Dangerous Games

ANDA’S GAME by Cory Doctorow

Here’s a fast-paced tale that takes us inside a very dangerous game, one with real-world implications-and demonstrates that even in a game, there are sometimes things more important than hit-points and treasure.

Cory Doctorow is the co-editor of the popular Boing Boing website (boingboing.net), a co-founder of the internet search-engine company OpenCola.com, and until recently was the outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org). In 2001, he also won the John W. Campbell Award as the year’s Best New Writer. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, The Infinite Matrix, On Spec, Salon, and elsewhere, and were recently collected in A Place So Foreign and Eight More. His well-received first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, won the Locus Award as Best First Novel, and was followed shortly by a second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. Doctorow’s other books include The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, written with Karl Schroeder, and a guide to Essential Blogging, written with Shelley Powers. His most recent book is a new novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. He has a website at www.craphound.com.

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ANDA didn’t really start to play the game until she got herself a girl-shaped avatar. She was twelve, and up until then, she’d played a boy-elf, because if you played a girl you were an instant perv-magnet, and none of the girls at Ada Lovelace Comprehensive would have been caught dead playing a girl character. In fact, the only girls she’d ever seen in-game were being played by boys. You could tell, cos they were shaped like a boy’s idea of what a girl looked like: hooge buzwabs and long legs all barely contained in tiny, pointless leather bikini-armour. Bintware, she called it.

But when Anda was twelve, she met Liza the Organiza, whose avatar was female, but had sensible tits and sensible armour and a bloody great sword that she was clearly very good with. Liza came to school after PE, when Anda was sitting and massaging her abused podge and hating her entire life from stupid sunrise to rotten sunset. Her PE kit was at the bottom of her school-bag and her face was that stupid red colour that she hated and now it was stinking maths which were hardly better than PE but at least she didn’t have to sweat.

But instead of maths, all the girls were called to assembly, and Liza the Organiza stood on the stage in front of Miss Cruickshanks the principal and Mrs. Danzig, the useless counsellor. “Hullo, chickens,” Liza said. She had an Australian accent. “Well, aren’t you lot just precious and bright and expectant with your pink upturned faces like a load of flowers staring up at the sky?

“Warms me fecking heart it does.”

That made her laugh, and she wasn’t the only one. Miss Cruickshanks and Mrs. Danzig didn’t look amused, but they tried to hide it.

“I am Liza the Organiza, and I kick arse. Seriously.” She tapped a key on her laptop and the screen behind her lit up. It was a game-not the one that Anda played, but something space-themed, a space-station with a rocketship in the background. “This is my avatar.” Sensible boobs, sensible armour, and a sword the size of the world. “In- game, they call me the Lizanator, Queen of the Spacelanes, El Presidente of the Clan Fahrenheit.” The Fahrenheits had chapters in every game. They were amazing and deadly and cool, and to her knowledge, Anda had never met one in the flesh. They had their own island in her game. Crikey.

On screen, The Lizanator was fighting an army of wookiemen, sword in one hand, laser-blaster in the other, rocket-jumping, spinning, strafing, making impossible kills and long shots, diving for power-ups and ruthlessly running her enemies to ground.

“The whole Clan Fahrenheit. I won that title through popular election, but they voted me in cos of my prowess in combat. I’m a world-champion in six different games, from first-person shooters to strategy games. I’ve commanded armies and I’ve sent armies to their respawn gates by the thousands. Thousands, chickens: my battle record is 3,522 kills in a single battle. I have taken home cash prizes from competitions totalling more than 400,000 pounds. I game for four to six hours nearly every day, and the rest of the time, I do what I like.

“One of the things I like to do is come to girls’ schools like yours and let you in on a secret: girls kick arse. We’re faster, smarter and better than boys. We play harder. We spend too much time thinking that we’re freaks for gaming and when we do game, we never play as girls because we catch so much shite for it. Time to turn that around. I am the best gamer in the world and I’m a girl. I started playing at ten, and there were no women in games-you couldn’t even buy a game in any of the shops I went to. It’s different now, but it’s still not perfect. We’re going to change that, chickens, you lot and me.

“How many of you game?”

Anda put her hand up. So did about half the girls in the room.

“And how many of you play girls?”

All the hands went down.

“See, that’s a tragedy. Practically makes me weep. Gamespace is full of cock. It’s time we girled it up a little. So here’s my offer to you: if you will play as a girl, you will be given probationary memberships in the Clan Fahrenheit, and if you measure up, in six months you’ll be full-fledged members.”

In real life, Liza the Organiza was a little podgy, like Anda herself, but she wore it with confidence. She was solid, like a brick wall, her hair bobbed bluntly at her shoulders, dressed in a black jumper over loose dungarees with giant goth boots with steel toes that looked like something you’d see in an in-game shop, though Anda was pretty sure they’d come from a real-world goth shop in Camden Town.

She stomped her boots, one-two, thump-thump, like thunder on the stage. “Who’s in, chickens? Who wants to be a girl out-game and in?”

Anda jumped to her feet. A Fahrenheit, with her own island! Her head was so full of it that she didn’t notice that she was the only one standing. The other girls stared at her, a few giggling and whispering.

“That’s all right, love,” Liza called, “I like enthusiasm. Don’t let those staring faces rattle yer: they’re just flowers turning to look at the sky. Pink-scrubbed, shining, expectant faces. They’re looking at you because you had the sense to get to your feet when opportunity came-and that means that someday, girl, you are going to be a leader of women, and men, and you will kick arse. Welcome to the Clan Fahrenheit.”

She began to clap, and the other girls clapped too, and even though Anda’s face was the colour of a lollipop- lady’s sign, she felt like she might burst with pride and good feeling and she smiled until her face hurt.

› Anda,

her sergeant said to her,

› how would you like to make some money?

› Money, Sarge?

Ever since she’d risen to platoon leader, she’d been getting more missions, but they paid gold-money wasn’t really something you talked about in-game.

The Sarge-sensible boobs, gigantic sword, longbow, gloriously orcish ugly phiz-moved her avatar impatiently. “Something wrong with my typing, Anda?”

› No, Sarge

she typed.