THE VIDEO HOUSE

A short/long movie concept

By Garrett Gilchrist

A bunch of friends (and people who've conversed online but never met) have gathered at a remote house in the wilderness, because the owner of the house, amateur gaming software designer Flynn Fender, who knows all of them either as friends or business contacts, has promised to show them all his latest creation, and has promised it's going to be something really special, and has also promised there would be free food and beer and that he also had some women coming. All the friends being geeks for the most part, they agree to come, even though it's a long way and they've all come from different parts of the country (and Canada). Still, it's good that everyone will finally get to meet, and the turnout is impressive. What they already know is this, from the press release Fender mailed to all of them - Fender's new invention is the Video House, a revolutionary new virtual reality gaming system in which the gamer will actually believe himself to be in the game. The viewer doesn't even look at a screen as he plays, as the system uses no monitors, no 3d processors, nothing. Rather, the viewer puts on a special interface suit which blots out all his senses, except those of taste and smell. The system then creates new sensory impulses based on input recieved from the gamer's own mind.

This is what Fender has told everyone. But the real unveiling of the system, and revelation of its true power, doesn't come until every single invited guest has arrived. Until then, Fender only allows his guests access to the main room, and the coat room. All other doors are locked tight and cannot be opened. In the meantime, Fender is relaxed and so is everyone else. They introduce themselves to each other, and chatter about nothing in particular. Fender starts up a strange conversation with a guy named Vince, trying to convince him that Meg Ryan is attractive. It's not an easy sell, and turns into a debate among most of the males there.

When the (late) last guest finally shows up, Fender locks the outside doors of the home, and tells everyone, welcome to the video house, a new exercise in interactive filmmaking. His voice changes somewhat, takes on a darker tone. All the other doors of the house now open. When you walk through any of these doors with your interface properly in place, Fender says, you are not just walking into another room of the house, you are walking into the gaming system. He has shot and digitized hours of footage around town with his home video camera, based on what he knows about everyone he has invited from speaking to them (online and otherwise). He has tried to shoot footage that matches their personality -- roads, sky, snow ... When you walk into any room of the house, the door will shut behind you and all 360 degrees around you will go black and be replaced by a 3-d video image of a real-world location, like a beach or a road or the sky. You get the idea. The viewer can walk around and interact with anything or anyone around them in any way they like. Thanks to the chemical-based interface design, the user will believe him or herself to actually be inside the system, walking on real ground, with all their senses except for smell and taste. Fender got the idea from his many years of experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs.

The silliness of the idea makes some laugh, but others are nervous, particularly the few females that have actually shown up for the event, and one young married couple. Fender insists that if they are nervous they can leave at any time, that the system is perfectly harmless and he has spent three years refining and testing it himself without any snags or hitches. Some do start to go, but Fender assures them that if they leave and quit now, they will be missing the chance to act out their deepest fantasies, a gamer's dream. This could be the night of their lives.

In the end, everyone stays, and nervously, on a volunteer-by-volunteer basis (some go alone, some in pairs, some in threes) the guests start to test out the system.

The first guest to try it is Vince. He walks nervously into the room, turns to look at everyone and waves, fearfully, goodbye. Everyone waves back, fearful looks on their eyes too. It is like a death march. Then the door slams shut, and he is in darkness.

Suddenly the light comes on and he is standing in front of an entire wall of video, showing a road in the middle of nowhere. It is like looking at a video screen. He laughs at the hokiness of it all, and then starts to mock-walk in place. The video moves with him, like a rear-projection. He turns his head, and the video turns with him ... it all looks pretty terrible. The face of a guy he doesn't know appears onscreen, looking out at him and saying "Where you from, stranger?" He laughs, and doesn't say anything. A long pause. The video repeats -- "Where you from, stranger?" He rolls his eyes, and says "Okay, might as well play along with this. Hi, I'm from, um, not from around these parts." The guy onscreen says, "That's a nice place. I've never been to um, not from around these parts myself, but I hear the weather's nice there. We don't get much weather here. Do you want to talk about the weather." Vince laughs. "No." "Okay then, goodbye," says the guy onscreen, and walks away a bit, then stops and turns. The guy says "Oh, and watch out for killer zombies." Vince laughs again, and says "Thanks, I will." The video is looking more and more realistic now, it almost looks like Vince is actually there. He looks around him and remarks at this. And it does have a nice sky. Okay, he says, so where else can I go in this game? A car passes along the road, and stops. He looks at it. A man inside asks, need a lift, stranger? Vince thinks a minute, and says, "yeah, sure. Okay, thanks." He hops into the car, and he is obviously actually in the place now, actually sitting in the car next to its driver ... everything is real. He looks around him. The driver asks, "Do you want me to take you into town?" Vince shrugs, and then says "Yes, thank you." The driver says "You're welcome."

We cut to the main room of the house. Everyone is watching the door Vince entered expectantly. Fender smiles.

Inside the game, the car is driving into a town, and stops. Vince hops out and thanks the driver for the lift. The driver says "No problem. You were a good passenger, so I'm going to give you a gift." Vince says, "A gift?" The driver says, "Here you go, here's fifteen experience points," and hands them to Vince. Vince takes them confusedly and puts them in his pocket. The car drives off. Vince looks around him and walks into town. The town is almost empty. Everyone is screaming and running. A man grabs Vince by the collar and tells him to beware of zombies, and then runs off. Vince says "Zombies? Cool. I've always wanted to be in a zombie movie." He then sees a zombie lumbering up the street, towards him. A woman screams behind him. He turns around to see who it is -- it is an attractive young lady in a red shirt and jeans. She says "Hello stranger, my name is Buttercup. Please protect me from that zombie over there." He shrugs and says "Yeah, okay," and turns. He fights with the zombie by punching and kicking it repeatedly until it falls and disappears. He is rewarded with a shotgun, which appears where the zombie was. "Sweet," he says, "A shotgun!" Buttercup says "Thank you for saving me from the zombie. But look out, there are more zombies coming." Vince looks, and surely there are, lots of them, in a circle all around them. He fires his shotgun over and over and over again, as in a video game, but more and more identical zombies keep coming. He keeps shooting.

Cut back outside to the main room of the house. Everyone is still watching the door, afraid. There is no sound. Fender is still smiling.

Inside the game, we see Vince surrounded by zombie corpses, with fade away. Vince smiles and shouts "Yeah! I am the ultimate badass! State of the badass art!" Buttercup comes up to Vince and kisses him on the cheek. She says "You win! Congratulations! Your final score is 2500 points. You have achieved the rank of: beginner. Please exit the room so another player can enjoy the Video House."

Outside in the main room of the house, everyone is still staring at the door in suspense. Finally one guy, Damon, freaks out and starts saying "He's dead, isn't he? He's hurt or dead in there! What the fuck is this?"

At this point Vince comes out of the room, covered in smoke. He pulls the apparatus off of himself and shouts "That was fucking awesome! You guys, you have got to try this."

Damon thinks a minute and says "Um, I'll go next."

From this point on there are no hesitations. Every guest at this little gathering gets in line to try out the video house. The "games" get more and more real, and much more like little movies than video games. Stranger still, each one reflects the personality of the person playing, and seems to exist to challenge them. The same "actors" reappear in most of the games (especially Buttercup).

Sid, a very bad amateur musician, winds up in a game where he plays the greatest, most popular rock star in the world. The crowd cheers everything he does in a way he's never been cheered at before, but as the game goes on they cheer less and less, and his popularity level goes down, because he can't play well enough to satisfy their tastes. He tries and tries and tries, but nothing he does is good enough, and in the end he winds up losing.

The happily married couple are forced to fight with each other in a boxing ring. They refuse to fight at first, but the game forces them. They give light little joking jabs at each other, all in the name of fun, as the referee asks them questions about their personal lives, testing how much they know about each other. The questions get more and more pointed, and they start to hit each other harder and harder as they discover shocking little truths. It turns into an all-out brawl when it's revealed the husband had a one-night affair while the two were dating.

A religious guy is made into a super-powered pastor, able to convert anyone to the one true faith. As the game goes on, he begin to exhibit godlike powers, and is able to do more and more, anything he wants, until he is insane, changing things and people into anything he wants them to be, screaming that he is god, that he has killed the old god and taken his place. The last screen of the game shows him to be ruler of hell.

An amateur comedian, Dudley, who no one finds funny in the real world, in the game world is a stand-up star, laughed-at by everyone. He is given his own sitcom, which hits the top of the rating charts, and is pampered as a star, but he gradually realizes that the jokes he's saying on the sitcom (based loosely on his own jokes) are not real joke, they're just nonsense, stupid and not the least bit funny. He realizes his show is really bad, and the loud, loud audience laughter doesn't help much. The audience laughs at everything, whether or not it's a joke. While taping an episode, he has a breakdown, and starts to scream and insult the audience and everyone around him for not knowing what comedy is, but they continue laughing and applaud him for his anger. He goes nuts, tries to exit the game, but is given his own movie series, called the next Adam Sandler ... AND HE CAN'T LEAVE THE GAME, NO MATTER WHAT HE DOES.

Outside, in the main room, we hear him pounding on the door, trying desperately to get out, saying he'll never tell an unfunny joke again. Eventually he is able to break the door down, and flops down, empty-eyed like a zombie, on the couch.

But the strangest game of all kicks in when J.J., a nervous little guy who wants to write romantic comedies and is the only one who ort of agreed with Fender about the Meg Ryan thing, refuses to go into the game system. He's seen what is happening to the people who are leaving now, especially Dudley. Fender assures him it's perfectly safe, and eventually Dudley gives in, but insists that Fender accompany him, to make sure nothing bad happens (after all, as the designer of the game, Fender would never let anything bad happen to himself).

Well, unfortunately for Dudley, the second the game starts, Fender has somehow disappeared, and J.J. is stuck in a remote place that looks like a deserted city, a junkyard, an island ... he walks around, looking desperarely for any sign of life, and then is kidnapped by a group of ninjas. They take him to the underground lair of a warlord, who says he is the ruler and despot of this island, and demands to know who this intruder is and how he got there. The warlord looks just like Fender. J.J. tries to reason with him, but he doesn't respond to the name of Fender, and the more J.J. tries to talk to him the more he realizes the warlord isn't Fender at all, but that the game has changed Fender, given him incredible power. This warlord has killed and enslaved millions, conquered half the world. The warlord is now the ruler of the entire Video House gaming system. And now everyone playing a game in any room of the house (which is about half the guests) is suddenly kidnapped by ninjas, and taken to the same place Dudley is. They are all prisoners under the warlord's rule, and he suspects them of being traitors to his government. He locks them up in small jails, from which he says no man can escape. They are hostages, and unless he is brought what he wants within twenty-four hours one of them will be killed, on the hour, every hour. What he wants, is to meet the American actress Meg Ryan. The warlord's name is Tom Hanks.

J.J. shows some backbone at last, as the leader of the resistance, and escapes thanks to the game's incredibly stupid A.I. - guards can be duped into doing anything if you just talk to them in the right way long enough. He promises to return, and exits the game.

Out in the main room, J.J. tells everyone remaining about how everyone else is trapped in the game and sentenced to death, how Fender has gone insane and how he needs their help to rescue those trapped inside before they are killed. He thinks the object of the game may be to acquire Meg Ryan.

Some help him, some don't ... most enter the game, trying in game after different game to find out where in the entire Video House system Meg Ryan might be.

Back in reality, a programmer calling himself Matticus, who has stayed outside, attempts to hack into Fender's computer, and get into the coding of the system.

After a time he realizes there IS no Meg Ryan object in the game's coding, and that the Fender/Hanks thing just intends to murder everyone. He tries to shut the system down, but the system refuses -- for security purposes, Fender has installed a device in which the system must be shut down from within.

He runs into the game to try and warn everyone, but is immediately kidnapped by those stupid ninjas.

Meanwhile, in the jail, those still trapped have taught the A.I. guard to do tricks. Which is fun but doesn't help them much. Matticus tells everyone the problem, and also says that they have to destroy the system from within. No easy task, as it involve tearing at the very fabric of this reality that three of their five senses are trapped in. However, someone comes to the bright idea that the last two senses, smell and taste, may hold the key. If they can generate a smell strong enough that it is obviously not coming from the reality they percieve themelves to be in, perhaps their brains will snap out of the system's control and into reality, and they can find a way to turn the system off.

However, before they can do this an incredible battle will have to ensue. Of course.

Anyway, somehow the day is saved, everyone comes out of it alive and a little wiser for the journey. And the doors, finally, unlock. There is one problem, though ... in the final battle, they deleted the Hanks thing from the system by killing him. In the process, did they kill Fender?

Most of the bunch don't seem to care, and march wearily home. But J.J. and Matticus stay behind, looking around for any sign of him. Then they look out the window, and see Fender, very much alive, wave to them from a hill in the distance. He is with an older woman with short blonde hair.

But they couldn't be seeing what they think they're seeing. It's a side effect of the chemicals in the game, surely. I mean, what they just saw couldn't be real.

I mean, who would ever believe that Fender just walked off in the distance, arm in arm with Meg Ryan?

THE END.