UNEARTHED ARTEFACTS

++YEAR 3173++INCOMING TRANSMISSION++ Found Sector A3: Pastime x17 – Board Game - “HOUR OF GLORY”

The Flesh Devil was found in Sector P9, the last survivor of a group living in a cave network behind a waterfall. This is a fact I found amusing – the department studying human video games are constantly coming across the design feature of placing notable objects and persons behind waterfalls. How strange that my prize would be found in the same way.

The human, whose name is “Kate”, tells us very little about how she lived before she was discovered. She likes to eat, despite being painfully thin, and she sings mournful songs through the night as she lies in her holding cell. Of course, she loves games, and we have already bonded a little over some of our favourites. A recent discovery, a crudely produced but brilliantly designed game called “Hour Of Glory”, has brought us a great deal of joy.

The game is about infiltrating an enemy stronghold, with one player controlling the commander of the stronghold and the other players controlling the stealthy agents who are breaking in. Unlike many games about sneaking into a base unseen, players also have the option of going in “loud”, shooting their way to the objectives and making as much noise as they like. The game has a timer – 60 minutes to accomplish the agents’ objectives. These aren’t real world minutes – the timer ticks down as actions are taken. Indeed, players can choose to take the chance of performing actions more quickly – with a higher possibility of failing – or take time with their action, hugely increasing their chances of success but pulling even more time off the clock. It’s this small design concept that makes the game so successful. Every single action presents a big decision for the player. And as the game of cat and mouse unfolds with the minutes getting closer to zero, the end of the game approaches with a giant serving of tension and excitement.

If the agents are ever discovered, then the commander – the role I enjoy in my games with Kate – can raise the alert and place new guards into the game, hunting for the agents. The agents then have another choice to make – shoot their way out, or try to hide and become stealthy again, a course of action that will take a great deal of time.

I asked Kate why she enjoys the game so much. She told me it was because she was very good at hiding. I did notice that she preferred to play the game stealthily, fulfilling her objectives quite painlessly as she navigated around my guards. In all honesty, I’ve only ever beaten her once, and only after a dare.

“I dare you to come out fighting,” I said. She didn’t rise to it. So I kept pushing. “Don’t you hate us? Don’t you hate me?” That was when she told me that I had humans all wrong. She told me that humans weren’t as hate-filled as I would like to believe.

“We just want to survive,” she said. And yet, she did come out fighting. To please me, I think, and to help me with my study of the game. After losing, she went to her cell and stared out of the window at the stars. She started to sing, this poor creature, one of the last of her kind. I listened, and time moved very slowly indeed. *