Stormfuhrer Read Online Free PDF

distant beam that held up the a-frame of his roof, Richard realized that it was the complexity, the realism, that must be drawing him to the game.  Occasionally, especially when many images had gone by—like when he had looked out from the back of the truck bed into the midst of the city—the screen would lag a bit with tiny freezes, as if the processor in his computer weren't enough to handle the tremendous detail.  But in reality the lag had been almost imperceptible, taking away nothing from the experience.
    At first he checked the website every thirty minutes, then every hour.  It was twelve hours before he could make something reappear on the screen.  One apparently played the role of a German soldier, stationed probably in Munich, by the looks of the buildings and architecture he could somewhat recognize.  There was no log-in, no company name, no title screen.  Once your browser opened the game, there was a brief fade-in and you were there.
     
    When Richard Hayes was finally able to return to the game, he had left the truck, was perhaps carried out.  He found himself in an infirmary.  There were large, high windows behind his bed that were so clean one could eat off them.  Everything was spotless.  A few nurses were moving silently from bed to bed in what he soon realized was a very long, pillared building.  Interesting, but not very exciting.  He stood his character up.  He was still in a uniform and, from the extreme detail, noticed that it had become very wrinkled.
    It was clear that there really wasn’t much constant action that would justify the repeated playing of this game.  But it wasn’t the appeal of bloodshed and heroic moves that eventually had Hayes playing the game over and over, for hours at a time, for days eventually, with little sleep.  It was the complexity, the reality of the situation in which his character was involved, the seemingly endless map, the exhaustive research that must have gone into his character’s creation and the creation of the world within which he interacted.  Tremendous detail had been put into every little piece of it.  Normally in a first-person shooter, a trashcan, for instance, might be a copy of all the other trash cans in the game, but in this game each trash can, for he found himself looking around for such details, was always a bit different from all the others.  He could detect no repeated patterns in the textures of objects.
    For weeks, Hayes pulled himself away from the game just long enough to sleep his four hours a night, to make coffee, to feed Fraulein, or to heat up a frozen dinner.  Occasionally, Carlos might stop by, but his visits were always brief.
    By early August, Hayes had come to a few realizations about the game.  First, the game might be some sort of language-learning program.  The longer one stayed into the game, the more German and less English was used by the other characters.  Secondly, the characters in the game reacted to the words of the player, usually in a convincing way.  Over the weeks, Hayes began responding to his fellow Germans in their language, haltingly at first, often receiving some curious looks.  He would use German words as he learned them and replace the others with English, often in the same sentence.  The word order wasn’t perfect, but he did what he could.  At times he could detect a second or two of lag during which a translation program must have been hard at work attempting to transform his words into something usable by the characters in the game.  This pause occurred especially when he mixed the words of both languages into the same sentence.  Other characters’ reactions then reflected responses more or less appropriate to what he had said, or intended to say.  Such complexity.  Finally, he learned that everything happened in real time.  When his character slept, he had to wait—usually about six or seven hours—before playing the character again.  In these instances, the screen