Gaming the System

Disclaimers:

All persons mentioned are over 18 when any hanky-panky happens. All companies and names are changed to be nonsense, any correspondence between a real person/company and this thing is your imagination or the happenstance of the multiverses.

If you're not comfortable with the mind-control sub-genre, relax, it's a fantasy, there's nothing forced here, and I hope the ideas play out with some happy-fun aspects.

Gaming Pre-Life

So, I've always been into two things - games, and math. Well, three - starting in 6th grade, I've always been horny, too. Basically, I go through a lot of lube and pencils.

One kind of math I love is game theory - I tried playing a bunch of both board games and online games, but after a while the patterns in them just turned into pure-chance or abstract heuristics (if-this do-that) equation-driven prediction trees.

I started this exploration when I was little, playing games with my mom (dad split when I was 8). She and I would play board games, but that got boring and slow. Mom was into math, too, she'd majored in it in college but 'had to be a CPA because topology doesn't pay mortgages'.

That's kind of a family saying, 'topology doesn't pay mortgages': have fun, but unless you're doing something useful - to someone else - you'll go hungry.

Console and online games were fun for a while, but when I could see there were always going to be people with slightly faster connections, more money for in-game purchases, and faster reflexes than I could ever have, well, most of those got old.

The strategy games, those were fun. I liked those, especially if there was a little first-person-shooter stuff because the strategy was picking which enemy to attack first, with what weapon, in what location.

I got super-into three different games and played them a lot. They were fun, but some monsters were TOTALLY probabilistic to kill. There was no way to advance levels without paying bucks or getting super lucky.

Of course, once you leveled up, if you went down a level and then advanced again, it wiped out the record of how you got lucky, so I couldn't go back and see my stats effectively. The whole probability thing pissed me off.

Since it cost me time, I examined every part of the gameplay for clues on how to get better odds on shooting a Jork.

Freshman year in high school, I noticed something - After you shoot a Jork, the color changes for a certain amount of time. I wanted to see if that time delay was constant. I found, it wasn't!

Normally in games like this, changing a status is either timed, dependent on a factor you can't see, or random within a range. Random within a range would yield a probability distribution curve - flat or a bell curve - and that'd be definitive info. I liked _knowing_ things, usually a clue in one part of an online game meant they re-used the idea elsewhere.

So, it turned out that delay was bucketed (I wrote a tool to time it exactly). There were only several delays possible. That meant there was a SECRET there, more info I couldn't see. I decided that meant the delay depended on a TYPE of Jork (not ever indicated anywhere - they looked alike). Extrapolating by the delays and their four weapon types, there were 1024 kinds of Jorks.

Each type of a Jork required a different kill method, impossible to determine from the outside, but known the game developers, who (everyone knew) ran automated testing on their games to validate it worked before minor releases.

For instance, for one type of Jork, killing it took 12 times in its foot, then 7 torso shots, but if you shot its head it was forever unkillable and you were hosed.

I tracked all of this with a special double-feed both into my monitor and into another computer's video-in, so I could see after it was killed what killed it. I had to kill a shit-ton of Jorks to get any decent heuristics on what killed which one. Fuck that was hard - massive hours involved.

Sure, the game was fun, but raw data collection is Seriously Boring. I HAD to find a better way!

Setting up a software-driven mouse-driver was a kind of hack that was technically frowned on and prevented on-box, but when the mouse-driver was on another box and it re-fed-out mouse movements to a 'real' mouse (innards exposed, no movement needed), I could bypass that.

There weren't plans for these, but there were plans for how to hack specific brands of mouse to tweak various settings, and I had fun with a software oscilloscope, multimeter, and 'gadgets' to find what was really going on.

Suffice to say for this story, I figured out how to read subtle clues in both the game's color schemes and the delays of color change. Then, I scripted aim and clicks to automate my responses. I was probably doing better automated testing than their own testing department!

This let me advance rapidly through the game.

The trouble with this: Like any cheat, once you use it and become triumphant, you've defeated the point of the game and it gets, again, super-boring.

VR Headsets

Backing up a little, I was in Junior year of high school when VR headsets ("halders") came to our school. I ate it up. Plugging their VR gear into our school laptop, BOOM, we could memorize anything.

I'd read about it online (news articles), but as soon as it came in I started reading up as much as I could on how it worked, etc. And, I was super curious!

The idea, everyone knows now, I'll go over again: Association based learning can be super-fast and highly reliable for recall in wetware brains like ours. Thus, memorization became simple, and school classes that required it just got Super Easy.

Classes changed. Memorization became the base level, and we had to add skills about WHICH rule to use.

A great example is falling-object physics, where you're given about 4 equations and a set of facts, and you have to figure out which equation gets you the answer. Usually it's not one equation, it's two or three, combining and transforming until you get the answer.

Picking that right transformation is a skill, not a memorization.

Before, to memorize things, it was flashcards, lightweight look-guess tries many times a day over 2 weeks, cements it into your brainstem. For sequential info, mom taught me to create 'Mad Wackrad Sosad Toobad Armorclad' rhyme-schemes, supply the first word and the rest replays into your head.

So, the VR headsets could help us by giving us fast memorization as associations, which is what human brains do really well, regardless of overall intelligence level.

Really, intelligence is inventing metaphors - abstracting a group of like items/situations - and using those to guess based on possible metaphor associations.

The TRIPS equipment was called a WidgetCo ("Head-hand Active Learning Device for Emergent Realization", natch). WidgetCos are sort-of-VR sunglasses and wristbands. Once we put them on, we could play games that threw on-purpose memorization into gameplay and then use that stuff in increasingly complex games.

The games were fun!

I liked them a lot, because I didn't get bored, and it generally took a lot to keep me interested. Through most of my school, I was bored most of the time and kept one eye reading a novel or doing crosswords and the other on my classwork.

WidgetCo learning fed my fancy like mad! Epic win, from my perspective. I wanted one for home, too, but mom couldn't afford it, so I figured out a set of trades in my OTF Jork game, used a medium-sized hunk of in-game money (selling items I'd acquired by "cheating" gameplay I'd written code for) to trade for out-of-game cash, to get a WidgetCo for home.

The school district, helping both super-rich and handicapped kids, had a server connection for people who had home units. Connected in, I pushed through independent study and did the rest of my high school required classes before Christmas junior year.

The trouble was, I didn't want to graduate early. I was in band (french horn) and cross-country/track, and missing out on good times would have been seriously borked.

Instead, with mom's help, I signed up for online classes at our local college. Mom was an adjunct professor there, meaning she mostly was a CPA accountant full time and 3 nights a week she'd go over and teach a class in stats or some other math subject. Hell, I saw her work when she did video lectures, and I could have taught them (though I wasn't old enough).

Being adjunct faculty means free tuition, and it was a super-nice college, though it was associated with an evangelical church and most of the people that went there were way more conservative than Mom and I were. I didn't fault them on that, religion is one of those things you grow up with.

So, starting in spring Junior year, I spent mornings at Aardmore College, 7:30 am to noon, doing in-person stuff like English class discussions and physics lab. Then, it was back to Graymont High School, for health (grad requirement), band, and then my two gym classes. The state graduation requirement was 4 years of gym classes, a giant pain, but what the heck, I was definitely getting fit.

Of course, I followed the gym classes with cross-country running practice (which I loved), so you can definitely bet I was far, far, far more fit than any person needed to be.

It was a full day, but I was living large and loving the way my understanding of the world was changing.

Summer school after Junior year was just as fun, though my social life was crap. I'd been dating Julie Heckter since Sophomore year, she was great and we had fun hanging out, but she didn't want to have sex. Frankly, I wondered if she ever would want to, but we had fun otherwise so that was fine.

We did kiss and stuff, but no sexy-time makes Kevin a horny boy, and I probably _increased_ my lube use after we started dating.

Part of the problem was that she was super-guilty about any kind of interaction that wasn't sitting in a hard-backed chair dressed in +5 chrome armor. I was pretty sure she got those ideas from her mother - so I was kind of in a battle with her mom.

Some things about fundamentalist Christian churches I don't easily understand.

Our birthdays were both right about the start of the school year, and with that date, she had decided she was going to have sex regardless of her mother's opinions. So, we tried it, and tried it farther, until we got it mostly going.

That 'GOING' meant 'Doing It' about once a week, sometimes twice or three times but all on the same day. I wasn't stupid - I'd read and practically memorized two college textbooks on human sexuality. They both said, in many ways, make sure both people are getting orgasms.

I made sure Julie got orgasms!

The smiles she had plastered on her face when we parted ways on Friday night were sometimes trouble for her at home, though, because her mom suspected we were Getting Busy. Her trick (found after a grueling interrogation she managed to resist) was to suck on a super-sour hard candy to change her facial expression before she walked in the house.

It almost worked. Or, rather, it worked for a while.

Her mom found out Julie was taking birth control pills (like most sane girls who were active), something that Julie had hidden, and therefore it established Julie had things to hide. Thus she got Julie to admit we were having sex. Being both 18, we were 'legal', but that Did Not Matter to her mom.

Her Dad got wind of this - her mom told - and her 'little girl' was 'was succumbing to evil forces' or something like that. He wasn't even as conservative as her mom, but it didn't matter, it was all super-duper-Badness, somehow.

So, we were forced to break up. Julie couldn't face down her parents, and I couldn't help her.

Emotionally, I had little choice, and it hit me hard, so I retreated into my WidgetCo and sucked in more coursework. On the outside? I was mostly the same - I'd been heads-down into coursework before because I had a lot of fun with it. But, not having an outlet was a hassle.

That work had paid off over the summer, between hanging out watching movies with Julie and sleeping odd hours, I managed to finish off all the credits I needed to graduate high school (minus a gym class), but frankly I didn't want to graduate and miss my senior year!

Choosing classes that fall was hard - what to do when the only thing I needed was gym?

For fun, I signed up again for two gym classes (it was fun to play games and be active, I liked it), did band and cross country, and didn't need to worry.

At the start of the year - I had Julie. After we broke up? I had to kind of settle back into my previous life - playing DND with friends and pretending to care in classes.

Like a medium-level dungeon you know all the traps for, Graymont effing High school was a Known Problem, but it had great friends to hang with so I stayed.

October 11th

I will never forget Thursday October 11th for the rest of my life.

The day was normal until my intro to psych class, a required course I already knew most of the material for.

About half my classes had some section of time where we used WidgetCo headsets - to look at class notes in a VR gaming 'world' (standing as a group with avatars), but it was rare to spend the whole class there. Mostly we had group discussion, answered questions, all that.

For times when we had discussions in the VR world (to talk about some in-game visual aid), it was a little frustrating. Between us, didn't do body language. The combination of Headsets and self-aimed cameras on the headsets supposedly put our facial expressions on our in-game avatars, but WOW was that faulty. We laughed at it but the only way to turn it off was a shard of post-it note over that camera, but if you did your avatar face turned green and the teachers would make you take it off.

We did try, though.

Anyway, in this psych class, we were doing in-class exercises in WidgetCo VR, trying to predict what a VR monkey would do given a social situation. The in-game "room" suddenly reminded me tremendously of a Jork-heavy dungeon I'd been in, so I paused the game and thought about it.

The monkey-enclosures were vastly different, but where they were in the 'room' were really similar to the layout of a specific dungeon level full of Jork Pits. On the surface, the rooms looked different, but the NPC's were behaving like in-game pieces.

The more I looked at it, the more the similarities aligned. That is, the location of the four doors (1 overhead, one high-wall platform, and two normal) also matched.

This could NOT be a coincidence!

If it did match, that meant that the set of light switches by the high-wall platform door would open the Master Control Pit, where you could type text into the dungeon P.A. system to tell all the Jorks to run for the door. On that level, they would run, and that gave you massive plunder for free - no fighting!

It was an exploit you'd only discover if you were like me and created an automated system to click on every single section of wall and every light switch, then toggle the switches with a pattern of clicks in ascii or morse, before you left an otherwise empty room.

I went to that wall, and of course there were hidden switches (appearing only when toggled down). That opened a panel near the ceiling for an upside-down telegraph key. From there, I knew the trick was morse-keying in 'ALL YOUR BASE' (used elsewhere as an Easter egg) and... Boom!!!

The wall slid open to show the elevator shaft! I was into the Jork Master Control Pit!

Yay!!!

(I didn't know quite why I was so happy, it was just such a neat little hole and connection between the video game layout and my Usually Mundane, normal WidgetCo school/training worlds. It's like when you see your teacher in the grocery store - two worlds colliding)

This Master Control Pit, MCP, looked WAY different from the dungeon one. Instead, bookcases were lined with instruction manuals, and instead of a text entry box next to a microphone for the 'dungeon P.A. system', there was a password entry box.

The manuals were decorations, not real manuals. Damnit.

I thought, "Shit!"

I didn't have any idea what the password was. Still, it was a start.

Class ended and I had to get going.

As soon as I got home that night I opened the Monkey-Game app again and had a closer look at that password entry box.

I tried everything reasonable and stayed up too late, almost 1 am and I was still at it. As a last attempt, desperate for any traction at all, I pointed my little shooting-hack computer at the entry box and 'fired' at it with four-character "pin" passwords like they used for Jork

Four characters of upper, lower, and numerics made 62 to the 4th, about 15m possible answers. I'd never get far, so I had to be smarter. Maybe, I thought, they weren't smart.

Some entry boxes give clues by how long it takes to return an answer. I was not disappointed!

This one was, in fact, stupid. It revealed if you had a partially correct answer since if you didn't have the start of the password correct, it would respond slightly faster, about 20% of the time. So, I could cut down on possible guesses.

Of course, I started with more-likely passwords, put in random delays between guesses, and exited/re-entered the location every 2 guesses, which was way faster than the 3-bad-guess penalty delay.

I didn't want to set off any DDOS alarms, I'm not stupid.

It took my system four days to find the right password, the next Tuesday.

I was IN!!!! Granted, it was past midnight that night, when my headset 'Bing!' sounded (I was reading a hardcover sci-fi novel, so I was up. The ring sounded loud in my quiet room.

What opened up was not a normal text box, though, it was a GUI-driven admin screen, apparently for WidgetCo administration people.

The menus were organized for student data, game setup, global, local, and retention.

I chose student data, but before I looked anyone up, I got cautious and considered that since it was password protected, maybe entries were being audited. A lot of infosec apps just let you do stuff but then trace what you're up to, like if it's a honeypot that entraps people and traces the 'bad guys' to see what they want to do.

Thus an audit would track who I looked up, if they were auditing. I chose a random person I knew, a friend of mine from band 2 years before then. She'd gone to U Wisconsin. I liked her, she was really pretty and fun to hang with but out of my league, plus I had been 'dating' this other girl at the time who turned out to be a nothingburger.

This girls' name was Grace Hopper (reasonably distinctive since she wasn't a century-old total badass USN Rear Admiral), so I found her results there and looked at what classes she was taking.

Back in the day, she'd been in Madrigals with me, so we had chatted a little and she'd talked about getting a B.S. in Nursing, a BSN.

Instead, once I found her, it said she was pre-med and taking organic chem, among other courses. I thought, hey, good for her! I could see the grades she was getting, B's and C's, only one A, and wondered what the problem was. She was smart - I knew that much, so this was confusing.

Diving into her class schedule, I found the app had organized her "ELP", Extended Learning Profile, into sections. The way this info was presented? It was Very Strange, not at all like we saw as students. It had a lot more data and options available and was laid out very differently.

The sections were: school-infrastructure, career-presumptive, degree-presumptive, personal-requests, life-habits, paradigmatic, and then each of the classes she was in.

Clicking on each section showed me metadata - version, when revised, by-whom - and the actual data to be inculcated, in the form of word-word and image-word association lists, as key-value pairs. For instance, the school calendar had keys of the date and values of holiday or fees-due, or whatever.