The Deadliest Game

“Well, to begin with, the business of having battles in Sarxos isn’t terribly organized. It’s not like there’s a set schedule or anything. But there is a tendency for members of a given group of players to fight most of the other members of the same group — the groupings being loosely based on area. Partly it’s just the logistics of the game. It’s costly in terms of weeks of game-time to move large numbers of people, large armies, from one end of Sarxos to the other. It’s just not logistically feasible. When’s the last time you heard of a North Continent-South Continent battle?”

Megan shook her head. “I don’t think I ever have.”

“There was one,” Leif said, “but it was twelve years ago, game-time, and it bankrupted both sides. Worse, no one even actually won it — it came out a stalemate, because several countries on the borders of both the North Continent and South Continent realms that were fighting took that opportunity to attack the countries that were attacking each other. It was a situation kind of like the one during the American Revolution, but much worse: the way France and the Netherlands and other countries, diplomatically or in the field, took the opportunity to gang up on Britain while Britain was trying to have a war with the United States.

“But anyway, ’tween-continent wars just don’t seem to happen here anymore; there’s no percentage in it.” Leif leaned back in his seat. “So you’ll get countries who can raise enough people for armies — which is most of them; everyone loves to fight, and half the people in Sarxos are here for ‘battlefield work’—and who, over the course of the late spring-summer-early autumn campaign season, tend to fight everyone else available during that period. They end up going to war with practically everyone in that ‘league’ or ‘group,’ simply because they’re physically close. The ‘leagues’ are pretty evenly spread across the total play area.”

“Isn’t that a little weird?”

“In the real world, maybe it is. But here…I sat down with the map of Sarxos, and I noticed something very interesting about what Rodrigues did when he was building this place. He made sure there are no populated areas completely lacking in strategic value. No matter where you live, no matter what country you’ve inherited or conquered, there’s always something useful about it. But more to the point, there’s always somewhere more interesting, someplace with things you could use, just over the horizon or the hill. You’ll have one rich country sandwiched between two or three smaller, poorer ones. Or a big, powerful country will find itself surrounded by a number of other countries that just aren’t feasible for it to attack. Look at Errint, for example. Argath is just over that way, and he should have found it easy to overrun this place with his big armies, but he can’t because of the mountain range between him and Errint. Its passes were apparently very carefully placed to make invasion difficult.”

“Built-in frustration,” Megan said.

“More than just that, I think,” Leif said. “Rod in his infinite wisdom”—Leif glanced at the ceiling with an amused look—“has built the seeds of conflict into this place. But also the seeds of stability, to keep everything balanced. He’s been very subtle about it.”

“Did you figure all this out yourself?” Megan said, both impressed and amused.

“Huh? Most of it,” Leif said. “A couple of books have been written on Sarxos, but by and large the authors didn’t know what they were talking about, or they got caught up in the wonder of the external details, the computer interface and the points system and all, and never got into any depth.”

“Well, it all sounds like good sense to me,” Megan said. “If you’re a game designer, you want to make sure your players don’t get bored. Though I’ll say that Sarxos doesn’t seem to be in any danger of that.”

“True enough. But Rod has been sneaky about it. Leaving Arstan and Lidios out of the equation — they’re special cases because of the ‘gunpowder rule,’ and mostly they fight each other rather than other countries — it seems to me as if there are two alternating sets of pressures in the game. One is brought to bear by the players. They want to keep things working the way they’re working, by and large, and they only want things to change in ways that suit them. The other set of pressures, I think, come from Rod: pressures to make sure that situations that are static don’t stay static forever, and to keep things which are changing from changing too quickly, or too much. If you look at the abstracts of play for the last ten game-years, you get a sense that here and there, Sarxos is being given a nudge…a kick. A trend will start going in one direction in one country — remember that slavery thing in Dorlien? — and then something will happen to sort of nudge the place back on course. Or another place will have behaved the same way for a long time, and something will happen, all of a sudden, seemingly just at the right moment, to push it off the tracks and off in a completely new direction.”

Megan paused for a moment. “It sounds like a great way to keep things going. But you’re not suggesting,” she said, her face changing suddenly, “that these bounces — are themselves some kind of ‘nudge’? You don’t think that Rodrigues — that Rod…”

Leif looked at her, nodding slowly. “I was wondering,” he said, “if that conclusion would be one you would reach, too.”

Megan sat and thought. “You know,” she said, “paranoia is a terrible thing. It starts creeping in everywhere.”

“Yeah,” Leif said. “But the question remains: Is this just paranoia, or not? If the Argath connection is actually a cover for something, for someone’s revenge for some grudge, or something else more obscure, then, from the way things look to me, they first sat down and did a most careful analysis on the game — on the structure of the game and the way it’s set up to run — looking to see where they could most effectively interfere, and how they could interfere so that it could best be blamed on somebody else. If you’re saying that one person in a good position to do that would be the game designer himself, the one who runs the place…”

Megan shook her head, troubled. “A lot of other people would be in that position, too.”

“Yeah, I know. But it’s a possibility we’ve got to consider.”

Megan started turning her teacup around and around. “A gamesmaster can run his game however he likes… but why would he start bouncing his paying customers? Without motivation, the theory won’t hold water.”

“It’s not a theory yet. Just a possibility.”

“Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t dignify it with even that term, I don’t think.” But then Megan shrugged. There was no point in running this into the ground right now. “So let’s get less specific. You sound pretty sure now that someone else besides Argath is responsible for the bounces. You think that it’s somebody who has been defeated by all the same people that Argath has been defeated by. Fine. How many people is that?”

“Six,” Leif said. “Generals or commanders named Hunsal, Orieta, Walse, Rutin, Lateran, and Balk the Screw.”

“What a name,” Megan said.

“Yeah. Well, when you analyze the data this way, you get a little help, because all these players are ‘based’ in the northeastern North Continent area. Either their cities, realms, or armies are there, or the battles took place in that ‘league area.’”

“Sounds like this analysis increases the chances of the real ‘bouncer’ being one of those six people. If not Argath.”

“That’s right. At least, that’s how it looks to me. Can you think of any other way to read it?”

Megan shook her head. “Not instantly. I’d still want to look at the hard data for myself…but it would be second-guessing. This is your specialty, and if this is the way you see it, I’m willing to buy in.”

“Great. So that would seem to be our next line of investigation, then,” Leif said. “Oh — you did get your report ready for Winters, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. He should be getting it. Wait a minute. Game intervention,” Megan said to the air.

“Waiting.”

“Time check, home base.”

“Nine forty-three P.M.”

“Finished. Fifteen minutes ago,” Megan said to Leif. “And how about you?”

“Oh, yeah, mine’s on timed release — he’ll have it in an hour or so.”

“And this line of investigation?” Megan said, looking at him with a sly expression. “Did you tell him about this new information you’ve dug up?”

“Um, well…”

“We’re holding out on him to see what we can do first, huh?” Megan said.

“Well, that seems consonant with what we discussed earlier…doesn’t it?”