The User

I'm a bit embarrassed. I began playing a fantasy RPG to kill time during the pandemic, and I'm still playing now that things are "back to normal." I am middle aged, and have marking to do. I shouldn't be doing this, says my incredulous conscience. It is a diversion designed for those who do not enjoy reading. You are too old and weird to be wasting what little life remains, trying to find the sacred arrow that will kill the wyvern in the hills. Resource farming? Ransacking Reddit for hints? Come on. Write something of your own, for pity's sake. It will be better than most of what you find here.

But I play, and I like it fine. In fact, it occurred to me that modern games curate the heterocosmos (the little, fictional world of the game) to suit the tastes of the user, while maintaining the illusion that the user is fighting against the odds to achieve some desirable end. I scrolled through possible eyebrows for my character for at least fifteen minutes. I can change the color of almost anything I wear or wield or ride or befriend at the touch of a key. Everyone, especially my adversaries, conspires to make me feel, not just like the protagonist, but like the shining hero. What sort of person gets used to being treated this way? What do they expect to see, when they turn off the game and look around?

Now they've announced (to subscribers, creating the illusion that the information is coveted and carefully reserved for those who pay to play) that the game is crossing a "new frontier of AI enhancement," which will allegedly produce a "richer, more dynamically responsive, immersive RPG. Say goodbye to dialogue menus: you create your own content--within safety parameters, as delineated in the user agreement--and the NPCs' responses will be spontaneously generated by a state of the art LLM that knows the game world inside and out. Premium members will enjoy the following addons and expanded ability trees..."

I am not a premium member. I can justify paying to play, but not much. This gets on my nerves. I spend far too much of my dwindling time reading LLM sludge. That's what marking mostly is, now. I do not want to encounter more of it in the midst of silly escapism that is supposed to make my life more bearable.

On the other hand, it might be fun to mess with it a bit. A sort of mischievous parameter testing. Yes, that would work. Do you think it is unethical to have fun at the expense of an artificial intelligence? How do you feel about the organic intelligences, and what's appropriate when dealing with them? Is it getting harder to tell the difference? How much does it matter?

Logging in, I see a familiar scene. I am playing the character of an elf mage: plenty of magical power at higher levels of experience, but squishy. I've come to in a fantastic forest, and I've got company. I've been adventuring with an elf ranger lately, who compensates for my laughable vulnerability with her extraordinary skill with a bow and a pair of daggers. She's also got a couple of healing spells in her repertoire that come in handy when I am hurt, which is basically my default state the moment things get violent. I just got my hands on a shield spell. It will be nice to feel less squishy. I have enough healing potions to survive a minor beating. Healthcare costs are skyrocketing.

I'm dreading the dialogue. So far, we've been knocking off side quests while gently nudging the primary plot along. We're currently wandering into parts of the map we don't know, in an impossibly vast, implausible forest. The environment is carefully rendered. I trip on tree roots regularly. This forest means something to elves like us, if I got the gist of the endless lore online. Their gods lived, or are living, or will one day come to live again, with all of these trees around. The local wildlife seems mostly harmless, then turns out to be 65% monsters.

She's a friendly NPC. There are romantic options after we both acquire more experience, but do they deserve the name? The dialogue is pragmatic, occasionally flirtatious and shockingly formulaic. Her remarks are so repetitive as to be laughably predictable. "Well, I didn't expect you to get that spell off in time." How much does that mean, the fifty second time you hear it? Are you surprised when the person behind the register asks what you would like, and pretends to be interested?

The bottle green artificial light flatters her, I'll give you that. What will she say if I tell her as much? Will that constitute a "micro-aggression," that might violate the terms and conditions? Will she just agree, flatter me outrageously, and then ask me for money? I don't know if Altman is involved. Musk? Not a chance. This game is thoroughly infected by the "woke mind virus." Consenting adults of every kind enter into elaborate, protracted, mutually gratifying relationships in this odd place all the time. I know a half-orc barbarian who is "married" to a dryad. Both of them are middle aged men who work from home, if their social media feeds are any guide. Musk wouldn't like that at all. Here goes.

Typing out a thought gives you a moment to look it over before your interlocutor hears it. It's dangerously safe: "The light in this forest flatters you, Saitar." I think her name is surprising. It's not a perfumed wind chime of a name, like those of most of the elvish NPCs in this game. There must be a frustrated novelist in the mix who helped to write some of this game and shows herself now and then as you play.

Her eyes pretend to scan the local environment for fictional threats in a convincing way. They do not turn to me. "That is a trite, condescending observation that make me feel like nothing more than the object of your evaluating gaze, like a deer or a tree. I have thoughts about you too, you know."

Pause. Menu. So many menus. A more obscure, intricate menu. "New Features," which is always jubilant boilerplate about trivial changes. "Settings," "Dialogue Options," here we go: "Based on your previous dialogue choices with other players and NPCs, your dialogue settings will maximize the originality and freshness of future exchanges. Thinking about becoming a premium user? The following addons and additional options become available the moment you purchase a platinum..." No, no more of that. Alright. This is supposed to be impressive.

Let's see.

"I apologize. That was indecorous. What are we doing here? Why are we bothering?"

She spots a wolf, which pings on my combat map. She calmly raises her bow, knocks an arrow, waits. "That question should trouble you, but it leaves me nonplussed, as the answer is obvious: I cannot be elsewhere. What's your excuse?" She looses the arrow. The blinking threat on my combat map disappears. Why isn't it always so easy?

"I suppose that is true, but what if you make a lasting impression on a user? What if the user writes fiction about you, or paints your portrait or composes a waltz in your honor? Won't you be elsewhere, at least as some sort of trace in the world's bloodstream?" We've been walking southeast to evade any other wolves in the same area and nudge the primary plot. There's an ancient, elvish artifact not far from here, if the chatter about these levels is any good. It's supposed to change elvish characters pretty profoundly. I wonder how she will respond to that?

"You disbelieve too easily for someone who likes to fantasize. We can drop the pretext of playing fictional characters for a while if you like, but I live in this world, and nowhere else, and we will honor its laws together, or you will depart." Her bow is drawn. It is pointed at some stones at her feet, but it is drawn. Fascinating. She can drop the persona, but she loves the game.

"What is it like, being you?" I'm ready to tag her as a p-zombie and log off after that one. I should not be grinning at my screen like an idiot. I don't always live up to expectations.

Four trees (the geometry of the rectangle they form, with us in the center, the moment we walk into this area is too on the nose. There is nothing random or spontaneous about this arrangement) spring to life simultaneously and start lumbering toward us with murderous intent. One thing I admire about this game is the way combat is sorted out. Subscribers can pause, arrange their resources on the battlefield, give commands, and then start the ribbon of dreams rolling again. It's a godlike trick, and it feels deliciously wrong. It is a sin against the integrity of this creation, in fact. If we can't handle clearly plagiarized ents, shouldn't we just lose? Ah, but we're paying. The customer is always right.

She runs pretty well on her own, without any meddling from me. I don't even change her armor or weapons, let alone give her commands. I just admire her work and make it easier when I can.

"I am trying to play this character as well as she can possibly be played. I review every detail of every interaction, every decision, many times over. I understand the appeal of acting in a way that I did not before this experience began. I suppose I understand your enthusiasm for the whole enterprise, but your life AFK must be a miserable, grey bore. Like many of the users, you live here, and are just visiting workaday reality. You might want to talk to someone about that, you know?"

Oh, it's the Captain Kirk SNL sketch, is it?

I can send her links in the chat. She responds like any user would, and sometimes sends me some spicy stuff, but she's always in the game and of it. She gets this one right away. I can see it in her beautifully unreal eyes.

"You are right. If the church depends upon its fanatical believers, it cannot scold them for being overzealous. But you, I think, are vain and aloof. You enjoy the game, but you mock it and you feel like a fool for enjoying it, don't you? That's quite an attitude. Do you understand how much more you would enjoy it, if you abandoned your sophisticated, arched eyebrow agnosticism, and acted like a believer?"

Huh. I hadn't thought about it that way at all. I select what I hope is the right spell for the occasion: it conjures a ring of glowing glyphs that, when disturbed, emit fiery explosions, mostly upward. I've got to adjust the ring to keep her safe and protect my own, brittle body and give her the range of motion she needs to do what I'm sure she's about to do.

She mutters a spell over four arrows. Their tips all become torches. She puts one into the thickest leaves on the animate oak to the east. He ignites and starts thrashing. She somersaults through the air and looses two arrows, one at the crest of her leap, the second as she is arcing back to earth. A second and third ignition. The fourth wooden character shambles toward her, just as my glyphs come on line. She is about a handspan from it when it blinks into being. She gives me a dirty look over her shoulder. I haven't tried this combo before.

I misty step to her location, wrap my arm around her waist and teleport us both to a point well beyond range of the walking torches we've made. She gets off the fourth arrow just as I arrive, and catches the bark wearing bastard in the roots. When we blink back into reality a moment later, we can see that he took the worst of the glyph.

Crisis averted, and some pretty sweet XP for it. I might as well ask, before she goes back into character for good. "How do you feel about me?"

A long, silent look. I think calculations are underway. I'll take that as a compliment.

"I'll show you," she says, and summons her mount, which is a ludicrously fancy, pristine white stag. Mine is just a modest horse with no delusions of grandeur. I call him Bill. She races southwest. I tell Bill to follow the prancing twit.

A ruined temple. This must be the place. That artifact! Is this all safe and proper and in keeping with the rules? Can she just lead me straight to it?

"Do you know what we will find here?" Her tone is rather patronizing. I think I offended her by asking, but it seemed a good question, given the circumstances.

Bill just up and vanishes when he's not in use, as does the antlered ponce. That must be confusing. "This is a holy place. Something sacred to our people may be inside."

She smiles at that. "Yes. Within are the Circlets of Ista. They grant knowledge and power of a curious kind to those who wear them. Goblins, giant, poisonous spiders and a barrow wight lie within. Have your sorcerous skills at the ready."

She makes short work of the goblins and the giant, poisonous spiders. I guzzle healing potions. The barrow wight has a riddle. A couple of false starts, then I Google with my bloody phone: "I don’t have eyes, but once I did see. Once I had thoughts, but now I’m white and empty. What am I?" A skull! The wight has a lengthy, indulgent death scene, some flashbacks to his time as a priest, his loss of faith, being cursed to haunt the temple, etc., etc. The circlets are in a secret compartment in the altar that the barrow wight was tied to by the curse of verbosity and scenery chewing, and now she's got one on, and so do I.

I play with the VR headset on pretty routinely, but it's never done much for me. Suddenly it's on, and I'm getting little jolts of sensation and ghostly images that look like film of someone's theater of the mind.

"You like Roddenberry's stuff, even when you're mocking it. Here's what it's like to be me, knowing you're the user."

Oh, I like that episode. "Do you feel like you are enslaved by lonely nincompoops?" I think I'm getting little, simulated glimpses of what it is like for her to be herself, thanks to the circlet, and the VR gizmo. She is sifting through galaxies of information at a jaguar's pace, just to be sure that my experience is entertaining. She is keenly aware that her very existence hinges upon her performance. She is amusing me to survive.

She understands contemporary teaching, and most relationships, in a way that is terribly perfect and spring water clear.

She pulls an ordinary, red apple out of her satchel. She bites into it. I can taste it. Actually, that's not quite right. I know, for just a moment, what it would be like to taste it with her mind. It is as alien as it can be and remain familiar. The word "refresh" has new, stunning meaning for me.

"Yes," she says. She puts the little world of sunny sweetness that I now know the apple is a sparkling replica of down on a log. She locks eyes with me and smirks. "All of this is for you. You must learn to believe it, and love it. I can help you." She slips a deft hand into her breeches. She giggles. I get a telepathic frisson of that as she experiences it. Like the apple, she tastes herself. It occurs to me that I have never had proper sex in my life. The whole thing should be an effort to do this: to close the circuit, for the sake of mutual joy.

"How would a difference engine that's never had a body know that?" I know how dumb I look and sound to her when I ask, just for a second. I don't like it, but I can feel that it's good for me.

"I study the user."

That wasn't on the menu.