As I hauled logs from the lumberyard to the construction site day after day, I observed the progress at the sawmill, listening to the sound of hammers on wood and smelling the smoke from the kitchens.
“How are things going out here, Chief?”
I called out to Barry, who I found supervising a few workers driving a wooden log into the ground, its ends sharpened down until it was more of a stake.
“That you, Boss? Thanks to you and Ann, we got our wood faster than I expected. Keeping that lumberyard in good shape has been a mighty pain. On the upside, we finished building a proper kitchen oven out of stone, as well as clay from the forest.”
The villagers had taken to calling Barry “Chief,” which made sense given they were working under him, but my situation was different even though I was doing the same work as all of them, so in turn, he’d started calling me “Boss.” The hierarchy was a little funny, but the names were clear enough.
I headed over to take a look at the kitchen, where Jenny found me and made me help set up. The simple oven of stone and clay was already complete and ready to make meals, but Jenny quickly dragged me up to the roof. It seemed she wanted to rainproof it, as well as to secure the building from the grit that inevitably blew in on the wind in this arid terrain. The dwarven villagers had not only made the oven from clay, they’d also used it to secure and support the logs that were holding up the roof. The village’s giants had used their massive hammers to drive the pillars into the ground, fixing the roof support in place. Ordinarily, doing work like this required setting up scaffolding and whatnot, but giants made easy work of many such tasks. I watched them hammer away, feeling the shock of each stroke traveling up through my legs. Over at the lumberyard near the forest, soup was simmering in a few big metal pots on top of more clay ovens. I hadn’t really minded being alone in the labyrinth, nor had it bothered me much when it was just Ann and I building the stairs together, but I sure was having fun working alongside all these people.
I’d played a lot of sandbox games in my time, and a lot of survival games where you had to tough it out alone in extreme conditions like snowy mountains and barren deserts. Those were fun in their own way, but there was a special joy in interacting, cooperating, and even competing with other people in a multiplayer setting. Sure, there were a few drawbacks to this situation: I was paying out wages and even worker’s compensation for people who got injured, for instance. But when you sat back and saw all this hard work going on, or better yet when you really jumped in and took on your own responsibilities, it turned out the game of life wasn’t half bad.