3V finds her way over to the window to stare. She’s seen these before, too. [i]Fallout: Magic Kingdom[/i] boasted one of the most complex skyboxes in modern gaming: real simulated weather patterns, real simulated dawn and dusk, and between the two, a night sky only here and there broken by the neon glow of settlements and the lights strung on MK Moss’s Castle. But, in some impossible qualitative sense, these stars are different. They weren’t created and set to their courses by an algorithm (unless you believe in the New Sequence party line). They’re the same stars that cavemen watched, back before fire, back before the spark of energy that would lead them all the way up here.

“Did you know that as many as 80% of original SNES games have been lost?” She leans against the window, not looking at her hostess. That’s a night sky you could fall into forever and ever. “Just gone. The emulation data’s gone, and their creators didn’t keep backups. Nobody’s ever going to play them again. More to the point, no one is ever going to have the opportunity to experience them. The most you can get is finding some obsessed fan’s wiki listings: [i]this is what ActRaiser was like. This is what Chrono Trigger was like. This is what EarthBound was like.[/i] And it’s not like they were necessarily good, but how would I know? Not like I got the chance to play them. Because hosting fees, and anti-piracy rulings, and every year more and more slips through the cracks.”

She raps her knuckles, gently, against the grass. “And that was just an experience for a couple of generations. Imagine losing something that was a shared part of humanity for generations. The experience of climbing a mountain. The experience of looking out at the stars. Even the muscle ache of climbing, but in a constantly working uphill way, not a climbing wall way. Different muscles. Maybe you could get that if you took the stairs? But that’s not quite the same thing, either. Stairs are just the same damn thing over and over. Maybe some interesting graffiti, maybe some leftover gum. A thing like this almost does emergent discovery perfectly.”

A snort. An aside. “Almost. The one thing a mountain doesn’t have is [i]intentionality.[/i] When you climb a mountain in a video game, any developer worth their salt will have worked in interesting content. A suggestive tableau, an encounter with wildlife, a perfect view. Out here, you’ve got to make all of that yourself, or just luck into it. Exhausting. Can you believe I enjoyed myself anyway?”