As an avid gamer, one thing that I particularly enjoy in this short story is Laidlaw’s narration, which only half-heartedly attempts to disguise the truth behind the setting, ie. that this is a videogame; half-heartedly, but deliberately. A big part of the appeal rests in how poorly your typical multiplayer hack-and-slash game translates across mediums; while gaming companies make efforts in fleshing out a world’s history – thus providing background and context for the players – the repetitive, grindy nature of the actual gameplay that often sits at the core of the player’s experience would translate very badly in a different narrative medium. Contextual holes and paradoxical situations that run contrary, or away from, what we would expect from a narrative point of view crop up frequently: the world consists of a small, poorly-defined colonized area, and a series of impossibly-large tombs, whose structure has more to do with challenging invaders than with providing a final resting place for the departed, populated by monsters of uncertain provenience (and let’s not even think about what the ecology of such a place would look like!). The motivations of the protagonists are neither noble nor greedy: they are here to somehow teach and learn how to improve one’s battle prowess by slaughtering the local denizens.
This superimposition of gaming logic over the short-story medium creates the comedic effect that Laidlaw certainly is looking for, thus crafting a bout of self-aware mocking – Marc Laidlaw has been involved in creating, and writing for, a number of highly successful videogames.
The finale, however, seems to twist away from this lightheartedness. Our heroine’s rescue party is revealed to be composed of her children, and her former in-game companion is revealed to be her estranged ex-husband. This alone would have made for a thoughtful finale, but Laidlaw’s coup-de-grace is the adding of one last wrinkle: the heroine’s conviction that the villain is in fact an alias of her ex-husband is shattered; he has in fact stopped playing.
In this the game becomes a metaphor: while she still thinks about him to the point of injecting him into her narrative (in-game first as a remote figure seeking closure, then as her direct, and frankly childish, adversary), he has already left their past behind, and has moved on.
This careless injection of one’s own internal consciousness into an otherwise pretty bare narrative is the warning the Laidlaw inserts into the story, perhaps the only concession he makes to the regular short-story format (that is, that there should be a meaning to the tale): video games can most definitely work as a form of escapism, and it can be fun and rewarding to build one’s own narrative into them; however, when this narrative begins to integrate bits of our objective reality, it can become subtly and dangerously subjective, allowing us to deceive ourselves.
Games can allow us to escape from the harshness of reality, but we should never attempt to use them to replicate or substitute it – in a way that our heroine as done: to the point that she has forgotten to go pick her own kids up in the real world!
This short, fun, and thoughtful story is available online at flurb.net – just don’t ask me about the pics! I have read it in print form in eos’ “Year’s best sf 13”.
Laidlaw, Mark. “An Evening’s Honest Peril.” Year’s Best SF 13, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, EOS, 2008, pp 207-228.
Hamletic Tortoise 