The End of FUN Read Free Page B

get to the point where all you want to do is play until your eyes fall out. And if you get serious about it, you’ll of course want to skip the grind—but you can’t skip the grind for free. Or say you want to respawn on a friendly face? That’ll cost you, too.
    Not gonna lie—I got hooked. Pretty soon I was spending all my time on
Tickle, Tickle, Boom!
, and even though I was doing a decent job earning (so I thought), there was bound to come a day when the roof caved in.
    It was a Tuesday, I remember, right after I’d defeated the Boss 4: The Pandacorn on
Tickle, Tickle, Boom!
, maybe three months into my life in San Francisco.
    I woke up like any normal day—took a leak, munched some Zazz—but when I went to log in to
Tickle, Tickle, Boom!
, Homie ™ popped up and was all,
    > access denied!
    user = FAIL !
    And I was like, WUT?
    And Homie ™ was like,
    > u r a FAIL !
    :(
    So I told it to bring up my account info, and that’s when I saw the problem. My balance was at –10,000. How did that happen? The truth is, I knew exactly how it happened. You don’t spend a month on your butt playing
Tickle, Tickle, Boom!
and not fall a little behind. But FAIL ? I thought that was reserved for, like, egregious trolling or whatever.
    I asked Homie ™ again if I was truly in FAIL , and it was like,
    > i’m so sorry!
    u are truly a FAIL !
    :(
    So I took a deep breath and asked Homie ™ what I had to do, and it said I had two choices: file a Petition for Return to Normal or an Application for Termination. In order to do either, first I had to earn back all my FUN ® , plus catch up on my YAY!logs—100 in all, and they all had to be user approved, meaning I had to get more YAY!s than BOO!s. Plus complete all the regular YAY!s. In the meantime, I was in FAIL :
    No mindtalk ™ .
    No timestop ™ .
    No brainzip ™ .
    No unauthorized games.
    Basically no real FUN ® until I earned back the FUN ® I owed. As I sat there reading the terms of my fate, it occurred to me that my rent to the hivehouse was due in a week.
    So now what?
    How would I have some FUN ® ?
    Homie ™ blinked.
    > that’s easy original boy_2!
    u can go to a party™!

YAY! for Parties ™ . In the beginning, they were kind of all right—everyone getting together IRL to exchange YAY!s. But they kept changing the rules and adding more time, and pretty soon no one went unless they had to. Listen: if everyone who is at the party is only there because they have to be, then where you are is not a party—even if there are balloons. Which there were not. Instead, it was 80 people crammed into a dimly lit meeting room in the basement of a building on Pine Street, with a single ironic disco ball dangling from the ceiling.
    They’d handed out name tags at the door, like actual name tags—more irony, I guess. The other person in my party pair was this hipster girl named Sasha—username sasha.c8kes—and she was having a lot of FUN ® and not paying much attention to IRL. What she did was she accidentally grabbed my name tag and slapped it on her shapely chest without even looking—and now she was original boy_2. So I took hers: sasha.c8kes.
    Her mood was WHATEVER , so I changed mine to FLIRT ? just to see what she’d do. She didn’t do anything. So I told her a joke, the one about what’s long and brown and sticky, the answer to which is:
a stick
. But either she didn’t like it or she didn’t get it. Not that there’s all that much to get.
    The reason we were there was to review the latest Animal of Wonder & Light ® , the Buffaloon ™ . I’ll say this much: they were getting better with the haptic response. You could almost feel the bristly hairs. But as for personality, I don’t know…the thing just stood there flapping its wings…and every once in a while it would whistle. Also: you could give it virtual