The offices of Blade and Sheath Incorporated were smaller than I expected. Not just that, but they were a lot more run-down. After all, this was the home of the third-largest VRMMORPG on the market, easily pulling in billions of dollars every year in subscription fees. That was without factoring in the cosmetics packs you could buy and the expansion packs they released quarterly. We were talking big bucks.
Maybe it was just me, but I expected some inner-city tower block, maybe situated in between buildings for a law company and an ad executive agency. The kinda place where you were never more than ten feet away from a guy holding a coffee in one hand and screaming into a cell phone in his other. The sort of building that attracted trendy cocktails that popped up around it and clung to it like barnacles on a ship’s hull, finding sustenance on the suited folks who worked there.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Blade and Sheath was basically a digital money printing machine, yet it was born and was maintained in a three-story office building near the south docks. The brickwork was decades overdue repointing, and the window frames looked like a mildly wild storm might shatter their frames.
I adjusted my expectations accordingly.
It made me feel better, to be honest. Made it seem a little less imposing for a guy starting his first day at work. Getting a job here had always been a dream of mine, but I’d never studied computer programming or game design or anything that might get a guy a job at a games company. In fact, despite it being a childhood dream to work at a place where they made games, I’d never seriously pursued it until now.
My route into the company, it turned out, was a strange one.
In the reception area, a busy receptionist ignored a ringing telephone to greet me. She gave me a smile that extended beyond professional and seemed genuine.
“Good morning! Name please, sir?”
“Josh Boothe. I’m here to see Sasha Watts.”
“Ah. Ms. Watts was in a fire blanket meeting this morning. I’ll see if it’s finished.”
“Fire blanket meeting?”
“Sorry. It’s an office thing. There was a problem in the Realm of Geekdom, and all the department heads had to meet. I’ll see if I can track her down.”
I assumed that the Realm of Geekdom meant the game, Blade and Sheath. It struck me as weird that the receptionist of BaS inc would refer to the product that way. Then again, she seemed like a weird lady. Case in point – she had at least three dozen cacti decorating her tiny reception desk. She probably couldn’t even pick up the telephone without stabbing herself.
I sat down, wondering what kind of place this was and what I was getting myself into. While I waited, I looked around reception where on one wall there was a mural of a blood elf warrior fighting a horde of corrupted imps. The style was a sort of graffiti art.
Above the scene was Blade and Sheath’s tagline: ‘For the players, by the players.’
That was the tagline that had drawn me in all those years ago. It wasn’t just a fancy slogan – the devs meant it. BaS was designed to be a massively multiplayer role-playing game, or MMORPG, which would be released and given a gentle nurturing by the devs, but then the players would take it from there.
The sheer amount of customization options in-game was mind-boggling. Players could create quests for other players to follow. They could design dungeons, towers, enemy forts. Given most people’s attention spans, the result was tons and tons of half-finished castles, villages, mountain mines. The base idea of player creation in an MMORPG had merit, but the devs were still fine-tuning the execution. Even so, aside from the odd expansion pack release by devs, it truly was a game for the players.
“Mr. Boothe?”
A woman crossed the reception area. She had red hair tied into a ponytail and she wore a crumpled shirt with the sleeves rolled up at the elbows. Clipped to her belt was a keyring with maybe two dozen USB sticks looped to it.
She stuck her hand out toward me.
“I’m Sas,” she said.
I took her hand and shook it. “Good to meet you. Call me Josh.”
“Super. You’re here for the town-building, right?”
I nodded. “That’s what they assigned me.”
“Sorry to ask. We’ve taken on a lot of staff lately. Lots of new faces, and I suck at remembering them. Last year, I went to my cousin’s wedding, and I forgot the name of my own niece. I’m a horrible, horrible person. Oh well.”
“Don’t worry about it. We never met face to face. You probably know me as a bunch of text on a CV.”
“I don’t read those. Anyway. Come this way, Josh, and we’ll get you set up.”
I followed Sas out of the reception area and to an elevator. Aesthetically, it looked like one of those old still ones where an attendant would take you to whichever floor you wanted. Inside, though, it was a modern elevator. It made me re-evaluate my judgment of this place. Maybe the BaS devs just liked the old, rundown aesthetic.
When the doors closed, Sas hummed the Imperial March under her breath, and she didn’t say a word nor look at me.
I knew anxiety when I saw it, so I did my best to appear relaxed and not draw any attention to how she must be feeling. If Sas noticed, she didn’t show it.
When the doors dinged open, she let out a breath and stepped out.
“Sorry. I hate the elevator. I mean, I know nothing will happen. It’s gotten stuck once in twelve years. But still. I don’t use it when I can help it.”
“I’d have been fine taking the stairs,” I said.
“I normally do, but today has been hectic. There was a fire blanket meeting earlier.”
“Yeah, I heard.”
“Not far now. Just this way. Try not to stare at the cages, I don’t want you scaring the animals.”
“Cages?”
Sas nodded at the window of an office right next to us.
‘Cages’ and ‘animals’ meant the devs and the offices they worked in, though she said it with a smile rather than meaning anything malicious by it. We passed by long, open-plan offices where hundreds of people were hunched in front of computer screens and laptops, enthralled in their work. I don’t think a single person even looked up as we walked by the windows. The ones who weren’t sitting in front of screens were lounging on multi-colored beanbags scattered haphazardly throughout the office. Though they were sitting on the most ridiculous furniture possible, they seemed to be having serious meetings and were talking and scribbling notes on ledgers.
Sas was talking to me the whole time now that she wasn’t constrained by the elevator.
“Remind me again,” she said. “How many classes are there in BaS?”
She said it with the kind of forced casualness you’d only pick up on from someone who really sucked at acting.
I realized what this was – she was testing me.
I’d done my homework on BaS when I interviewed for the job, even though I had played it for years. I treated it like I would with any other role that I was applying for.
“A hundred and six classes,” I said.
“A hundred and seven.”
“That’s not what I read.”
“We added the Twilight Steel Shaper class just yesterday,” said Sas. “Tell me something. Did you do any research before applying?”
I gritted my teeth. “Some. How many guilds are there in BaS?”
She raised her right eyebrow, as though she couldn’t believe I’d had the gall to ask her a question. After a while, she said, “Thirty-six.”
“Thirty-five. You removed the potters guild two weeks ago.”
“Son of a bitch,” she said and grinned at me. If everything I had seen so far wasn’t a clue, this was confirmation that Sas wouldn’t be a normal boss.
Sas strolled on, always a step or two in front of me. She talked all the way, sometimes glancing back to see if I was listening.
“As you know from our video chats, I’m head of Player Content Generation,” she said. “If the game feels stale, that’s down to me. Or so my paymasters say. I’m not in charge of BaS expansion packs, of course. That’s an entirely different type of content. Do you know the difference?”
“Between player content and expansion packs?”
She nodded.
“Sure. I play BaS,” I said.
Sas said nothing. Evidently, she was waiting for me to actually say it. She was one of those kinds of managers, it seemed.
I composed my thoughts, then answered. “So you’ve got scripted content, like locations and characters and questlines that the devs make,” I said. “And then there’s the player content system, where everything is made by players.”
“There’s a whole heap of nuance and detail involved but yes, that’s pretty on the money.”
She took me to an office at the far end of the third floor, where there were tons of boxes piled up against one wall. One box was crammed with rolled-up posters. I couldn’t see what was on them, but I remembered the aggressive poster campaign from last year. The posters featured five of the thirteen player races in BaS. Rather than have them brandishing weapons, they were lounging in one of the in-game taverns. The tagline read, ‘Log in. Sword Down. Feet up.”
Having adjusted my expectations already, I wasn’t surprised to see a storeroom full of crap. Not that it mattered much to me anyhow, since I would be working from home.
Sas fiddled with the switch for a set of blinds. When the blinds didn’t move, she rolled them up by hand and then jammed them in place.
“Let’s get a little fresh air in here.”
She cracked open each window one by one. I opened the last one for her. A winter breeze quickly blew in like a tempest that was upset at being kept out so long. I zipped up my coat.
Grabbing two boxes, Sas tapped them and then, feeling they were solid, stacked them in the center of the room. I wondered what she was doing.
She stood on the boxes and reached for the smoke detector set on the ceiling. Twisting it, she removed the lid and then pulled the mains connections, then yanked out the emergency battery.
“Uh…” I began, but she held a finger up.
Standing near the open windows, she took out a cigarette packet and shook out a single cigarette. She popped it into her mouth and then flicked open a silver zippo lighter.
“There’s an extra dollar per hour in it if you keep schtum,” she said, grinning. I must have been wearing a stern expression or something because she said, “Oh! Sorry. Did you want one?”
“I’m good.”
“I should quit, but I don’t have time.”
“Don’t have time to quit?”
“Nope. It’s a whole ordeal. Gotta book a week of vacation so I’m not stomping around the office like an ass. That kinda thing. Better for everyone that I carry on. Anyway, let’s get on with this.”
She extinguished the cigarette in her coffee cup, which still had some coffee in it. Crossing the room, she stood in front of a giant map of the game. Or, actually, two maps. The poster was six feet tall and showed the landmass of BaS, duplicated. The first representation listed all the locations created by the devs. The capital city of Storm Hollow. The dozens of dungeons home to loot and monsters.
The map on the right showed the player-created content. Four towns, thirty-eight villages, and a bunch of smaller hamlets. On top of that, there were hundreds of dungeons and ruins and temples.
I’d explored a few of these when I played BaS but they were invariably half-finished and poorly planned. I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. It got to the point that some folks ignored player-created content, which were represented on game maps as blue dots. I still had faith in the idea, however, and I reckoned the devs just needed to stumble on the proper way of implementing it.
“Let’s find you a VR set,” said Sas.
“You’re giving me a set?”
“Sure. If we were a restaurant, I’d give you a uniform.”
Giving someone a VR set was a little different than issuing them a ten-dollar uniform, but I wasn’t gonna complain. The set I was using right now was on its way out.
She headed to the boxes piled in ten rows. She turned and looked at me, squinting, and held up her index fingers, like she was using them to measure my head.
“You look like a regular adult size,” she said. “Not that there are many choices. Kids, adults, large adults. Y’know. For people with big heads. Do you have a big head, Josh?”
“Never something that occurred to me.”
“No. Your head looks normal-sized.”
“I’ll add it to my CV.”
She grinned, then commenced her hunt through the myriad of piled boxes. While she checked each one for a VR headset that would fit me, I asked her to tell me a little more about my new job and what I should expect.
“Keen. I like it. The player content system is much more dynamic than anything we could come up with in an office,” she said. “And that means good and bad. Dungeons that only stay open for a week. That kind of thing. Creates scarcity. Questlines written by creative writing majors who need an outlet but don’t want to stop playing BaS so they can, you know, actually work on their studies.”
“I’ve played tons of player-created quests and stuff,” I said.
“That’s a touch modest, isn’t it?”
“Ah. So you did read my CV after all.”
“My sec reads ‘em. But she bullet points the good ones and sends ‘em over to me.”
I knew what she was referring to, but I didn’t elaborate. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to blow my own trumpet. I mean, why buy a trumpet if you don’t plan on blowing it?
No, it was the fact that I had been so proud of the Rise of Tower’s Reach questline that I had written and had approved for the game. It had attracted masses of players, and the quest had branched until there were five pathways to finishing it, each with a different outcome. I was paid dividends for every person who completed it.
Then my dog, Baxter, hurt his foot chasing a ball. There was a tiny sinkhole in the grass, and he put his paw in it wrong and broke his leg. I was forced to sell Rise of Tower’s Reach on the BaS auction site for five hundred dollars. That, along with my 5000-dollar savings, helped me afford Bax’s surgery, but every questline I created after that petered out. Nothing caught on like Tower’s Reach.
“This job is for town building, right?” I said. “Not quest writing?”
“Yup. Here.”
Sas passed me a box. The lid was open, and inside were hundreds of little white packaging fillers.
“Lemme get that,” she said.
She scooped the fillers out with her hand and threw them on the floor. Out of empathy for the office cleaning staff I started to pick them up, but Sas said, “Hey! I know I look like an ass, just throwing stuff around like that. But this is a test. I’ve been suspecting for a while now that the people we pay to clean this place are slacking. They’re ignoring the rooms that they think we don’t go to.”
Sas’s whole life seemed to be one series of little tests, grudges, and battles, I realized. I couldn’t live like that. It’d stress me out.
I shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
“Here.”
Inside the box was a brand-new VR headset with touch sensors, lovingly packaged with foam so it didn’t get damaged. Tucked to the side was a small, paper manual.
“Wow. Touch sensors?”
Sas nodded. “Nothin’ less for our employees. Besides. You’ll need ‘em.”
At home, I played with a second-hand VR set that I bought from Loot Tree. The vision flickered during battles and the right earpiece wasn’t working. It sure as shit didn’t have touch sensors.
The price of those had steadily dropped over the last few years, especially as VR tech improved. But it was still a luxury I couldn’t bring myself to splurge on. I’d picked up frugalness from my father, and I never replaced things while they still had life in them. That was why I wore a ten-year-old coat every day, one that I’d made so many sewing repairs on that it looked like a Frankenstein’s monster of a garment.
“Is this on loan?” I said.
“Nope. It’s yours.”
“These sell for five hundred dollars,” I said. “What’s to stop me just never coming back and having a free VR set for my trouble?”
“Is that what you’re gonna do?”
“Nope.”
“Well then. Moot point. And that’s the worst kind of point because even the word moot sounds stupid. Anyway, we partnered with Hurrell Tech years ago. These things might sell for half a grand, but they manufacture ‘em for a relative pittance.”
I looked down at the VR set again, hardly believing I now owned one as sophisticated as this. I couldn’t wait to try it out. “Well, thanks.”
“Thank me in a month, once you realize what an asshole I am. Twenty bucks an hour and a VR set might not seem like such a good deal.”
Maybe she had a point. Twenty bucks an hour was way less than I used to make as a junior for a marketing exec company. Back at Oaktree Media I was on a path that went upwards. It was only slowly, but still, my old boss Phil Glendale said I was ready for a promotion and I just had to play my cards right.
Then Bax broke his leg, and even after his surgery, his rehab went slowly. Poor guy needed someone around at home all the time while he got better, and I didn’t have anyone I could ask to do that. Sure, I could pay a dog walking service to check on him twice per day, but that wouldn’t cut it for my best friend. It wasn’t good enough. Bax had been there for me when my parents died, and now it was time that I was there for him. Besides, if I was honest with myself, I wasn’t enjoying it at Oaktree Media.
That meant I needed a job that was work-from-home and had flexible hours. When I saw a job listing for Blade and Sheath inc, I couldn’t believe it.
A job creating player content for BaS was perfect in most ways. It was work-from-home and it was fun. The money wasn’t great, but I’d always been a frugal guy, and twenty bucks per hour were enough to see me through until Bex was fully recovered and he could be safely left alone at home for a little longer.
“Thanks for the set,” I told Sas. “I’m looking forward to getting started.”
“Then let’s get the other stuff out of the way, huh?”
She took me to a staff canteen on the second floor, where she bought me a coffee. I’ve always hated leaving a deed unpaid, so I bought us both a jam doughnut in return. Sas ate the donut like a lunatic, tearing it apart and gobbling the jam-covered bits, then throwing the rest away. I ate mine carefully, trying not to stain my shirt and tie.
“So,” she said. “Let’s talk specifics before my meeting. How’s your coffee?”
“Tastes like crap.”
Sas laughed. “I keep telling ‘em that they gotta buy better stuff. You can screw around with a lot of things, but not coffee. Anyway. Your role. Let’s discuss it. Tell me what you know.”
“It’s town building,” I said. “I’m supposed to start building a player town somewhere in BaS.”
She nodded. “Do you know why we want you to do that instead of just adding a fully made town ourselves?”
“You’re cheap.”
She laughed. “Can’t argue with that. Since the launch of SpaceNet and how that went, we’ve had our budgets cut.”
SpaceNet was their foray into creating a sci-fi MMO, and it did not go down well. That’s what I would say if I was being nice about it. They tried making a game ten times the scope of Blade and Sheath, but they wanted to do it not just five times quicker, but they wanted it done immediately. BaS had grown over time, allowing all its kinks to be ironed out. SpaceNet was released as this big, flabby universe where nothing worked as it should.
“I’m guessing you can’t afford to pay as many people to work on new content for BaS,” I said.
“Yes, but that’s not the whole story. We created BaS with dynamic player content in mind, and we never really cracked that nut. That’s why there are two build interfaces within the game. One for creating physical structures, the other for creating quests, weapons, and spell tomes. Player content didn’t happen by accident; we designed the game with that in mind. Every MMO needs a USP. And I am aware that I use a lot of acronyms, BTW.”
“Why do you need to hire players to create towns if everything is dynamic. Plenty of folks are out there building stuff.”
“Trying to talk yourself out of a job?”
“I just want to understand it better.”
“You’re underestimating the average person’s tenacity. Most people start building a village, hit a hump and then give up. They decide it’d be more fun to go questing or find a dungeon. As such, the game map is littered with the ruins of half-finished dwellings. It’s a bloody eyesore.”
I knew what she was talking about. Most people who built stuff in BaS started too big. Like, they wanted to build a cathedral with a dungeon full of undead demons beneath it. They had an initial burst of motivation and then, realizing their project was too big, they gave up.
I wouldn’t have said the map was littered with such things, though. “Things degrade in-game. I’ve seen it. If something is left unfinished for long enough it begins to disappear.”
Sas sipped her coffee and nodded. “Sure, we built in a destruction mechanic for places that are unfinished and haven’t been worked on or visited in a while. Even so, that only solves half the problem. For dynamic player content to realize its potential, we need dedicated players to be the forerunners. That’s where you come in. Another coffee?”
I looked down at my half-finished cup. “No thanks. I think I get it. You figure that if you pay a bunch of players to create towns, they’ll be more dedicated because it’s a job. When they finish building them, other players will buy into the whole thing and start building their own.”
Sas smiled. “Exactly. You know, they always used to think that nobody could run a mile in four minutes. Impossible. Couldn’t be done. Then a student called Roger Bannister did it. Suddenly, more and more people started running a mile in under four minutes.”
“So we’re the Roger Bannisters of the MMO world.”
“You got it. Create a town, and your job’s done.”
“Seems like an incentive for me to drag this out,” I said, “If I lose my job when I finish what you asked.”
“Are you the kind of guy to drag things out?”
I shrugged. “I could be.”
She stared at me for a moment as if trying to see whether I was joking or serious or just playing some kind of game with her. Finally, she said, “Somehow, I don’t think you are. Welcome to the Blade and Sheath team, Josh.”