I wanted to live in a world that had been created by someone else. I wanted to lead a life that that had been designed by someone else. I wanted to think thoughts that had been defined for me to think, have feelings that had been specified for me to feel. I wanted to dream dreams that someone else had thought up for me to dream. That’s why The Game was perfect for me. The Game – I decided – would suit me down to the ground. I needed to play The Game…

So with these thoughts in mind I went searching for the Game Maker, to ask for his help in fulfilling my need to have the criteria that I have just mentioned fulfilled. I was going to find him, wherever he was, and ask him to provide me with a fully-programmed reality. The Game Maker was not an easy man to find. I searched and I searched and I searched. I travelled and I travelled and I travelled – I can’t tell you how many boots I wore out. I went here and there and everywhere in-between. Everywhere I went I asked the question – “Have you seen the Game Maker?” Everyone I met I questioned. I put this question to them, but to no avail. I looked high and low for the Game Maker; I travelled the length and breadth of the land and I travelled a fair few of the neighbouring lands too.

Eventually, in a disreputable tavern in a bad part of town in a godforsaken hole of a place no one in their right mind would ever want to visit, I met a man who claimed to have some information on the subject. He would tell me everything he knew on the subject on the condition that I kept supplying him with drink, and the occasional joey of heroin from the vending machine by the bar. At the end of a long and highly improbable story he eventually came to the nub of what it was he had to say – there was (he claimed) a man who drank in a public house about five or six miles down the road, in an even more unsavoury part of town, who had actually met the Game Player, and knew where he lived.

I took off down the road at a great pace, with the feeling that I was finally reaching the end of my quest. At last my searching had paid off – after more dead-ends and false leads than I could remember. I found the pub without difficulty and stepped in through the heavy wooden door, breathing heavily. The place was some dive – a mingled odour of urine, stale farts and sour beer assailed my nostrils the moment I stepped through the door. The room was dark and smoggy and the air felt unpleasantly stagnant and damp. Apathetic-looking flies crawled up and down the beer-glasses as the even more apathetic owners of the glasses stared listlessly into space. No one was talking. I noticed with growing unease the grey, unhealthy-looking bats with tiny human faces that were hanging here and there in dense cluster from the grimy ceiling. I was immediately struck with the feeling that I wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.

Ignoring this feeling, I walked to the bar and asked the bar-tender if he knew of a man known simply as ‘the Oracle’.  Without speaking a word, he gestured to a wizened, stick-like figure in a grimy cloak sitting alone in the corner, staring morosely at an empty glass. I went over to introduce myself, full of misgivings. After the usual tiresome rigmarole (which involved me buying him copious amounts of alcohol, heroin and scopolamine suppositories, he spilled the beans…

“It’s you, you dumb-ass fool!” he barked contemptuously at me, his face an unhealthy shade of grey from all the scopolamine. “You are the Game Maker!” He paused to cough up an unlikely amount of phlegm into a filthy yellow handkerchief, “Who else did you think it was? You are the Game Maker and this is all your game, every bit of it. You’ve been in The Game all along….”