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An Internet inquisition?

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Sternelli's madness, Burroughs' secret: Our dark trilogy concludes -- for now

T A B L E_ T A L K

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R E C E N T L Y

God save the president?
By Jackie Stevens
An anti-impeachment gathering of New York's intellectual hotshots may not do much for the country, but at least it made them feel good about themselves
(12/16/98)

Ask Camille
By Camille Paglia
Wise words for an inner city teacher: Toss out the tutorials on self-esteem and send your students on an adventure to the distant past
(12/16/98)

Harassment backlash
By Matthew Dallek
When Angelo Armenti embarked on a witch hunt for professors accused of indiscretions, he became a case in point for why sexual harassment policies just don't work
(12/14/98)

Campus groupies
By Allison Landa
Wackos, preachers and EBDs: A visit to the land of campus groupies
(12/11/98)

Breasts on the brain
By Lori Gottlieb
Putting mammary-hungry college boys to the test
(12/09/98)

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SLAVES TO THE GAME | PAGE 1, 2
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But risks and reassurances like these are nothing compared to our first experiments in joyful mutual destruction, such as when we used to play Marathon. When we were freshmen, a guy named Ian knew how to download games from a site in California. He came over to the apartment every couple of days to help us get set up: first Marion, who he had a crush on, and then Louisa, her roommate, and then Stephen and Leo and me. The girls soon lost interest (both in Ian and in the game) but Stephen and Leo and I became enthralled. As few as one or as many as 10 people could enter a simulated maze inhabited by homicidal aliens equipped with machine guns and disintegrator rays. We were at a delicate age, prey to the contingencies of early college love-affairs and responsible for the first time for the serious organization and delineation of our own lives: work and play, friendship and desire, rivalry and hatred. Play was through the school's ethernet system, so everyone could sit at a computer in his own room, ganging up on the aliens.

"I've got napalm! Look out, Leo. Oh shit, now you've got it all over yourself." I made some of the first discoveries in the world of the game Marathon -- including the notoriously powerful napalm launcher -- but never quite learned to control many of them.

"Yo, what the fuck are you doing. Look, I'm dying."

When a character had absorbed too many bullets, fragments of shrapnel or disintegrator hits, the animation on his screen would grow surreal, suffuse with red and finally go blank. If he wanted to get back in the game he had to log back on. And the other players had to approve the log-on if a game was already in progress.

"Yo, let me sign on, dude." Victim of my clumsiness, Leo was now dead.

"No way, Leo. Look, I'm about to win." Ian's competitive streak was graceless and explicit. After a while we stopped inviting him over.

"Yo, don't be an asshole," Leo pleaded.

"Hold on, I'm about to waste these guys. PLOW!"

"Dude, you gotta let me on. You come over my house, use my roommate's computer, now you won't let me in the game."

"Why are you such a pussy, Leo?"

It didn't take long for the aliens themselves to become a distraction in the increasingly serious business of annihilating one another. Stephen and Leo battled every night, refusing to play in the same room, bellowing at one another through two sets of open doors. Then they rehashed the previous night's duel at lunch. By this time Stephen had found out that Leo'd slept with Jessica who worked at the bookstore, and although Stephen had no right to be jealous or protective (since she'd shot him down simply and politely and never spoken to him again), the game was not exactly all in fun.

"By the way, Leo, I found the atomic land mine again, so tonight I'm going to make you cry."

"Dude, shut the fuck up," replied Leo, bored.

"No, I mean it. I'm gonna booby trap the second level where you'll never find it. If you don't stay the fuck off of the second level you're gonna be toast."

"Just shut up. You're so full of shit your eyes are turning brown."

This particular game did not seem to encourage moderate, tasteful speech. In fact, I've never heard such loud, prolonged obscenity outside of Leo's telephone calls with his family. In any case, after a while the calls home were just another game. Instead of napalm he could ask about his brother's torturous junior-high love life, about his mother's tedious job. After a certain amount of abuse his family members would hang up on him: kick him out of the game.

But as Jessica who worked in the bookstore disappeared from our lives again, our interest in Marathon faded. Plus we found some kids from Villanova who could kill all of us (working as a team) in less than 90 seconds every time we played. I was never much good at the game, and when we met the 'Nova kids I had started doing the reading for my philosophy class again, so there was less time for practice, but Leo especially was at the top of his form, killing Stephen and me predictably every time. He had learned how to speed up the aliens, and could take on as many as six at once. Leo was the "goddamned KING of fucking Marathon," the cyber-athlete we all tried to be.

The guys from 'Nova blew him up with a recoilless rifle in less than a minute, and he walked out of his room stunned and ashamed. I never even fired a shot. That was the end of Marathon for us.

The end of the rest of the story is the water-smuggling debacle, and the present search for a new game. After a while one wins not only a great victory in a given game, but even bragging rights to the whole territory of that game. Out of Stephen's disgusting mouth it is not unusual to hear, "Yeah, but I'll make you my little bitch in Battle Chess!" In some obscure way this is good and proper, but it makes the search for new games constant and insatiable. For Chanukah I just bought him a remaindered copy of Myst, and also he found something called Moto-Racer pre-installed on his new computer. He's been having some trouble with job applications and his thesis, and he's been a little down on himself. Right now he's in his room, shouting again and again, "I SUCK AT MOTO-RACER," and giggling when Marion tells him to shut up. I worry about this, but I also suspect that he's trying to hustle me.
SALON | Dec. 18, 1998

Isaac Zaur is a senior at Haverford College, majoring in English. His last piece for Ivory Tower was about standing in the Bad Line for college admissions.