Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment, and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution by Heather Chaplin & Aaron Ruby

Author:Heather Chaplin & Aaron Ruby [Chaplin, Heather & Ruby, Aaron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Industries, Media & Communications, Games & Activities, Video & Mobile, Social Science, popular culture
ISBN: 9781565128354
Google: ILwfJOa4Y7QC
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2006-11-10T23:44:18.558935+00:00

6

Virtual Worlds and Alternate Lives

David Reber is a thirty-year-old ex-Navy serviceman who works as a merchandiser for a Best Buy in Petaluma, California. He spends his day attired in a pale blue Best Buy polo shirt and khakis, making sure the daily shipments of computers the store receives are transferred from the trucks outside to the displays inside. He says he’s the kind of guy who “gives 150 to 200 percent” at work and is “all over the asses” of those who don’t, even though he’s not their boss.

At the end of his nine-hour workday, David gets into his Grand Am and, because the car needs a new engine, avoids the freeways and drives the long way home through the suburban-shopping-mall parking lots and the country roads of Petaluma back to his house on a small cul-de-sac off U.S. Route 101. His house, which he rents along with two other guys his age, is standard suburban California ranch style, with a gaping garage as big as the house itself, wall-to-wall beige carpeting, three bedrooms, a bathroom, and a flat-screen TV in the living room.

When David gets home, he heads straight for what he calls his “command center.” This is his bedroom—a small room with black curtains over the windows to keep the light out, a single-size bed, a Lara Croft calendar, a picture of himself at seventeen in white Navy duds, and a Namco clock. There are four speakers, one suspended from each corner of the room, and a big subwoofer sits beside a custom-built computer beneath his desk. David has spent more than $2,000 upgrading his computer and getting his satellite speaker system just the way he wants it. All the equipment is to facilitate David’s metamorphosis from working stiff into a leader of Freedom’s Hope, a guild of forty people on the war-torn virtual planet of Rubi-Ka. On weekdays, he plays four or five hours a day, on the weekends, more. “My one roommate is always trying to get me to go out biking or hiking on the weekends,” David says, “but I’m like, ‘No, I want to play! I’ve got a guild meeting! My friends are online.’ My other roommate, he’s a manager at Electronic Arts, he never harasses me about playing sixteen hours a day.”

Like many players of massively multiplayer online games, David is an old Dungeons & Dragons fan. With a weight of three hundred pounds by the time he was fifteen, and as the sole caretaker of a prescription-drug-addicted mother while his father was off starting a new family, David took to the role-playing game immediately. He liked the logic of the rule-based game, the eloquence of decisions based on a dice roll, and he liked the escapism. He enjoyed making up characters and inventing backstories for them and working as hard as he could to make sure all of his actions were consistent with the character he’d created.

After high school and his stint in the Navy, David—about 150 pounds lighter—managed a Namco arcade,

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