Confrontation

A new short story...

Today I am excited to share with you a new short story created especially for you.

The short story ‘Confrontation’ emerged as an idea from the challenges of attempting to protect my children from the addictive nature of screens and online gaming. Games companies such as Fortnite are increasingly employing technology tactics that ensure that young minds become addicted to playing their games. Great amounts of time are sacrificed to a game that employs novelty as a narrative tool. One child is said to have played Fortnite for over 7,700 hours in less than two years (BBC News 2022).

I have found myself wondering and imagining what form of digital, pervasive world my children will inhabit as adults. I felt this was a useful way to expand on the notion of writing what you know.

‘Confrontation’ grew out of this form of imaginative interplay into a piece of speculative fiction that explores the notion of a character who has succumbed to this form of addiction, and in fact, feels safe within his digital prison.

In my journal, I explored my thoughts on why these games are so addictive, and the central idea emerged around how novelty drives the narrative flow in online gaming, increasing the dopamine response.

This is the essence of how we can explore our concerns and worries through art and storytelling.

Several questions arose. What would you do to your customers if the game reached a level of novelty that became self-recursive? It seemed that taking away the access to the drug itself would be the ultimate novelty for an audience saturated within a game, enforcing the player to return violently to the real world.

In the short story ‘Confrontation’, I have attempted to explore and reflect on how novelty and surprise is used as a storytelling tool in the genre of speculative fiction.

I hope you enjoy.

CONFRONTATION
by John Harrigan

Alex viewed the world through the prism of an opalescent screen. Even though he knew he was unwell; he did not care. He was addicted to Confrontation, an online game to which he had devoted every waking hour of his life.

Confrontation had become the reason for waking, eating, sleeping. Confrontation had replaced the dreams Alex once had. He no longer recognised life away from the fluorescent glow of his apartment's digital station.

He’d felt like an alien to this world. Confrontation had remade him.

He awoke at 6:30am and then went out back to watch the Spartan planes drop a new loadout of atmospherics. He loved how the sun dimmed as it rose into a sky obscured with nano particulate designed to lower temperatures to a level that would not burn and damage the eyes.

He waited patiently for the news to scroll across the clouds and tuned his mind to the gamer hub to see who had climbed or dropped on the Confrontation leader boards. 

He'd only completed last night’s play around 3 am; a lot could happen in the game in just over three hours he’d been asleep. He watched as kills and mission logs scrolled across the surface of the sky above his apartment block. He noted he was emoting, that his body was reflecting movements his digital avatar Spiky had made thousands of times, physical symptoms from his imagination, ripples in a body that had become passive and secondary to his digital form. This morning the sky looked as if heaven had become visible after it had undergone a hostile clan takeover. 

God was just another gamer and Confrontation was a religion, a billion worshippers deep.

He went inside after vaping that day's passwords. Security biochemicals settled and moulded around his lungs, meaning there was no need for him to go through the rigmarole of ten-factor authentication. He hated having to remember who he was here in the real life. Passwords were tiny little fractures, pauses that delayed his connection to the game he loved.