The Never Game

They made their way through a crowd clustering around the booth for Fortnite, which seemed to attract the most attention in this portion of the hall. Some attendees within the cordoned-off portion of the booth were at computers, playing the game, in which avatars ran around the landscape and homemade structures — forts, he assumed. The characters would blast away at creatures and occasionally break into a bizarre dance.

“This way,” Maddie said. “Come on.” She clearly had a mission. She called, “What was your favorite game growing up?”

His turn to be wry. He said, “Venison.”

A brief moment passed. Maddie laughed, a light, high voice, as she got the joke. Then she eyed him. “Serious? You hunt too?”

Too? One of those something-in-common moments? He nodded.

“My father and I’d go out every fall for duck and pheasant,” she said. “Kind of a tradition.” They dodged a pair of Asian women in bobbed wigs, one of which was bright green, one yellow. They wore snakeskin bodysuits.

Maddie asked, “You didn’t play games?”

“No computers in our house.”

“So you played on consoles?”

“None of the above,” he said.

“Hmm,” she said. “Never met anybody who grew up on Mars.”

On the Compound, in the rugged Sierra Nevadas, the Shaw family had two basic cell phones — prepaid, of course, and for use in emergencies only. There was a shortwave radio, which the children could listen to, but like the phones it could be used for transmission only in dire straits. Ashton warned that “fox hunters” — people with devices to locate the source of radio signals — might be roaming the area to find him. When the family made the trip to the nearest town, White Sulphur Springs, twenty-five miles away, Ashton and Mary Dove had no problem with the children’s logging on to the antiquated computers in the town library, or using them at their aunts’ and uncles’ homes during their summer visits to “civilization” — Portland and Seattle. But when your daily routine might find you rappelling down cliffs or confronting a rattlesnake or moose, vaporizing fictional aliens was a bit frivolous.

“Oh, oh, oh!... Come on.” Maddie charged off toward a large monitor on which a gamer — a young man in stocking cap and sweats and an attempt at a beard — was firing away at bulky monsters, blowing most of them up.

“He’s good. The game’s Doom,” she said, shaking her head, sentimental. “A classic. Like Paradise Lost or Hamlet... Caught you almost looking surprised there, Colter. I have a B.A. in English lit and a master’s in information science.”

She picked up a controller. She offered it to him. “Try your hand?”

“I’ll pass.”

“You mind if I do?”

“Go right ahead.”

Maddie dropped into a seat and began to play. Her eyes were focused and her lips slightly parted. She sat forward and her body swayed and jerked, as if the world of the game were the only reality.

Her movement was balletic, and it was sensuous.

Speakers behind Shaw roared with the sound of a rocket and he turned, looking across the jammed aisle. He gazed up at the monitor, on which a preview of this company’s game was displayed. In Galaxy VII the player guided an astronaut piloting a flying ship over a distant planet. The craft set down and the gamer directed the character to leave the vehicle and walk into a cave, where he explored tunnels and collected items like maps, weapons and “Power Plus wafers.” Which sounded to Colter like a marathon runner’s food supplement.

The game was calmer and subtler than the shoot-’em-up carnage of Doom.

Maddie appeared beside him. “I saved the world. We’re good.” She gripped his arm and leaned close, calling over the noise, “The gaming world in a nutshell.” She pointed back to Doom. “One, where it’s all from your perspective and you mow down the bad guys before they mow you down. They’re called first-person shooters.” Then she turned to the game he’d been looking at. “Two, action-adventure. They’re third-person role playing, where you direct your character — avatar — you know avatar?” He nodded. “Direct your avatar around the set, overcoming challenges, collecting things that might help you. You try to stay alive. Not to worry, you can still use a pulse laser to fry Orc butt.”

“Lord of the Rings.”

“Hey.” She laughed and squeezed his arm. “Hope for you after all.”

When there’s no TV, you gravitate toward books.

“One last lesson.” She pointed up to the Galaxy VII screen. “See the other avatars walking around? Those are players somewhere else in the world. It’s not just a role-playing game but a ‘multiplayer online role-playing game,’ a MORPG. The other gamers might be on your side or you might be fighting them. At any given moment in the popular games — like World of Warcraft — there could be a quarter million people online playing.”

“You game a lot?”