Playground, page 26
“Give it stakes, dude. Make ’em pay to play!”
Every ten minutes that a user spent on the platform earned him one Playbuck. He could spend this money in various ways, most notably by upvoting the posts of other users. Every Playbuck spent went to the voted-on poster. But the amount spent increased the tipper’s odds of seeing future content from that source. It also increased the odds that the tipper’s own content would be seen by other people who tipped that post. So both tipping and being tipped increased a player’s influence. There were leaderboards in various categories. People could participate in other influence contests and buy cosmetic trophies in each of Playground’s different Domains—expenses that would curb inflation.
But all playing had a cost: that was Rafi’s golden insight.
In two hours, we worked out all the interlocking moving parts. The only thing we couldn’t figure out was how to monetize it for real. But I never doubted that would come. In the future, there would be no “real” money. There would only be your standing in that new Wild West free market called the web.
The Greeks wanted us out of their restaurant so they could put our table back in circulation. As newborn purveyors of capitalism, we understood completely. We were still refining and inventing and shouting at each other all the way across campus and up to that intersection where our paths diverged. Rafi was having a great old time. I hadn’t seen him so animated in months. It was like we were back in high school, racing each other to the next level of Go.
I grabbed him by the shoulders and stopped him on the corner of Green and Lincoln.
“Rafi. Dude. Listen to me. This is going to be huge.” Far bigger than any prize he could hope to reach on his current life’s trajectory, though I didn’t say that out loud. “Come onboard.”
Like there already was a company to join. He flashed his considerable teeth. “What? Work for you?” He looked down at the sidewalk, clearing his visual field so he could think. For a moment his face looked like a little child’s. The hint of a smile played on his lips as he imagined what it would be like, the two of us going into business, making our own rules, creating a new living thing. I agonized over whether to press him—to pitch how fun it would be, win or lose, to try to change the world together. He always bristled at my slightest attempt to influence him.
“You could write your own job description. Lie on a couch all day long and be the idea guy. All the time in the world to write poetry on the side.”
“Huh. This gonna be a real biz, or just—you know—a couple of guys with toy trains?”
Nobody on the Internet had a real business plan. I didn’t even have a real business yet. But there were fortunes to be made. That was obvious to anyone who was paying attention.
“Toy trains have made a lot of people a shitload of money.”
He pushed his glasses up with his left index finger while shoving his right index into my chest. “And if we go down in flames? If this whole cockamamie brainchild of yours goes belly-up in nine months?”
“Then you slink back to graduate school.”
Something about that reply angered him. He tightened his lips, tugged at his T-shirt, and turned all business.
“No, man. You know what the flight attendants say. ‘Put your own mask on before assisting others.’ ”
I stood there on the corner of two summer-emptied streets, gaping like a fish and feeling like he’d just slapped me. I wanted to fight back. I started to shake. I wanted to say that our destinies had been connected ever since he won my father’s scholarship, back at Ignatius. The one named after my family.
“Fine,” I said. “Thanks for lunch.” I had paid. “And for the ideas. See ya.”
I spat out these words curt enough for him to know that I was hurt. He lifted two fingers in a dismissive blessing. “Yeah. See ya.”
I walked away and did not turn around to see how long he stood there or what look played on his face. I went home and worked for hours, more driven than ever to take over the world.
HAPPILY, MY EXISTING PLAYGROUND CODE proved sufficiently well designed that the additions to the platform Rafi and I had come up with over lunch required no major surgery to implement. The upgrade went fast.
I’d been running a closed beta version for months, using about eighty trusted former colleagues and virtual acquaintances to test the work. When I pushed out the first version that used Playbucks, the response was dramatic. Several beta testers grew obsessive. Usage went way up, both in hours spent in the sandbox and numbers of words posted to the various Domains. Users sent me rave messages, begging for new features.
I studied what worked, tweaking and fleshing out the economy. People badgered me for a public launch. They wanted thousands more people to play with, to rate, and to make Playbucks on. In those days, coders put things out there in embryo and let the community mature the product. Even the early browsers went through many public versions before they stabilized. I refused to do that, and my users couldn’t understand why I was holding back.
AROUND THAT TIME, I got an email from Ina. I’d had little contact with her since her graduation. She was working as a barista at a coffee shop across from the performing arts center. She wrote:
Can you please get him to finish up his thesis? Tell him no one is judging him. Tell him to take the last hundred pages that he just threw out, put his name on it, and turn it in.
Todd, I’m desperate. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in this sinkhole.
My heart fell when I read her words. It was the first I’d heard that she meant to make a life with him, beyond school, somewhere else. Of course she did.
Any word I tried to “tell” Rafi would only make things worse for everyone. Still, I could have gone to see him. She asked me to, and I didn’t. I was still bitter with his rejection. The lowest part of my brain was thinking: Put your own mask on before assisting others.
A late-night call from his mother, and Rafi’s first thought was: Who died? When it was clear from her first few words that no one new had, he put his hand over the receiver and sighed.
“Can I call you right back, Ma? No—I mean right back. Like, thirty seconds.”
He hung up and slipped out of the bedroom, heading toward the phone in the kitchen.
“It’s fine,” Ina mumbled, her face in the pillow. “Don’t go. I wasn’t completely sleeping.”
“Sorry, love. Mama. I’ll be just a minute.”
“Say hi from me.”
“I will.”
He hadn’t yet told his mother about the woman he intended to propose to any month now.
In the kitchen, he dialed the number stored in his fingers since childhood.
“Ma! You good? Everything okay?”
“I’m doing fine, Rafi. Little lonely, is all.”
Moody Stepdad had disappeared the year before. Rafi’s first fear was that he was threatening to come back.
“It’s kind of late, Mom. Is there a problem?”
“You, Rafi.”
“Me? What about me?”
“I had that dream again.”
“Well, I told you already. Stop having that dream.”
“Maybe if you came home. Maybe if I could see you more often.”
“I’m working hard here, Mom. I’ve got an advanced degree to finish up.”
“I know that, Ra. And I am so proud of you.”
“But . . . what?”
“But . . . you got what you need already, don’t you? I talked to Mr. Charles again.”
The managing director for buses at the CTA.
“Mother. We’ve discussed this.”
“I told him how smart you are. I told him how well you get along with white people. He says you don’t even have to finish your whatever you’re doing. Your master thesis. He can start you right away as an assistant manager.”
It was a mystery to Rafi: Why did his breathing always slow down whenever his heart sped up?
“That’s great, Ma. I . . . really appreciate it. It’s just that . . . I’ve got my work to finish here.”
“So when you gonna finish?”
“Soon. It’s all going really well.”
“It’s taking so long. How come you need a master thesis? Didn’t you just hear me? Mr. Charles says he’ll take you right now.”
“I heard you, Mom. Are you hearing me?”
“How much student debt do you want to keep accumulating? How you gonna pay off what you already owe?”
The bleak, crowded, dismal blue-gray rat warrens of the CTA in the bowels of the gargantuan Merchandise Mart flashed on the back of his closed eyelids. The one time he’d gone there with his mother, he barely lasted ten minutes. Eight hours a day would kill him before his first paycheck. He could never go back now, after where he’d been.
But neither could he tell his mother why. He had stepped through the wardrobe into a place where he was free to do what he did as well as anyone. That thing his father had drilled him all childhood long to excel at. He had an answer for little Sondy, ten years too late. He did not love whiteness, per se. He only loved what whiteness gave him.
Why did no one get it? Not his mother, not his lifelong friend, not even the beautiful woman sleeping in the next room, whose love had taught him a new kind of liberty. He was happy. More than happy. He was utterly fulfilled, rolling the thankless stone forever up the hill. The many demons of his past, his lifelong sense of guilt, his fear that he would never be good enough: he could hold them all at bay, so long as he was free to go on revising. The Lilliputians could not touch him; he could outread them all.
His mother was speaking, but he didn’t hear. His mind was busy retrieving the stoical quote—Camus again: “If I had to choose between justice and my mother, I’d choose my mother.” Sure. But what about choosing between your mother and freedom? No choice, really. Of those two options, only one would let him go on breathing.
“I appreciate it, Ma. And I’ll think about it. You thank Mr. Charles for me, okay? Okay? See you. Yeah. Love you, too.”
In bed, Ina murmured, roused herself, and rolled over to spread herself against him.
“Did you say hello?”
“I did. She says hi back. She wants to meet you soon.”
THREE MONTHS LATER, Sondra Harris Young Johnson’s aorta came apart. She had just finished her third Racine run of the day. She was dead before they could get her out of the drivers’ coffee room and into an ambulance. A devastated Rafi went back to Chicago for the funeral. Ina went with him to prop him up and walk him away from the grave.
His cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents cleared a space in their grief to welcome Rafi and his surprise guest. His father didn’t show. Rafi and Ina stayed two days. It felt much longer. She wanted to see the neighborhood. He wasn’t giving tours.
Back downstate, they had another wake, just Rafi and the two people he was closest to in the world. He told them stories and read a poem.
“I always admired her,” his best friend said.
Rafi bit his tongue. It didn’t seem the moment to fight. His friend was so clueless, you had to love him. And who knew? Perhaps Todd really did. Really did admire, in his own Keane way, a woman he’d met all of three times and didn’t know from Eve.
........
THE MOMENT I LAUNCHED, all kinds of clones were sure to spring up like weeds. I wanted the largest possible head start with as many features in place as I could nail down. When the imitators started chasing me, I’d have a commanding lead with a large, loyal user base who had no reason to leave and lots of reasons to stay and play.
Once the project went public, I would need several programmers to develop and maintain the code. I needed servers, along with an ops person to do the constant maintenance and upkeep. I needed a real graphic designer to make the thing look beautiful. And for all of that, I needed to play a shiny strategy. Not Playbucks—real money. The kind that people used in the playground above my Playground.
I went to Professor Handler, my former supervisor. The CRIK project was still chugging away, making tiny gains in its goal of fitting everything ever known by anyone into the structures of symbolic AI. Professor Handler liked to joke that every year, they succeeded in formalizing another week of human knowledge. Meaning they’d just slipped another fifty-one years behind.
Handler had started a couple of companies of his own, and he knew angel investors in the Valley. I walked him through the Playground beta. We browsed several of the top-level Domains, then drilled down into Politics. We drilled down again into American Politics, then American Political Current Events, only to arrive at a flaming hot discussion about the recent Oklahoma City bombing. When Professor Handler interrupted his running critique of the interface to spend his pile of complimentary Playbucks on rebutting the currently most popular post, I knew my creature was going to have a long and happy life. I had to pull him away from the thread and remind him why we were there.
He said, “Let’s take a peek at the code.”
I didn’t want to show him. It was like disrobing in front of a panel of county fair judges. I didn’t mind him seeing my work. The work was strong; I’d learned well from him and scores of other greats, in my years of school. I just didn’t want him to discover, in twenty minutes, all the ingenious inspirations that it had taken me two years to come up with.
He liked what he saw. “Why don’t you create a couple dozen guest accounts, and I’ll distribute them to a few venture capitalists I’ve worked with. This is exactly the kind of ambition everyone is looking for.”
Three weeks later, I got a call from a group named the Seedbed Partners. They wanted to front me three-quarters of a million dollars. The figure was so unreal that I barely heard the terms. But the terms were favorable. I almost said yes right then, over the first phone call.
My advisor reined me in. “Sit tight. Buy time. Play coy.”
Two days after that first miraculous offer, an outfit called the Honte Group called and offered me three million to buy the entire project out from under me. They would keep me on as lead programmer and project manager at a crazy salary if that interested me.
Again, I almost agreed before they finished their proposal. Any firm named after a Go term had my trust. I mean: three million dollars, thrown at someone who was still in his mid-twenties? I could have invested it in conservative long-term bonds and lived off the interest forever. Free from the messiness of making a living and accountable to no one, I could have spent the rest of my days tinkering on new projects and hustling chess games in Grant Park.
I went to Handler and begged him to tell me what to do. “It’s worse than training CRIK,” he said with a sigh. “We teach you everything except how to know yourselves.”
“The Honte people say they need an answer by the end of the month. Seedbed Partners are about to withdraw their offer. I’m melting down. I can’t sleep. I just want to curl up in my room and play Unreal.”
“Aristotle said that happiness is the settling of the soul into its most appropriate spot.”
I doubled down on my belief that computer scientists should never dabble in philosophy. “What does that mean, exactly?”
“What makes you happy, Todd Keane? What’s your work? How do you define a day well spent?”
My mind flashed on that day many years ago when Rafi and I had looked at a Go board for the first time together in the basement of Ignatius, trying to learn the life and death of groups of stones. I watched the clusters creep and connect across the board, joining up like the neighborhoods of a great metropolis. The years since that day had unfolded one stone at a time, chaining and laddering, from the moves of that opening Fuseki to this vital point, this Tsumego, when I found myself facing a moment of life or death.
The words of the book that Rafi had given me sounded in my head, as if they’d been waiting for this moment. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
I looked at Professor Handler. It was all so obvious.
“No one is going to run my company but me.”
He smiled and sank deeper into his Aeron chair. “Well, all right, then! Now: Do you need a consultant?”
I stared at him, but the old man was joking. His revolution had run its course. Mine was just beginning.
I called Seedbed Partners and took the three-quarters of a million. It was more than enough to get me going. It was also an insane amount of debt for a child with an uncertain prospect and no sense of business. But my father had told me once that a man’s worth was measured by how much money other people were willing to let him lose. And a corollary: the strength of a man’s character was measured by how much he was willing to lose on others’ behalf.
I suddenly had character to spare.
WHEN PLAYGROUND LAUNCHED, I had five people on payroll. Two months later, we were eight. And that was nothing compared to the growth of the user base. In those same two months, the closed beta of eighty users swelled to more than ten thousand, on word of mouth alone. Remember, real search engines were just appearing, and people still published paperbound books listing all the most interesting website addresses to type into your browser.
Everyone I hired had to have a little ludic lunacy in their heart. I ended every hiring interview with a question: “What’s more important: the journey or the destination?” Either answer was fine with me. I was just looking for how much bounce the candidate was willing to put into it. Soon enough, we had a corporate culture, one that is still at the heart of the thousand-headed monster that long ago got away from me. We believed in rapid prototyping, in playing hard and getting hurt, in finding everything that the rules never thought to prohibit, and in letting the users tell us what to build next.
