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indication of where to begin or what they represented. Each had functions accessed through dozens of unreadably tiny icons, many of them virtually identical but for a pixel here and there, most of which had only the vaguest relationship to their functions. It must have been intuitively obvious to somebody, but I was lost. What was the question mark for, and why would I click on it? What was the snake for? The semicircle? The tiny automobile? And why didn’t anybody write any of this down?
    No one was paying attention to me, and I slowly realized that this was their equivalent of job training—leaving me alone with a computer and a game editor just to see what I’d do. Like dropping a delicate tropical fish into a new aquarium—they’d come back in a few hours and I’d either be swimming around or floating at the top of the tank.
    I poked at a few icons experimentally, but nothing seemed to happen. People were throwing me glances every once in a while; I saw Don peering out of his office at me. It came to me, gradually, that I was undergoing a test, a deliberate one. Not for technical literacy, because there was no way I could have learned this ahead of time. It wasn’t supposed to make sense. It was a test of character—could I sit with this patchy, buggy, undocumented piece of software and learn it by trial and error and not freak out, not be reduced to tears or incoherent rage? They wanted to know how much frustration I could stand.
    The truth was, though, that for the first time in a very long time I was being given a test that made sense to me. I clicked, a section of map highlighted. I clicked somewhere else, I noted the result. I didn’t worry about making a mistake. The editor was designed with a perversity that shaded over into cruelty, but I sensed that once I learned its rules, I could live with it.
    I learned by trial and error. I figured out how to raise and lowerpieces of floor, to place blocks and monsters, how to apply colors to the terrain and objects. I learned that trying to save over a file with the same name crashed it to the DOS prompt.
    The screen froze, and somebody walking past said, “Did you right-click in the 3-D window? You can’t do that.” I learned that clicking Save As while you had a piece of terrain selected meant you had to reboot. I learned that nobody ever clicked on the button labeled SMART MODE . Nobody knew what it did.
    There was another test. At first I thought there was no manual whatsoever for how to use the editor, until I realized that the manual was the people in the room with me. You learned when it was okay to ask—you waited for a coder to launch a long compile or export, as signaled by a trip to the candy machine. You learned to distinguish the “I’m taking a break” stare (usually accompanied by a sigh or chair spin) from the “I’m thinking really hard” stare (straight ahead, or angled roughly fifteen degrees upward) and the “I’m really screwed up and angry” posture—elbows on desk, hands gripping head.
    And you learned whom to ask. Todd was the nearest UI/tools guy but he was perennially cranky, so talk to Allison if she was around, or catch him when he’s just coming back from lunch, and always phrase the question so it sounds like you screwed up and are just looking to be rescued, not like there’s something actually wrong with the editor.
    It must have been around two in the afternoon when I started to relax. Bug fixes were for the customers, the soft, lazy civilians who only got the software after it was finished and boring and safe. Real game developers worked with real software, the kind that broke a third of the time unless you knew exactly what you were doing. The next time I went to the kitchen for a bag of Skittles, I did so with just a hint of world-weary swagger. Of course the editor crashed all the time. Why on earth wouldn’t it?
    College was one long series of missed cues and indecipherable codesfor me. Other people followed