Don

The boy has a deep feel for the game. A hacker malevolence tweaks everything he touches. He plays with the blind confidence of an oracle, as if he were born to a special destiny. His command of game glitches and cheat tactics is uncanny. For hours at a time, every day, he forges ahead, minute by billing minute, sometimes going all night and past dawn. When does he eat? Sleep? When does he dream — and of what?

His handle is T-Redeem.

Already, today, he’s accomplished so much. He spent a whack of credits on carbon scrubbers for cleaning up Chinese airspace polluted by coal power plants. He bankrolled a Brazilian group — apparently, high schoolers in a favela near Rio — to reforest a tract of rainforest. In the Canadian sector, he opened discussions with gamers on a virtual Indigenous reserve. Their conversation was in a coded slang, but it’s clear they’re planning a terrorist intervention at the Athabasca oil sands simulation.

All this and more, woven into a tapestry of gaming brilliance. He’s realized this by now, but Greenhouse was designed so that only millions of paid player transactions over decades will cause a meaningful drop in temperature sufficient to forestall disaster in the game’s virtual climate. If the virtual temperature does rise too high, or too quickly, the game itself will destruct, orphaning players all over the planet. That threat, as unreal or absurd as it sounds, is a pillar of our player engagement and corporate billing model. We want players to believe they’re contributing to a goal larger than themselves.

The few staffers left on my team have been instructed to keep everyone and everything away from me for now, excluding Bai Jun, my Chinese successor as CEO of Greenhouse. Here, in the wilderness of Vancouver Island, in the mountains, in a well-appointed grouping of cottages disguised to look like old shacks, I’m on sabbatical.

I’ve had a career, been there, done that, taken names, kicked ass, delivered results, and, best of all, engineered the takeover that brought us into the deep pockets of a Chinese hedge fund that will grow the business for a long time to come.

I spend too much time monitoring the boy’s activity in the game, but it’s generally an enjoyable pastime. I designed the game. I gave it life. I nursed it from prototype through launch and into mass deployment that now delivers obscene profits internationally. I have also, genetically speaking, participated in designing the boy.

I’m his father.

This week he’s with me, away from his mother — well, his lanky fifteen-year-old body is with me. To say we’re bonding or reconnecting is a stretch. He games when awake. I watch him game when I’m awake, impatiently waiting for another moment when it’s possible that words might, in a physical space, in real time, pass between us.

On his last bio-break:

“Dad, why did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Greenhouse.”

“Create it?”

“Love it, Dad. More than you loved me and Mum.”

“I am sorry you see things like that,” I say after a gloomy pause. “Son, I was trying to do something good. To get people active. To educate — no, to engage them in something important. And a good way to do that these days is through games.”

“It’s only a game, Dad.”

Then he’s gone again, back into the game, his controller agitating in micro-movements — same with the headset. He likes to yank my chain, for sure. On some level, he repels me with his devotion to the game, his lack of interest in anything else.

As I watch over him while working on my financial portfolio, I notice that at times he appears to hold his breath for too long. Sometimes, when he exhales, it comes out as a melodramatic sigh. After an hour of passive observation, I can’t resist going into the game to see what he’s up to. The classic helicopter-parent move.

He’s embroiled in a small green infill project where, with the assistance of some local gamer activists, he’s demolishing a public housing project that our designers built with the usual elements: drugs, gangs, guns, violence. It’s a pixelated, interactive canvas of urban danger and depravity. The old buildings (and gangs) are all gone now, and in their place something new is rising. A cohort of gamers, led by my son, is actively earning game credits by working together to create an organic urban farm. While that’s in progress, they take most of their newly earned credits and allocate them to poorer members to help them buy condos near the farm. We call this holistic redistribution: First, you earn credits by doing something environmentally sustainable and then you redistribute a percentage to those most in need. This is one among several Robin Hood dynamics of the game, an idea that I worked up from my superficial reading of Marx. I’m not sure what Marx would make of the transaction fees we charge members to facilitate these wealth exchanges, not to mention the monthly subscription fees to remain active players. But these fees allow the company to keep investing in the entertainment quality of the game for the benefit of all members — but also, importantly, to provide sufficient profit margins to keep shareholders happy. I’m proud of my son’s work here, except for one thing: He’s demolishing the neighbourhood where I grew up.

I request a private chat. I get an automated reply that tells me he’s out of touch. I respect his concentration in the game, his focus. I’m sure his ADHD meds are of some value here. The kid only very rarely snacks or takes bathroom breaks while in the game and, given that he’s loudly passing gas every couple of minutes and squirming in his console, I just wish he’d listen to his body more.

T-Redeem: Dad, what’s up?

GM001: It’s starting to look pretty good.

T-Redeem: Thanks. So you’re not mad, what I’m doing here.

GM001: Why would I be?

T-Redeem: Come on, you shut me down here always.

GM001: Stopped that a while ago.

T-Redeem: Mum made you stop.

That isn’t totally true. I was encouraged, not formally ordered, by his mother and her therapist, to let him express his resentments as the divorce got real. Yet, it’s unnerving to have him apply his unique gifts to remake the place where I grew up. I mentioned this to our corporate psychologist when we were updating my video diary together. She warned me it’s easy to stroke my ego by thinking this is a form of Oedipal acting-out. She cautioned me not to jump to conclusions. Maybe so, but he isn’t destroying his mother’s old neighbourhood, which is a much more environmentally degraded suburban setting of McMansions, shopping malls, and epic parking lots.

GM001: This is the only place you want to talk, I guess.

T-Redeem: What?

GM001: Well?

T-Redeem: It’s the only place you listen, lol.

The game is really no place for a father to speak to a son who, in this world, is something like a teen warrior-king. As the principal game designer, I have access to tools to control his behaviour here. I have the power to destroy or infiltrate the T-Redeem persona he’s created. His mother recently suggested this, telling me that he spends so much time here he’s in danger of failing his last year of high school. True, I can wipe his credit balance with a single keystroke. I can’t bring myself to do that, for two reasons. One, he’d find a way to get or steal credits somewhere and fairly easily find his way back into the game by buying a fake avatar from one of the many resellers out there. Two, the proud father in me is, I’ll admit, stoked by his tactical brilliance.

T-Redeem advises me by chat that he’s launching an operation that will prevent him from responding for some time. A common tuning-out tactic. I look up from my screen and I’m tempted to cuff him out of his trance. But he’s here for only a week that’s ending today, and I don’t want him leaving angry at me. His new operation is making credits available to help locals buy seed stock for the urban farm in my old neighbourhood. Problem is, they can’t agree on what they want grown there. T-Redeem issues an ultimatum: a decision by end of day or he’ll take back the credits, which causes outraged chatter from players who feel this should take weeks, and involve some kind of vote, or referendum. Like a lot of top players his age, the democratic instinct is far from fully developed. He thrives on exploiting power imbalances.