In Real Life
IN REAL LIFE
Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.
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Copyright © 2014 Lawrence Tabak
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IN REAL LIFE
Lawrence Tabak
TUTTLE Publishing
Tokyo Rutland, Vermont Singapore
Dedication
To my gamers, Josh and Zach
Acknowledgments
This book was inspired and informed by my two gaming sons, Josh and Zach. The story was wisely tightened and the writing consistently improved by the careful editorial work of my agent, Kate Epstein. For help with cultural details and transliterations, as well as mathematical insights, I’m indebted to Professor Ki-Suk Lee, Department of Mathematics Education, Korea National University of Education. Careful and helpful readings were provided by a number of kind souls, including my wife Diane, Josh Tabak, and Stephanie Carmichael. Last, but far from least, to the editorial team at Tuttle, led by Terri Jadick, who guided this project with care, sensitivity and enthusiasm.
CONTENT
Dedication
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Part 1: Kansas
Part 2: Korea
Part 1
KANSAS
1.
School called. Again. Unexcused absence, blah, blah, blah. My interception rate on these calls is eighty-four percent (This is Seth’s father, how can I help you?), but they had called Dad while I was at Mom’s. So Dad calls Mom and pretty soon I can hear the screaming right through my headset even though I’m in my bedroom with the door closed. And I have a good headset. She’s getting so worked up that DTerra, my best friend, picks it up over my mic and says, “What the hell is that?”
“Nothing,” I mutter and then hit mute. I love the feeling before a game starts. The buzz of adrenaline, the little turning in the stomach. I’m determined not to let a little parental meltdown break the mood. “I HAVE talked to him! I’ve talked to him until I’m blue in the face! YOU talk to him!”
“Sounded like an orc attack.”
Despite the screaming I laugh. DTerra’s real name is Donald Terrance but I usually just call him DT. He lives five hundred miles away in Moorhead, Minnesota, which he says to think of as a twin city of Fargo, if the twins were deformed dwarfs.
“Don’t you yell at me,” my mom is yelling into the phone. “Friday was your day. It was your responsibility to see that he went to school.”
Actually, I did go to school. I just left at lunch. All I had that afternoon was a study hall, gym and a review session in AP physics, which I already understood. I hadn’t really missed anything.
“OK,” DTerra says. “You ready to make our move?”
I say, “One minute.” I actually like to draw out the pre-game excitement. And making the other team wait a couple minutes. It sets the stage. Shows them who’s in control.
Plus I haven’t looked at Brit Leigh’s Facebook page for maybe twenty minutes. She changes her picture about that often, so it’s always worth checking. If she knew how many times a week I visited her homepage I bet she’d have me arrested for stalking. Last time I looked she had 149 friends, which includes just about our entire sophomore class. It’s easy to remember because 149 happens to be the 35th largest prime number, and we have 35 kids in our English class. Anyway, the point is if I had any balls at all I would at least be one of those 149. But I don’t, and I’m not.
“Seth! Let’s take these guys now!”
We’re scheduled to play a two-man game against a team from Germany with a rating a little higher than ours. We’ve been waiting to play these guys for weeks. If we win, we’ll move up into the top ten on our server.
“One second,” I say.
Brit has added a picture of her, a friend and two senior guys goofing around. The four of them are draped all over each other and leaning into the camera and acting high or drunk. Which is possible. Even goofy she looks pretty amazing. Brit and I have been in the same school since middle school. I think we took geometry together. But I never really noticed her until this year.
It started near the beginning of the year. Our history teacher, Mr. Hobson, has this way of talking to the girls in the class. At least certain girls. I’m not sure if it would be more or less creepy if he was younger or more handsome, but he’s an old guy, at least as old as my dad, and when you get up close to him you can see craters in his cheeks and his breath is pretty awful. Anyway, he’ll call on girls in class and say stuff like, “Brit. I bet you know who the Continental Congress assigned to write the first draft of the Constitution. Because I’m sure you weren’t out carousing like half the girls in this school, dolled up like streetwalkers, doing God-knows-what on a school night.”
And Brit, instead of blushing or putting on that “OMG” face and looking at her friends in disbelief, she just stared him in the eye and said, “Mr. Hobson, are you asking me about James Madison or are you asking me about my social life?”
Everyone started laughing and now it was Mr. Hobson who was blushing. Brit and I have American History and English together and if it weren’t for her presence, I’d probably have missed so many classes I’d be flunked out by now.
Actually she knows who I am, I’m pretty sure. She said hello to me once at the mall food court. She was with a bunch of girls and I was with my mother. So I was walking as fast as I could and looking at the ground. The thing is, you have to be someone, do something, before the girls pay attention. So my brother, for years he spends three hours a day shooting hoops in the front drive. It looked like some kind of boredom torture to me, standing in the corner with a rack of balls, shooting the same damn shot over and over. Of course, Garrett would probably say the same about playing twelve hours of Starfare a day. But then he got to be a famous star on the basketball team with every girl in school worshipping him.
I pick up the morning paper and there it is on page one.
Local boy wins world Starfare tournament, $30K
Brit is waiting for me outside of homeroom. Everyone is high-fiving me and patting me on the back. She says, “Seth! That was so cool. I hear you’re going to buy a Porsche.”
I don’t care if everyone is watching or not. I step in close and wrap my arms around her and pull her towards me. Then our lips are meeting and she’s kis
sing me back and sighing.
“Seth! What the hell?”
DT is always a little wired. It’s not like they’re going to start the match without us. So I tell him that I’ve got to check my broadband speed, even though it’s fine.
I wish I knew exactly what it is about Brit. It’s not like she’s the school goddess or something. She’s got normal, brown hair. Cut shoulder length like most of the girls. Wears the same sorts of nice clothes. But she’s different too. She has this sort of confidence. When she’s standing up in front of the class, like she did last week, giving a report on some old poem…it’s like those moments in a movie where the music wells up and everyone’s leaning forward. She shakes her hair and then brushes a strand back behind her right ear. And my pulse doubles and I can feel something electric glowing inside of me and spreading through my body….
Just before I tell DTerra I’m ready, my mom starts pounding on my door so hard my Starfare Horizons poster starts shaking like a fan is blowing. Luckily I have a lock, but it’s one of those you can pop with a little metal stick, if you work it around a couple minutes. At least it gives me plenty of warning.
“Not now!” I shout.
“Your father is on the phone and you’d better talk to him. And I mean now! Anyway you know I HATE talking through a locked door. Why do you have to lock it anyway?”
Well, that’s pretty obvious, I’m thinking.
“Seth!”
“I’ll call him back on my cell,” I shout. The game is about to start and DTerra is telling me what he’s going to be doing and it takes total concentration. I tell my parents it’s like when my older brother was starting on the basketball team, dribbling down the floor. Would they stand up and scream, “Garrett! You forgot to pick up your dirty socks like you promised” or “Garrett! Have you finished your English essay?” But no matter how many times I explain it, they just don’t get it.
Mom mutters something but I can tell she’s giving up, so now I just have to get my head back into the game. That’s why I dream about getting away from all this school and family crap and just focusing on what I need to do to make it to the top. And making it to the top means making it to Korea. E-sports are huge in Korea, with twenty-four-hour TV broadcasts and teams that train like madmen. The top guys are pulling in six-figure money. I don’t talk about it, because people would think I’m crazy, but someday, if I can cut through all the crap that’s holding me back, that’s going to be me.
Then my room and my mom and school disappear and the game starts. My hand is dancing over the keyboard, my mouse is clicking like a Geiger counter. Every extraneous thought is gone and I’m deep inside the glowing screen, mining resources and figuring out how to counter the German team’s troop development. As I’m clicking I’m shouting out orders to DT and marching across a landscape of spiked mountains and fire-glowing valleys. A skirmish starts and the screen lights up with explosions as we trade cannon blasts. I yell for DT to finish them off while I check the spybots I’ve sent to the western quadrant. My whole being is now tunneled into the world on the screen, every neuron in my brain is firing for one purpose. Another hard-fought, glorious victory.
2.
Thank God, back at Dad’s. He’s on the road; I’m on the Starfare warpath. For once pumping in decent hours, really getting into the groove. I’m taking four AP courses, two are a breeze, two are a pain, but I’ve got sixth period study hall, which means early release. I scamper across the parking lot, between all the hand-me-down Acuras and BMWs, cut through two rows of McMansions on a bike path and I’m plugging in at Dad’s condo. For dinner I take a fifteen-minute break, scoot around the corner and I’m at KenTacoHut—my favorite restaurant. American, Mexican and Italian under one roof.
For months all I’ve been thinking about is this online tournament that gives away seats at Nationals. At my age, the top Korean kids are already challenging the pros. If I can’t even make U.S. Nationals then I’m worse than awful. Rather than dream about becoming a pro-gamer, I might as well plan on winning American Idol. And most dogs sing better than me.
As the day approaches, my classes get longer and longer while all I can think about is getting back to the computer. It seems like a year before we get to the Friday of the weekend tournament. The teacher is blabbering on, something about World War I. As soon as he says the word “battle” Starfare games start echoing in my head like pop music worms. I close my eyes and I can see the flashes of a Starfare firefight, and feel a glimmer of the excitement of battle. When the last bell sounds I’m out of there like there’s a fire and jog all the way home. The computer takes what feels like an hour to boot up and the game queue is endless. I run to the fridge, grab a Pepper, and then, at last, my game is up and I’m back where I belong.
Saturday, 10 a.m. and I’m finally sitting down in my bedroom at Dad’s, waiting for the first round draws to be announced. I’m so wired I can’t sit still. I get up, walk around the room, check to see if the draw has been posted yet, get up, walk around. All I can think about is winning the seat at Nationals in San Diego and getting the free entry and hotel room that goes with it.
Once I get into the first round, I’m actually calmer than I was when I was waiting.
I get lucky and they pick one of my favorite maps, Horizons, and I’m quickly in the zone, coasting by a half-dozen decent players. My sixth qualie match goes fast so I’m a bit ahead of the rest of the draw, queued up, waiting for my next opponent my right leg bouncing up and down like it has a muscle spasm. I’m getting so close, just three more wins. I’m all nerves and Starfare buzz, trying to calm down by scanning one of the Starfare message boards when I’m startled by an IM on my personal account in all caps:
Stompazer: HEY NOOB READY TO GET STOMPED
I don’t even bother replying. This guy Stompazer has been stalking me for over a year. Ever since I got written up in this computer magazine. They did a story on whether the next generation of American players could produce a Starfarer who could compete with the Koreans. I talked to a reporter on the phone for a few minutes and the story itself was pretty lame. But this guy Stompazer thinks he’s going to be the LeBron James of Starfare and is pissed off that they didn’t mention him in the story. He’s a couple of years older than me and I have no problem saying he’s a decent player. But he has way too much time on his hands. Just about every day he’s IMing or emailing me a challenge, saying how he’s going to knock my butt around or grind me into little pieces or stomp my ass. And that’s the clean stuff. I’ve changed my handle a couple of times but someone must be feeding him info because he just pops up and laughs at me for trying to avoid him.
Stompazer: BETTER PUT ON A HELMET ASSWIPE CUZ IM GOING TO KICK YOUR HEAD IN
When I pop up the tournament screen I mutter a few choice swear words, because there it is. I’ve drawn him in the round of eight, game to start in three minutes.
Stompazer: THE GREAT AMERICAN HOPE IS GOING DWN
I try to ignore this guy because I’m pretty sure he’s seriously deranged. And he’s spent all this time researching me and tracking me online. I’m pretty sure he knows where I live. All I know about him, besides he’s nuts, is that he lives somewhere in California and is a senior in high school. He’s had a few good wins, but so far I wouldn’t say he’s done anything to make people think he was going to take the Starfare world by storm. I decide if I’m going to play him, I’m going to have to acknowledge him.
ActionSeth: Hey
Stompazer: THAT ALL U GOT TO SAY…U R SUCH A PUSSY
I’d bet anything that Stomp is a complete loser IRL. Not that my real life is all wins. But at least I’m not spending all my free time harassing people online. I shut down the IM and concentrate on the tournament clock. We’ve played one-on-one ten times and he lets me know every day that he’s up 6-4. What I’ve never told him is he’s so obnoxious that in half those games I just tanked to ge
t rid of him.
But this one counts. A lot. I try not to think about how painful it would be to get this close and go down. To Stomp. But as soon as the start screen lights up, my nerves are gone. As always, the action is frantic. For about twenty minutes it looks like a draw to me. But Mr. Stomp doesn’t know a couple of things. First, I’ve been training harder than I ever have in my life. And I know this Horizon map like the way my tongue knows the back of my teeth. As we get into the midgame it’s pretty clear that I’ve got the upper hand when it comes to knowing the little quirks, taking the shortcuts, squeezing all those extra resources. My material advantage just grows and grows and the more I relax, the more I’m able to press him. I take special pleasure in a furious battle outside his home base, knowing that I’ve got superior numbers. I’m shooting fireballs so fast the screen looks like a strobe light, generating a rumble of sound effects like a Kansas thunderstorm. Normally you’re way too busy to message your opponent but Stomp starts throwing up little IMs on the game screen, stuff like I’m a lucky suck. I just smile to myself and concentrate on finishing him off. It doesn’t take long.
I know Stomp will do everything in his power to stalk me if I stay online, so I shut down the computer and soak it in. Next weekend, it’s the final four. I’m really happy with that, because I’m not getting in the kind of hours I think I need to really take it up a notch. During my best week, I’m getting around thirty-five hours. The Koreans pros, who absolutely dominate, they’re training twelve to fourteen hours a day, six days a week. And they’re working these maps as a team, a dozen of them just pounding on it hour after hour, sharing every little quirk and advantage they stumble on. Even if I had fourteen hours a day I couldn’t compete with that.