Playing Games

“PLAYING GAMES”

When the last piece of drywall was nailed into place I stood back to check out my handiwork. The false wall in the back corner of the garage had taken a long time to build and I thought to myself perhaps the best thing about retirement was having time to do even the silly things like the wall. After two months of thinking and scheming it was the last physical part of my plan. With great care I’d made the new construction look exactly like the sixty year old walls that surrounded it. Even the small, ragged hole I had cut in the drywall looked old. No one looking at it would realize it wasn’t original construction but the only person I needed to fool was my ten year old grandson. Harry was a typical little boy; curious and fun-loving, with boundless energy. Whenever he adopted a new hobby or activity it became my interest as well. His latest passion was Fortnite. He and his friends had been playing video games for about a year but this one was different. This one engaged them in a way I’d never seen before.

When Harry got his new X-Box One we all thought he’d just keep playing the simple games he’d always enjoyed. His Mom and Dad did their best to limit his gaming hours but when he discovered FortNite that became a real challenge. The game allowed players to team up so Harry gathered his friends Christopher, Nathan and James to form what the game called a squad. Sometimes the four of them got together to play and other times they played from their own homes. When they were immersed in the game they called each other by their game skins. I’d hear Harry, who went by the skin Fusion, talking to his team of X-Lord, Ripply and Sentinel. Watching and listening taught me that each color of the guns they used had a power rating and that gold was the highest power. The golden gun was the inspiration for the false wall and the little experiment that I’d planned to go with it.

My idea was to create a mystery and get Harry and his squad to solve it. Prying them away from their gaming would be a challenge but I knew if I could connect the scheme to FortNite I could tap into and redirect their enthusiasm for it. It would be that energy that kept them focused on the mystery. They’d still be connected to the game but wouldn’t be sitting in the dark staring at their screens. My wife, Carol, had been sworn to secrecy and was an enthusiastic partner in helping me with online research about Fortnite. But it was a conversation with my daughter that helped me finalize the details for my little plan. She’d told me she’d gotten an email from Harry’s science teacher, Mr. Cooper, that said Harry was having problems paying attention in class and that he’d talked to him about trying to concentrate harder. The new semester was starting with a section on the scientific method and he wanted Harry to be prepared. When I heard that it helped me round out the details for the mystery. Everything was ready to go.

On Saturday morning Harry and Christopher rode their bikes to my house. I had promised to pay them ten dollars each to help me clean out a few things in my garage. Ten bucks was a small fortune to a ten year old. I’d backed out my car and in the corner with the false wall I’d carefully stacked some cardboard boxes along with some trash bags and pieces of scrap lumber. Their job was to put all of the loose items into the trash barrel, recyclable items into the blue barrel and then wheel them out to the curb for pickup. They went right to work and I stayed nearby pretending to be working in the yard. About twenty minutes in I heard Harry say, “Hey, check it out. There’s something in the wall!” A few seconds later he came around the corner and yelled, “Papa, you gotta see this. We found a box inside the wall!”

That was when I followed him back into the garage and started my act. “What do you mean inside the wall?”

“It’s right here. See inside that hole? There’s a box in there.”

I bent down to peer inside. “Holy cow, you’re right. It must be something the old owner left behind.” I reached inside knowing full well the box wouldn’t fit through the hole. “Looks like we’ll have to make the hole bigger. Christopher, grab that hammer on the workbench and Harry, get the crowbar in the corner.” They stood there looking at the hole and I said, “Okay, start making the hole bigger so we can get the box out, and be careful.”

Giving two ten year old boys permission to make noise and break something is fun to watch. They took turns at the hole and in a few minutes they’d made it a lot bigger than was needed to remove the box. I walked over to the wall and said, “Okay, guys, I think that’s big enough. Harry, can you reach inside there and try to bring out the box?”

Both boys knelt on the dusty concrete floor and the look on their faces when Harry pulled the box through the hole was priceless. While I stood there watching them I heard a voice behind me.

“What’s all the noise out here?” Carol was also doing a great job of pretending to be surprised. She stood next to me trying to keep a straight face.

“The boys found an old box hidden in the wall. I have no idea what it is, it must have been in there for years.”

Harry was practically breathless. “Can we open it, Papa?”

“Sure. Here, use my pocket knife to cut the cord.”

Christopher leaned closer while Harry used the knife. “Check it out,” he said, his eyes wide with amazement, “It says TOP SECRET. What do you think it is?”

I continued my act. “I have no idea but the man we bought the house from was a scientist. He worked for the military back in the 1960s. Whenever I asked him what he worked on he just clammed up and wouldn’t talk about it.”

While Harry tore at the brown paper covering Christopher reached back into the hole and pulled out a large manila envelope. “Look,” he said excitedly, “it says TOP SECRET too!”

Harry had finally gotten to the flaps of the box. He pulled them back and when he looked inside he froze. He stared at it for a moment then said, “Oh my god it’s a Drum Gun!”

“A what?” I asked.

It’s a Drum Gun like in Fortnite.” He pulled it from the box and Christopher’s eyes were as big as saucers. “Chris, look, it’s gold, it’s Mythic, the highest rarity.”

As the two boys talked and took turns holding the gun I thought about what I’d gone through to build that thing. Carol had found an image of it on the Fortnite website and printed it out for me. Trips to Target and Walmart got me two toy guns that I cannibalized to make the basic Fortnite stock and trigger design. A trip to Home Depot came next. I modified the barrel with PVC pipe and a small shower nozzle and then built out the body with some galvanized duct metal. A metal canister served as the ammo magazine. After a coat of primer and then bright gold spray paint I added strips of black rubber gasket material and black metal washers for the sights. When it was finished I thought it looked good enough to be a movie prop.

I had to almost shout to get the boys attention. “Hey, Chris, what’s in the envelope?” While he undid the clasp and tore open the flap I thought about the expert help I’d gotten from a friend at the engineering firm I’d retired from. Working from measurements and photographs I’d given him he created computer drawings that looked like ones a scientist might have used to build a top secret gun. I’d told him the title block should read “DRUM GUN, FOR MYTHIC LEVEL ONLY” with the date July 4, 1966. Notes on the drawing pointed out details like the high speed ammo loader, the laser sight and the automatic fire switch. The boys sat there on the floor totally caught up in the mystery of how a gun from their video game wound up buried inside the wall of an old scientist’s garage. It was clear to me there wouldn’t be much garage work getting done from that point on. Fortunately they’d moved most of the material so I finished the job while they sat there speculating on where the gun came from, who made it and if it was real.

When the trash barrels were at the curb I walked back into the garage. Harry was holding the gun and sighting down the barrel while Christopher looked over the drawings. Both boys were totally caught up in their surprise find. “Okay guys, tell me about this gun you found.”

Harry held it out so I could get a closer look. “Papa, you know how we play Fortnite on our game boxes? This is the Drum Gun that Midas uses. It’s the most powerful weapon in the game.”

Christopher chimed in, “The only way you can get it is to defeat Midas at the Agency!”

Carol seemed to share my confusion. The boys might as well have been speaking in a foreign language because I knew almost nothing about Fortnite but I played along. “This is really strange because I thought it was just a made up video game but if it’s not real where did this gun come from?” Before they could say anything I added, “Chris, check to see if there’s a date on the drawings. That will tell us when someone drew them.”

He studied the top page for a moment and replied, “It says July 4, 1966.”

Harry’s eyes widened. “That means someone built this like fifty…fifty-four years ago.”

“And what’s really strange,” I added, “is that whoever built this gun wanted to keep it so secret they boxed it up and built it right into this wall so nobody would ever find it.” I could see the boys were almost overwhelmed by the mystery of the Drum Gun so I said, “I’ll tell you what, I’ll still pay you each the ten bucks. Why don’t you head home now and Nana and I will bring your gun over after lunch.?”

Harry seemed reluctant to let go of the gun but he handed it to me. “Okay.”

Carol and I stood and watched as the chattering boys rode out of the driveway and down the street. “Well, so far your little project is moving along like you planned,” she said.

When we pulled into our daughter’s driveway about two hours later Harry was standing in the open garage with Christopher, Nathan and James. The entire squad seemed mesmerized when I handed them the golden gun. My daughter heard us arrive and walked out to greet us. “So this is the amazing gun Harry can’t stop talking about.”

“Mom, check it out. Do you know how hard it is to get this gun in the game? It’s like impossible!” The squad continued examining the gun and speculating on its history.

When my son-in-law joined us we moved off to the side to share the next step in the plot. Stephanie and Mark had been in on my plan from the beginning and were taking care of the part of the mystery that involved Harry’s school. Mark had taken photos of the gun and drawings and emailed them to Mr. Cooper. Stephanie had spoken with him several times after he’d realized the mystery could make for a good teaching opportunity. The plan was for Mr. Cooper to ask the class if anyone had something unusual they wanted to know more about, like a puzzle or a mystery. We all knew Harry well enough to know, given his excitement over the gun, his hand would be in the air before Cooper even finished the question. He’d tell his teacher about the mysterious find in the garage wall and Tuesday morning the class, using the scientific method, would try to solve the puzzle. It was out of my hands now. The rest was up to a science teacher and a room full of curious ten year olds.

On Tuesday morning, according to Mr. Cooper, Harry, golden gun in hand, walked proudly to the front of the room and explained to his classmates how he and Christopher had found a gun hidden in a wall. He told them about tearing open a big hole, about the Top Secret labels on the box and about the drawings that showed how the gun was made. He also told them the role and importance of the gun in the world of Fortnite.

Cooper began his lesson. “Okay, class, let’s look at the sheet I put on your desks this morning. It shows you the steps we’ll follow when we use the Scientific Method.” There was a collective groan from the kids but when Cooper added, “We’re going to use this method to solve the mystery of Harry’s Fortnite gun,” they seemed to find instant enthusiasm.

He walked to the whiteboard on the front wall and wrote the word “Question”. “Okay, this is where we start. We ask a question, one that states what the problem is, what we’re trying to find out. What’s the question we want to ask here?”

Nathan raised his hand. “Is Harry’s gun a real Fortnite one?”

“Okay, does everyone agree that’s the problem we have to solve?” The sea of nodding heads led him to write the question on the board. “Now, the next step is we form our Hypothesis. This is kind of a guess at this point but we have to decide, at least for now, what the outcome will be. It’s our prediction of what we’ll have in the last step, our Conclusion. So who wants to predict what the answer to the question will be?”

The group was silent for a few moments and they kept looking at each other as if to say, “You be the one, not me.” Even the squad was silent. Finally a girl in the back row raised a hand and said, “I predict it will be real.”

Cooper told me later that when the girl made her prediction Harry was smiling ear to ear and was not only paying attention but was the student who was the most engaged in the process. When I’d first brought my idea to him he promised he’d send all of us the worksheet the kids would be working from so we could see what Harry would be doing. He’d be taking the next steps of Experiment, Observation, Analysis and Conclusion. We all had a hunch about what the class would decide about the golden gun’s origin and we hoped that Harry wouldn’t be too disappointed.

It was right after dinner that Stephanie, Mark and Harry pulled into our driveway. Harry got out of the backseat, carrying his gun and wearing an expression I couldn’t read. I met them at the front door and we moved into the living room. Stephanie looked at Harry then at me and said, “Harry wants to tell you about what happened today in Science class.”

I still couldn’t read his expression. “Okay, buddy, tell us how things went. What did the kids think about the Drum Gun?”

He paused then said, “We talked about the drawings that said when it was made and that there was no such thing as Fortnite back then so it couldn’t be real. Then Mr. Cooper showed us a picture of the gun from Fortnite’s website and everyone said my gun looked exactly like it so some of them said it must be real.” The longer he talked the more excited he got. “Then we did Experiments and Observation to see what it was made from. Everybody thought it was made from a real gun with other stuff. So then we did Analysis.” I could tell from Carol, Stephanie and Mark’s smiles that Harry’s newly found enthusiasm for science was coming through loud and clear.

When Harry paused I said, “I remember learning the Scientific Method when I was in school and the next step, the last step is the Conclusion. What did the class decide?”

He took a step closer and looked up at me. “Mr. Cooper said we actually decided two things. The first is the gun wasn’t a real one.”

“What was the second one?”

He paused and smiled. “That my Papa likes playing games too.”