Chapter 8
Chapter 8: Convention Week
The Toronto Indie Games Festival ran Tuesday through Friday in the waterfront convention centre, which was the kind of building that had been designed to make everything happening inside it feel significant. Large windows, the lake visible in the distance, corridors that generated the specific acoustic hum of two thousand people doing things they cared about.
Nisha arrived Monday evening to set up.
The Still Water Games booth was Section D, Row 4 — good placement, high traffic, near the finalists' showcase area. She'd built the display herself over the weekend: a single monitor showing the Signal opening sequence, clean white panels, the logo she'd iterated seventeen times before she was satisfied. Priya had helped carry boxes and had then removed herself to the conference hotel bar with the stated intention of meeting people and the unstated intention of giving Nisha thirty minutes to set up without an audience.
Nisha installed the monitors, calibrated the demo build, ran through the intro sequence twice.
The convention centre was filling up around her — other developers setting up booths, volunteers in event lanyards, the early-arrival crowd who had taken Tuesday off work for this. She knew some of them. This community was not small but it was not enormous either; after five years of festivals and meetups and the general connective tissue of the indie games world, she had accumulated a network, which meant she had people to wave at and genuine conversations to have and, tonight, the specific low-level awareness of the whole convention hall of where Section D, Row 7 was.
She had looked it up in the exhibitor map.
Bright Fault Games. Section D, Row 7. She was in Row 4. Three rows was approximately forty metres.
She told herself this was a logistical awareness. She was a person who liked to understand the layout of a space. It was practical.
She finished setting up and found Priya at the hotel bar.
"How'd it look?" Priya said.
"Good." Nisha sat down and picked up the drink Priya had ordered for her. "Thank you."
"You saw the floor plan."
"I was looking at the layout."
"For professional reasons."
"Yes."
Priya looked at her with the specific expression of a person who had been Nisha's best friend for eight years and had an extremely well-developed read on the difference between what Nisha said and what Nisha was doing.
"Has he arrived yet?" Priya said.
"I didn't check."
"Nisha."
"I didn't. I don't know and I'm not going to—" She stopped. She drank her drink. "It's fine. We're professionals. We're both here for the same reason and that reason is the award and the work, and we'll be on a panel together on Wednesday and we'll conduct ourselves professionally and then one of us will win on Thursday night."
"And the rest of it."
"There isn't a rest of it."
Priya made the sound. The one that meant she was choosing not to argue.
"He was a man at a wrong table," Nisha said. "Five years ago. I have a life. I have work I'm proud of. I have—" She made a small, precise gesture at the hotel bar, the convention centre across the street, the whole accumulated weight of five years. "This."
"You do," Priya said. "You absolutely do. And I'm proud of you for all of it." She picked up her drink. "I'm also your best friend, which means I'm allowed to say: you've been carrying this for five years in the particular way of someone who insists it doesn't weigh anything. And now he's here. And you're going to have to stand next to him on a stage."
"I know."
"So I'm asking — not are you fine, because I know the answer — I'm asking: what do you need?"
Nisha looked at the bar top. She thought about the answer she usually gave and the answer that was actually true.
"I need to get through the week," she said. "Professionally. With my dignity intact and my head in the game, which is—" She almost smiled. "Actually what's at stake."
"Okay," Priya said. "I can work with that."
"And I need you to not make it—"
"I won't make it anything." Priya raised one hand in a gesture of absolute sincerity that Nisha trusted approximately seventy percent. "I am here as your professional support system and your friend. I'm not here to engineer anything."
"Good."
"I'm just saying: if something happens—"
"Priya."
"—I'll be available for debrief."
"Priya."
"Okay." Priya finished her drink. "One more of these and then sleep. You have a full day tomorrow."
Tuesday was, in fact, a full day.
Nisha spent the morning at the booth. Signal generated the response it usually generated — people who hadn't heard of it trying the demo and then standing at the monitor for longer than they'd planned, the specific quality of someone inside a game trying to resist being inside it and failing. She answered questions about the design, the narrative architecture, the parallel-timeline mechanic. She was good at this. She had been doing it for five years.
She did not look at Section D, Row 7 more than twice.
She spent the afternoon on a panel she'd actually prepared for: narrative design in games about grief and memory, with four other developers whose work she respected. The moderator was good and the conversation went to places she hadn't anticipated and she found herself genuinely present in it, which was the thing about work — it was reliably more interesting than the things she was trying not to think about.
She had dinner with Priya and two developers she'd known since her first TIGF — a couple from Montreal who made architectural puzzle games and who had the warm easy company of people who loved what they were doing and were interested in everyone else who did too. Conversation about games, the industry, the city. A second round. Laughter.
She did not see Jamie.
She went back to the hotel and worked for an hour on a design document for the next project, which was about a sound engineer in a recording studio where the tapes contained voices from a different timeline. She was still in the early structural phase, the part where everything was provisional, which she usually found stressful, but tonight the provisional quality of it felt right. Like she was at the beginning of something.
She slept well.
She dreamed about a coastal town at low tide, which she did not think was significant.
Wednesday morning: the finalists' panel.
She'd known it was coming since March. She'd known the format — both finalists on stage, thirty minutes, a moderator asking questions about the games, the craft, the design philosophy. Public-facing, the biggest stage of the convention. The full auditorium.
She dressed for it with care. She was always careful about what she wore for this kind of thing — not in the anxious way, not performing, but in the way that Priya had once called armour that's also true to yourself, which had been one of the more accurate descriptions of her approach to clothing. Dark trousers, a deep blue jacket, her mother's watch. Her hair loose because it was Wednesday and she'd told herself Tuesday was working and Wednesday was the panel and she could have the distinction.
She arrived at the auditorium twenty minutes early. The moderator — a critic she respected, someone who'd reviewed both Watershed and Undertow and had smart things to say about both — was already there, running through notes. They talked through the format. Nisha drank water.
She heard the door behind her.
She didn't turn. She was a practical person and she was finishing a conversation about the format, and turning around would not serve any professional purpose.
But she was aware — with the specific, inconvenient accuracy of someone who had been aware of this person across a forty-metre distance for thirty-six hours — that the door had opened and someone had come in and the room had changed.
She finished the conversation.
She turned.
He was talking to one of the stage crew — easy, natural, with the warmth that had apparently not diminished in five years and which she was registering, at this range, as a personal problem. He was taller than she remembered, or the same height, or she had compressed the memory in some way that made the reality startling. Brown hair. The same. A dark jacket, white shirt — not quite overdressed, or appropriately dressed, depending on who he was trying to impress.
He looked up.
For one second — two — they looked at each other across the length of the auditorium, and Nisha thought: there it is. Not good or bad. Just: there it is. There you are. Five years and here we are and that is the face I have been not-thinking-about and I was wrong to think I was prepared for it.
Then his expression did the thing she hadn't expected, which was: something moving across it. Not the flat recognition of someone encountering a professional acquaintance. Something with weight in it.
She looked back at the moderator. She asked a question about the microphone setup. She was entirely professional.
Her heart was doing something she was choosing not to describe.