Cory Doctorow - Andas Game

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file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/Doctorow,%20Cory%20-%20Anda's%20Game.txt
Title: Anda's Game
Author: Cory Doctorow
Publication Date: 2004/11/15
License: Creative Commons
Anda didn't really start to play the game until she got herself a girl-shaped avatar. She was 12, and up
until then, she'd played a boy-elf, because her parents had sternly warned her that if you played a girl
you were an instant perv-magnet. 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 12, 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 was 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 wookie-men, 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.
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"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 10,
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 smells like a boy's armpit. 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. She 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."
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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.
> You mean gold?
> If I meant gold, I would have said gold. Can you go voice?
Anda looked around. Her door was shut and she could hear her parents in the sitting-room watching
something loud on telly. She turned up her music just to be safe and then slipped on her headset. They
said it could noise-cancel a Blackhawk helicopter -- it had better be able to overcome the little inductive
speakers suction-cupped to the underside of her desk. She switched to voice.
"Hey, Lucy," she said.
"Call me Sarge!" Lucy's accent was American, like an old TV show, and she lived somewhere in the
middle of the country where it was all vowels, Iowa or Ohio. She was Anda's best friend in-game but she
was so hardcore it was boring sometimes.
"Hi Sarge," she said, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice. She'd never smart off to a superior in-
game, but v2v it was harder to remember to keep to the game norms.
"I have a mission that pays real cash. Whichever paypal you're using, they'll deposit money into it.
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Looks fun, too."
"That's a bit weird, Sarge. Is that against Clan rules?" There were a lot of Clan rules about what kind of
mission you could accept and they were always changing. There were kerb-crawlers in gamespace and
the way that the Clan leadership kept all the mummies and daddies from going ape-poo about it was by
enforcing a long, boring code of conduct that was meant to ensure that none of the Fahrenheit girlies
ended up being virtual prozzies for hairy old men in raincoats on the other side of the world.
"What?" Anda loved how Lucy quacked What? It sounded especially American. She had to force herself
from parroting it back. "No, geez. All the executives in the Clan pay the rent doing missions for money.
Some of them are even rich from it, I hear! You can make a lot of money gaming, you know."
"Is it really true?" She'd heard about this but she'd assumed it was just stories, like the kids who gamed
so much that they couldn't tell reality from fantasy. Or the ones who gamed so much that they stopped
eating and got all anorexic. She wouldn't mind getting a little anorexic, to be honest. Bloody podge.
"Yup! And this is our chance to get in on the ground floor. Are you in?"
"It's not -- you know, pervy, is it?"
"Gag me. No. Jeez, Anda! Are you nuts? No -- they want us to go kill some guys."
"Oh, we're good at that!"
- - - - - - - - - - - -
The mission took them far from Fahrenheit Island, to a cottage on the far side of the largest continent on
the gameworld, which was called Dandelionwine. The travel was tedious, and twice they were
ambushed on the trail, something that had hardly happened to Anda since she joined the Fahrenheits:
attacking a Fahrenheit was bad for your health, because even if you won the battle, they'd bring a war to
you.
But now they were far from the Fahrenheits' power-base, and two different packs of brigands waylaid
them on the road. Lucy spotted the first group before they got into sword-range and killed four of the six
with her bow before they closed for hand-to-hand. Anda's sword -- gigantic and fast -- was out then, and
her fingers danced over the keyboard as she fought off the player who was attacking her, her body
jerking from side to side as she hammered on the multibutton controller beside her. She won -- of
course! She was a Fahrenheit! Lucy had already slaughtered her attacker. They desultorily searched the
bodies and came up with some gold and a couple scrolls, but nothing to write home about. Even the gold
didn't seem like much, given the cash waiting at the end of the mission.
The second group of brigands was even less daunting, though there were 20 of them. They were total
noobs, and fought like statues. They'd clearly clubbed together to protect themselves from harder
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players, but they were no match for Anda and Lucy. One of them even begged for his life before she ran
him through,
> please sorry u cn have my gold sorry!!!11!
Anda laughed and sent him to the respawn gate.
> You're a nasty person, Anda,
Lucy typed.
> I'm a Fahrenheit!!!!!!!!!!
she typed back.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
The brigands on the road were punters, but the cottage that was their target was guarded by an altogether
more sophisticated sort. They were spotted by sentries long before they got within sight of the cottage,
and they saw the warning spell travel up from the sentries' hilltop like a puff of smoke, speeding away
toward the cottage. Anda raced up the hill while Lucy covered her with her bow, but that didn't stop the
sentries from subjecting Anda to a hail of flaming spears from their fortified position. Anda set up her
standard dodge-and-weave pattern, assuming that the sentries were non-player characters -- who wanted
to pay to sit around in gamespace watching a boring road all day? -- and to her surprise, the spears
followed her. She took one in the chest and only some fast work with her shield and all her healing
scrolls saved her. As it was, her constitution was knocked down by half and she had to retreat back down
the hillside.
"Get down," Lucy said in her headset. "I'm gonna use the BFG."
Every game had one -- the Big Friendly Gun, the generic term for the baddest-arse weapon in the world.
Lucy had rented this one from the Clan armory for a small fortune in gold and Anda had laughed and
called her paranoid, but now Anda helped Lucy set it up and thanked the gamegods for her foresight. It
was a huge, demented flaming crossbow that fired five-metre bolts that exploded on impact. It was a
beast to arm and a beast to aim, but they had a nice, dug-in position of their own at the bottom of the hill
and it was there that they got the BFG set up, deployed, armed and ranged.
"Fire!" Lucy called, and the game did this amazing and cool animation that it rewarded you with
whenever you loosed a bolt from the BFG, making the gamelight dim towards the sizzling bolt as
though it were sucking the illumination out of the world as it arced up the hillside, trailing a comet-tail
of sparks. The game played them a groan of dismay from their enemies, and then the bolt hit home with
a crash that made her point-of-view vibrate like an earthquake. The roar in her headphones was
deafening, and behind it she could hear Lucy on the voice-chat, cheering it on.
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"Nuke 'em till they glow and shoot 'em in the dark! Yee-haw!" Lucy called, and Anda laughed and
pounded her fist on the desk. Gobbets of former enemy sailed over the treeline dramatically, dripping
hyper-red blood and ichor.
In her bedroom, Anda caressed the controller-pad and her avatar punched the air and did a little rugby
victory dance that the All-Blacks had released as a limited edition promo after they won the World Cup.
Now they had to move fast, for their enemies at the cottage would be alerted to their presence and
waiting for them. They spread out into a wide flanking manoeuver around the cottage's sides, staying
just outside of bow-range, using scrying scrolls to magnify the cottage and make the foliage around them
fade to translucency.
There were four guards around the cottage, two with nocked arrows and two with whirling slings. One
had a scroll out and was surrounded by the concentration marks that indicated spellcasting.
"GO GO GO!" Lucy called.
Anda went! She had two scrolls left in her inventory, and one was a shield spell. They cost a fortune and
burned out fast, but whatever that guard was cooking up, it had to be bad news. She cast the spell as she
charged for the cottage, and lucky thing, because there was a fifth guard up a tree who dumped a pot of
boiling oil on her that would have cooked her down to her bones in ten seconds if not for the spell.
She power-climbed the tree and nearly lost her grip when whatever the nasty spell was bounced off her
shield. She reached the fifth man as he was trying to draw his dirk and dagger and lopped his bloody
head off in one motion, then backflipped off the high branch, trusting to her shield to stay intact for her
impact on the cottage roof.
The strategy worked -- now she had the drop (literally!) on the remaining guards, having successfully
taken the high ground. In her headphones, the sound of Lucy making mayhem, the grunts as she
pounded her keyboard mingling with the in-game shrieks as her arrows found homes in the chests of two
more of the guards.
Shrieking a berzerker wail, Anda jumped down off of the roof and landed on one of the two remaining
guards, plunging her sword into his chest and pinning him in the dirt. Her sword stuck in the ground, and
she hammered on her keys, trying to free it, while the remaining guard ran for her on-screen. Anda
pounded her keyboard, but it was useless: the sword was good and stuck. Poo. She'd blown a small
fortune on spells and rations for this project with the expectation of getting some real cash out of it, and
now it was all lost.
She moved her hands to the part of the keypad that controlled motion and began to run, waiting for the
guard's sword to find her avatar's back and knock her into the dirt.
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"Got 'im!" It was Lucy, in her headphones. She wheeled her avatar about so quickly it was nauseating
and saw that Lucy was on her erstwhile attacker, grunting as she engaged him close-in. Something was
wrong, though: despite Lucy's avatar's awesome stats and despite Lucy's own skill at the keyboard, she
was being taken to the cleaners. The guard was kicking her ass. Anda went back to her stuck sword and
recommenced whanging on it, watching helplessly as Lucy lost her left arm, then took a cut on her belly,
then another to her knee.
"Shit!" Lucy said in her headphones as her avatar began to keel over. Anda yanked her sword free --
finally -- and charged at the guard, screaming a ululating war cry. He managed to get his avatar swung
around and his sword up before she reached him, but it didn't matter: she got in a lucky swing that took
off one leg, then danced back before he could counterstrike. Now she closed carefully, nicking at his
sword-hand until he dropped his weapon, then moving in for a fast kill.
"Lucy?"
"Call me Sarge!"
"Sorry, Sarge. Where'd you respawn?"
"I'm all the way over at Body Electric -- it'll take me hours to get there. Do you think you can complete
the mission on your own?"
"Uh, sure." Thinking, Crikey, if that's what the guards outside were like, how'm I gonna get past the
inside guards?
"You're the best, girl. OK, enter the cottage and kill everyone there."
"Uh, sure."
She wished she had another scrying scroll in inventory so she could get a look inside the cottage before
she beat its door in, but she was fresh out of scrolls and just about everything else.
She kicked the door in and her fingers danced. She'd killed four of her adversaries before she even
noticed that they weren't fighting back.
In fact, they were generic avatars, maybe even non-player characters. They moved like total noobs,
milling around in the little cottage. Around them were heaps of shirts, thousands and thousands of them.
A couple of the noobs were sitting in the back, incredibly, still crafting more shirts, ignoring the
swordswoman who'd just butchered four of their companions.
She took a careful look at all the avatars in the room. None of them were armed. Tentatively, she walked
up to one of the players and cut his head off. The player next to him moved clumsily to one side and she
followed him.
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"Are you a player or a bot?" she typed.
The avatar did nothing. She killed it.
"Lucy, they're not fighting back."
"Good, kill them all."
"Really?"
"Yeah -- that's the orders. Kill them all and then I'll make a phone call and some guys will come by and
verify it and then you haul ass back to the island. I'm coming out there to meet you, but it's a long haul
from the respawn gate. Keep an eye on my stuff, OK?"
"Sure," Anda said, and killed two more. That left ten. One two one two and through and through, she
thought, lopping their heads off. Her vorpal blade went snicker-snack. One left. He stood off in the back.
> no porfa necesito mi plata
Italian? No, Spanish. She'd had a term of it in Third Form, though she couldn't understand what this twit
was saying. She could always paste the text into a translation bot on one of the chat channels, but who
cared? She cut his head off.
"They're all dead," she said into her headset.
"Good job!" Lucy said. "OK, I'm gonna make a call. Sit tight."
Bo-ring. The cottage was filled with corpses and shirts. She picked some of them up. They were totally
generic: the shirts you crafted when you were down at Level 0 and trying to get enough skillz to actually
make something of yourself. Each one would fetch just a few coppers. Add it all together and you barely
had two thousand gold.
Just to pass the time, she pasted the Spanish into the chatbot.
> no [colloquial] please, I need my [colloquial] [money|silver]
Pathetic. A few thousand golds -- he could make that much by playing a couple of the beginner
missions. More fun. More rewarding. Crafting shirts!
She left the cottage and patrolled around it. Twenty minutes later, two more avatars showed up. More
generics.
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> are you players or bots?
she typed, though she had an idea they were players. Bots moved better.
> any trouble?
Well all right then.
> no trouble
> good
One player entered the cottage and came back out again. The other player spoke.
> you can go now
"Lucy?"
"What's up?"
"Two blokes just showed up and told me to piss off. They're noobs, though. Should I kill them?"
"No! Jeez, Anda, those are the contacts. They're just making sure the job was done. Get my stuff and
meet me at Marionettes Tavern, OK?"
Anda went over to Lucy's corpse and looted it, then set out down the road, dragging the BFG behind her.
She stopped at the bend in the road and snuck a peek back at the cottage. It was in flames, the two noobs
standing amid them, burning slowly along with the cottage and a few thousand golds' worth of badly
crafted shirts.
That was the first of Anda and Lucy's missions, but it wasn't the last. That month, she fought her way
through six more, and the paypal she used filled with real, honest-to-goodness cash, Pounds Sterling that
she could withdraw from the cashpoint situated exactly 501 metres away from the schoolgate, next to the
candy shop that was likewise 501 metres away.
"Anda, I don't think it's healthy for you to spend so much time with your game," her da said, prodding
her bulging podge with a finger. "It's not healthy."
"Daaaa!" she said, pushing his finger aside. "I go to PE every stinking day. It's good enough for the
Ministry of Education."
"I don't like it," he said. He was no movie star himself, with a little pot belly that he wore his belted
trousers high upon, a wobbly extra chin and two bat wings of flab hanging off his upper arms. She
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