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in a bad way from the lung cancer, or visit Sophie and Bill and the nieces. Until one day Ma wasn’t there anymore, and the rest of it, and that’s you in that corner there, you with your sixty-thousand-euro salary and your legacy that went partway to a poky wee place in the Colonies and a mortgage you won’t pay off before you retire, and no fucking life whatsoever. (Well, there’s your knitting habit and your criminal record: But that’s just fodder for your OCD.) This is your life, it’s been your life since you clawed your way from CS graduate to start-up seven years ago, and your so-called life is such a bijou bourgeois piece of shit that there’s no room for anything but work in it, so you’ve been keeping yourself too busy to care until—
    Last week they cancelled STEAMING and told you to clear your desk at half an hour’s notice. Here’s your next month’s pay in lieu, now get the hell out of here, you freak! And you suddenly realise that you haven’t got a life. Even though they made you learn more about Scottish Premier League fitba than the captain of the national squad, the bastards.
    “Excuse me. You cannot be sleeping here—”
    Restart:
    The worst thing about it all is that you hate football.
    Of course, to have admitted that you hated football while you were working on STEAMING would have been a bit like one of the US president’s staffers confessing to thinking religion was overrated, abstinence didn’t work, and what the country really needed was a short sharp dose of communism with a side order of Islamic extremism to go. It’s one of those things that you just couldn’t talk about at LupuSoft, not while they had the exclusive rights to both the Hibs’ and Rangers’ fan club franchises and were trying to milk the surplus income out of all the assorted bampots, neds, and ne’er-do-wells who figured that a LARP where you get to play at football hooligans among consenting adults was better than the other kind of live-action role-playing. (In which you played at football hooligans with non -consenting adults, while the combined manpower of Lothian’s finest and the Rock Steady Crew played collar-the-radge back atcha with CS gas and tasers.) On the other hand, you were able to suppress or sublimate your hatred without too much difficulty. You’re a bourgeois liberal geek who thinks “team player” is a term of abuse, but you believe in society, you believe in checks and balances, you believe in getting your own back on the thick-headed sports jocks who made life excitingly unpleasant for you in school…and as it happens, while you were working on STEAMING you could convince yourself that you were doing your bit , because any job that gets the brangling thugs playing a game on their mobies instead of lobbing tinnies and chibbing innocent bystanders up the high street has got to be a good thing. Network-mediated LARPs have been the gaming story of the decade, ever since SPOOKS came along and gave actuaries a chance to live a secret agent life on the side; STEAMING was set to ring the cash register again and take the nutters off the street. And it paid the mortgage, besides.
    At least, that’s how it had been before the Bologna cup final disaster, and the double whammy of the social psych study in The Lancet the very next week that stuck the proverbial sharpie in and twisted, hard. Questions were asked in the lumpy-looking construction site down Holyrood Road, and the ministers did wax worthy and serious and proceeded to apply the tawse of uptight self-righteousness to the rump of the dead equine of games industry self-regulation with gusto and vigour. At which point LupuSoft management revisited the risk-value trade-off inherent in defending their investment in a second-division virtual-world football-hooliganism game against a class-action lawsuit, and decided the professional thing to do was to downsize your team’s sorry ass.
    Maybe it could have gone the other way in the boardroom