back. The man told me that I was looking at an autistic angel. He told me about something called “Formware Market Analysis” that the angel taught him. He told me he also had autism but that this method had cured him. He was no longer triggered by the broken glass. He said that he could now stimulate himself “forever”. He found reasons to live everywhere he looked. From time to time, I felt the angel lean down through the flurry of jagged shapes to kiss me lightly on the lips and comfort me. I Googled “Formware Market Analysis” when I awoke and found a 3D printing preparation software development company based in the Netherlands. 

I told Noqlip about the dream and he said he thought it was cool. “Formware Market Analysis are three cool words,” he said, “much like World Damage Control”. He loved throwing two or more cool sounding words together and considered it an integral part of his writing style. I commended him. Inspired by my dream, I thereafter became an online video consultation psychic. 

I performed tarot readings for strangers on my laptop, many of whom were neurodivergent. They found my aura comforting. I was dubbed a neutralizer of frequencies and a karmic guide. Noqlip became increasingly despondent over the reception of his SCP-inspired fiction and poetry during this time. As my online following grew, his dwindled, excepting the few trolls that persecuted him. He confessed to me that he was having thoughts of taking his own life. He began to donate large amounts of money from his savings to a woman who streamed herself playing independently developed video games online, sometimes by projecting her voice into a Japanese cartoon puppet character. He ingratiated himself to an anonymous cult that had formed in worship of her witty and casually cruel personality. They all imitated her sense of humor. Noqlip failed to approximate it and was bullied relentlessly. One girl liked to make fun of his work by replying to every post with comments that read “WOW! THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED! WOW!!! THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED!!! IT’S A TRUE STORY”. This disturbed him greatly.

IV

Noqlip was never found dead. He disappeared. I tried to contact him electronically to no avail. I stayed awake in his bedroom listening to some of his favorite piano music inspired by Harold Budd, Brian Eno, and the Minecraft soundtrack. I thought about snow particles falling. I emailed his parents a compressed folder of his writing with my condolences. I wore some of his funny gaming-themed t-shirts in order to get inside his mind. I remembered a kid telling me on a tactical first-person shooter developed with a graphical platform resembling the Lego franchise that “if you commit a die that is a symp [sic] move”. I learned recently that the phrase “first world problems” originates from a work of sociology but reached its current usage through circulation as an internet meme.  

Last night, I received a photograph from an unknown number. It was a picture of me standing at an intersection not far from the apartment. I was wearing one of Noqlip’s shirts that I had never worn before. It read: “Build. Defend. Destroy. Explore. Craft. Create. Attack. Survive. Battle. Amend” as well as other verbs in bright red letters describing the things you could do in an award-winning independently developed survival simulation game. I then received an ominous text message telling me to return to the intersection in the same shirt if I wanted to meet Noqlip again. I suspect it was from an artistically talented member of the internet cult that had harassed him and was intended as a joke.

When I got there, I didn’t find anything. I stood in the cold and dark for a long time. I didn’t know what to expect. I started walking and imagined what I would have said if I saw Noqlip again. I stopped at a plaza between three buildings much like the one where I saw the beautiful woman in my dream. I thought about all the unkind things he said to me once, or the unkind things he said to me that I didn’t register as unkind at first, or the unkind things he said to me that I don’t remember, which fill the rim of my memory and hurt my head. I imagined passing him on the street, and what I might say. I had a vivid fantasy. It was something like this:

I wave my hand and ask, “how are you doing, Michael?” (his name was Michael). He responds: “I am doing well, thank you”. And I say: “that is good”. 

I have decided to retire from professional fortune-telling.