EDVGT II

(cont. from An Exploratory Dialogue on Video Game Theory)

It's a Choose-Your-Own-Dialogue! To have your character begin playing a game at the LAN Center, click here (just as soon as I've written that part). To get up and purchase a drink from the LAN Center, continue reading!

This terrible, fantastical nonsense won't do at all. I require caffeine to function, and I'm willing to sell my soul to Coke for it...I feel dirty buying energy drinks at a LAN Center, especially when the games industry loves to partner with the beverage industry to insert "BAWLS Guarranaxx" as a cornerstone of the Liberated Nerd's identity...

"Excuse me, but don't I know you?"

It was a vaguely familiar face asking me the question, tentatively probing just as I racked my brain for a name. I was going to suggest "Valerie," but she beat me to recognition.

"Haven't we had a philosophy class together," she realized. "It was PHL 555, I think, 'How To Be a Living Embodiment of a Philosophical Point of View?' And I think your name is Joan?"

"That's right," I nodded, taking a bottle out of the fridge. "I remember your name, too, I think...Balere, isn't it? I didn't know you played video games."

Balere was a woman about my age, a lanky, pale woman with black hair and clear Spanish ancestry. "Play?" she asked. "I don't just play them, I study them."

We re-introduced ourselves as I paid for my drink, the way students do outside of classes. It can only be said to have to do with a kind of deception that goes on between students and teachers, or maybe only some students - or maybe between students and students, instead. She was actually a major in video game theory, which naturally I had never heard of. I was in the kind of stupor where one doesn't remember whether caffeine, alcohol, and/or sleep deprivation are the biological culprits, and at first I was a little bit confused.

"Wait, you study game theory? And what, come here to LAN centers to apply it or something?"

"No no," she said impatiently. "Nothing like that. I actually study video games themselves, and what they mean as a medium, with all the possible implications of that." As she said this, she paid for her own couple of energy drinks, a pair of absurdly massive "Monsters." I cringed a little, but then of course I was drinking the same crap...