She deposited me in the Jenning & Reece cafeteria and said she’d be back to get me in an hour.
I wandered about in a daze for a few minutes, highly overstimulated and practically vibrating for some reason. I made it to a table with some effort and sat quietly, only occasionally remembering to eat. Because what the hell weird fuckery had just happened to me? I scanned the room, looking for anyone else who might have a similarly glossy-eyed look, but was unable to detect if anyone else was here for “usability testing.”
I tried to gauge how freaked out I should be. As far as I could tell, I’d blithely signed a doc describing a list of “unlikely” side effects, then Olivia made spell noises at me for two hours, and now I was experiencing many of those “unlikely” side effects. Not only that, but I’d also sure as hell experienced main effects, too. Ipso facto, this was some weird shit.
To be fair, the spell noises Olivia produced did in fact sound like variations on Sparkle Dungeon spells. Kind of like the psychological feeling of realizing you’d been listening to pig Latin and now it was resolving into proper speech in your mind. She was stretching her voice in familiar ways to make some of those sounds, so I believed there was continuity in technique from prior games to what I’d just heard.
But spells in the prior games didn’t make you feel anything as a player; you just lost hit points when you got hit or whatever. This was different. This was like accidentally clicking on an ad and getting a hundred pop-ups before you had a chance to react, and each one was bombarding you with highly concentrated, weaponized ad messaging designed to hook you and control you and make you do stuff or want stuff, and you couldn’t close them fast enough and eventually you had to throw your laptop off the balcony. This was sort of like that, but not on a balcony obviously.
That had to be it, I decided. These weren’t spells—these were prototype ad units.
To be fair, I wasn’t thinking clearly yet.
So but then I got serious as we went into our second session. Because you did not simply deploy some weird advertising technique on me and expect to just, oh, for instance, get away with that shit. I rose to ascendancy in the game faster than anyone because of how I approached problems and how I deduced solutions, how I attacked but just as importantly how I defended, and in retrospect I felt attacked during that first session. And as the Luminescent Gods of the Black Light Gate were my witness, I intended to defend in this second session.
When I was gaming, when my adrenaline was up, my mind went into this kind of flow state where processing of information happened at a very high speed, but paradoxically I felt myself working through entire decision trees at a calm, steady pace, and the net result on balance was that I managed to stay just slightly ahead of real-time game events. Thus did I throw down my foes from atop the sparklements. My mind was buzzing in this state as we sat down in that strange glass room again.
I was cocky and overconfident and unnecessarily combative, sure, all traits that were often useful in a sprawling, enormously popular MMO about medieval rave warriors fighting off an alien invasion, but not entirely on point for a laboratory setting where I myself was the lab rat. Still, you learned not to switch off your instincts just because your conscious mind had its own seemingly relevant opinions about shit. My intention going in was to resist, to demonstrate that advertising trickery wasn’t guaranteed to work against a subject who knew enough about what was happening to conceptualize a defense in the first place.
Naturally my notion of “defense” was deeply naive and preposterous. The experiment changed in session two. I would now be hearing sequences of conjoined spells. Full-blown advertorial.
As Olivia commenced round two of lobbing spell sequences at my nervous system, I had the briefest flash of insight, realizing almost instantly that despite my desire to resist, I was going to wind up as fundamentally receptive as I was during the last session. My goal abruptly changed—all I wanted out of this encounter was to remember it better than the last session.
Moments later, she said, “That’ll be all for today.”
Dammit.