It's just a Game
Millions of children sat down every single day to do one hour of the most important thing of their life. To play RH, Real-life Heroes.
Some adults complained and lobbied to have the game discontinued, but when asked themselves if they had ever played and enjoyed it the complaints went away. The company had created a gem, an ever expanding game with hundreds of programmers creating new possiblities, even creating factions for different objects, mobile scripting, digital design and building scripts. The game was flawless in that it was always changing yet sticking to core basics long enough to allow its players for adaptation.
It contained three different aspects, dependant on the players age. At the beginning ages, age 1 to 11 it taught children simple programs through games such as counting frogs or adding and subtracting money. In most cases it acted as a substitute to having parents those first few years before preschool, then after the preliminary ages of 6 and lower, it went into a more comprehensive reading analysis and basic biology class. The second age group, 12 to 18 went into games of violence, strategy, simulations for social interaction, whilst still additionally acting as a teaching agent on the side. The last age group, 19 and up gave the players unlimited freedom, they could talk to one another converse among other players, create their own dimensions with in-game tools and various other ingenuities developed.
It was perhaps the most perfect game created, characters within the game were based on actions done in the game long before. People learned to love their characters and model themselves after it, them shaping the game as it shaped them. Slang caught on within the game, which later came out into real life, shaping the language of real life, people would go out less, in order to exercise more on their character. Jobs were often left early for the complaint of re-training my character, and most bosses themselves accepted it, some even put a company machine that ran 24 hours as a relaxation tool for their workers. It brought shy people out of their shell, perhaps your kind co-worker in the next cubicle could really be Arthur3304 the most powerful general in the Arion Clan. In most cases they were.
To Lile it wasn't a game, it was a faith. Each day he prayed more than five hours to it, as a minimum mind you. His parents wondered if he was insane or that his fervor was just immense. They allowed him 5 hours yet kept a strict claw upon his priveleges, sure that he lived life as a person rather than as a bit of data with a randomization program.
At school he looked upon it with empty heart. All that he had learned he had picked up innately through hours and hours of playing RH. The teachers lacked enthusiasm because most of the students in the class did know everything to be taught, in one school a teacher was accused of not coming to school and telling the children not to tell, they said it lasted for a 40 day stint. He pleaded guilty, and was fired, most likely pointing to the fact that is was more than 40.
Inevitably Lile was faced with the greatest fear of his life. Living with grandma and grandpa in the countryside, without technology. It brought mortal terror upon the poor boy that he nearly fainted, and could only be revived by 10 unblemished hours of RH.
Twitching spasatically he walked into the cabin doors. From pure perfection of the city to the irregularity of a wooden cabin Lile was stunned. His parents had thought it be, a good idea to teach the boy that life could be much more than just videogames, no matter how productive they might be. The wood that created the cabin scared him, the non-child safe wood stove scared him, the thought of having to push a lever to actually get a glass of water scared him. He had once read a quote about heaven and hell, the flaming lake to which lucifer and his hordes fell, and he thought. Lucifer was lucky enough to at least have fire.
There stood grandpa old, saggy, with liver spots, white wispy hair and a permanent grin which stuck out the skin that would hang from his mouth. Lile's grandmother much the same, but too plump to be saggy she had the air of a queen and the humbleness of a mouse.
"Come in, come in, it's not so bad when you get warmed up m'boy, our parents called us about your fear of leaving those machines you love so much, but thought it'd be good time for you to visit us", said Grandpa, motioning toward the prehistoric thing attached to a line, possibly the most primitive of telephones.
At this moment his grandfather was staring at him dubiously, while he stood their, silent wondering what was currently happening at the spaceport in RH, perhaps the Democratic party had once again declared one of their vicious wars against the happy dictatorships.
"You jus, gonna stand there, or are ya gonna get yourself inside?"
"Yeah, I'm coming in grandpa, just hold on", said Lyle as he began to walk in.
The rest of the cabin conversation that night was at best trivial, and adds nothing to poor Lyle's current state of incommunicado with his digital accomplices.
In the morning Lyle was waken up with a soft push to the shoulder by a pair of leathery hands.
"Hey, son, do you want to go fishing today?" asked his grandfather, who carried a tacklebox in his lefthand while wielding two fishing rods perilously close to Lyle's head. Lyle looked at his grandfather's blue eyes, and thought perhaps it wouldn't kill him to go out and fish to make this old man happy.
"Yeah, sure, ill get up in a second" was the reply, with somewhat forced cheerfulness yet still resonated the slightest bit of mirth.
"You kids, always in a second, in my day it was done immediately, you just dropped whatever you were doing...even if it was nursing your own baby brother" chuckled Lyle's grandfather as he walked out of the room.
There they stood on the wooden dock, poles wedged into a angle as the lines went out in a curve towards the water, making gentle ripples. The both of them sat, and sat, and sat. And then they sat some more.
"Fishing takes too long", complained Lyle, thinking about how easy it was in RH, all you had to do was lower the best bait with the best pole for the best fish.
"Ah, its an art, an art that my grandfather taught me, its patience that we should always treasure, all those people today want instant results, but I say the fruits are better when ripe" lectured his grandfather, reminiscing on some long-lost memory of childhood.
"Fruits don't need to be ripe, ripeness just signals rotting, and the sweetness is actually the decay of the fruit", answered Lyle, completely disregarding his grandpa's speech.
"Just learn to love each day, and not its potential"
"Yeah, right" Lyle booked that memory for sure. It had almost reached the "possibility of being noticed" category, but had sadly fallen short.
The rest of the fishing was quite uneventful, to say that they caught small fish and let them go, in where Lyle yelled an mental outcry that they could be eaten for five hundred experience. Sadly his self analysis deemed him completely insane, but he could always laugh about this later with his friends in the game.
The next day Lyle woke up to a big suprise. He found he woke up in a cabin, that was wood. He was expecting the pass two days to be just a horrible nightmare derived out of some childhood cruelty. But no, he actually was in a wood cabin, cut off from the world, with his grandparents. Cruelty enough he thought, cruelty enough.
He put on his clothes and walked into the living room to find there in the center his grandfather playing RH.
Lyle was more than dumbfounded, he was completely amazed. Almost as amazed as when he had got here he had thought no, it couldn't be possible that his archaic grandpa had played a horrible horrible joke on him. He hoped that somehow, mentally he could transfer the visions of violence and pain to his grandfather. It failed, marked by the grinning old face smiling at Lyle.
His grandfather did this, right in front of his eyes, exactly on the morning he was to leave. Was it to teach him some useless lesson of olden days and olden ways that could somehow affect his future? No, definitely no decided Lyle. After all his grandfather was very old and could possibly be senile. He dragged his small trunk out of the cabin and heard something in just the faintest of sounds.
"I hope you enjoyed your break from those games you play, you have to understand that life is much better than whatever we dream, because the changes are so unimaginable that it's more fun to live than to pretend, you and me both know you had fun away from that game"
On the bus, Lyle thought about this all the way back to his parents house. His grandfather, although old, senile and obviously deranged did have a effect on him. He did feel good, he felt better about himself than ever before and perhaps this break was even good for him, despite his sour attitude. And the fishing was fun, at least in the parts where the fish were caught, it was no match at all for the easy simplicity of holding up a rod.
He returned from his spring break a new kid. At school he walked up to his former crowd and they stared at him, as if he was some beast.
"Hey I didn't see you on all week, did you have that invis spell on again?" asked Brian, his best and perhaps most clone-like friend.
"Nah, I visited my grandparents cabin, it was okay, we went fishing", said Lyle, shrugging his shoulders noncommitally.
"You mean to say you didn't log on...once in two days?"
"Yeah, I didn't really feel like it" said Lyle, he motioned out his hands in suppliance, "Sometimes its good to get away from the game"
"Are you kidding me? They finally added the apprentice system to the game and now players are allowed to teach others, isn't that awesome?" asked Brian, excited, practically jumping up and down.
"Yeah, I guess, I might check it out later Brian, if I have time", droned Lyle, not really listening.
"Seeya on RH"
At home, once again there stood the machine. Its black smooth shell contained thousands of things to do, he could do whatever he wanted, his friends were there, plus that new command. he stared at it longingly in a battle between his want to play, to remember the good days and his new self, the self created out of abstaining from playing the game. Perhaps it was okay for an hour.
It turned out he played for six, and little joy was derived out of this obsession. By the end he was tired, bored yet still insistent on playing it like a sick addiction. His mind was throwing an everlasting battle between playing longer and quitting right then and there. Quitting would let him be free but he feared that he would soon again return, whereas if he kept playing he could stay on and not lose precious time on his character.
By the eigth hour he hated himself, he hated what he was and what he had become, what had this game turned him into, changing his self image, forcing him to continously play. On the game he heard players talking about the oldest player, coming back to play just today, with all the rarest items and best abilities, one that even the oldest of programmers hadn't known about. Lyle thought if he stayed on long enough he might be able to see him, or if he was lucky even talk to him for a while. So he kept playing.
Then he saw the oldest player, Xcel, walk into his room and point towards him, motioning on the game using a social meant to talk.
Dumbfounded Lyle brought his character over to talk to him. This was the best moment of his life, his pain and suffering diminished in the view of this great character, the master of the game. His character walked over, kneeled in piety of this great being and help its ear up to hear the character whisper.
"Son, I told you it was just a game, didn't you have fun fishing?"
(Just as a note I changed the name from Lile to lyle, because I found out it wasn't the correct spelling, so I already know about that and no need to comment. )