Richard knew better than to draw actionable conclusions from this one chance encounter. Corporation 9592 had an entire department full of people with advanced degrees in statistics, managing a code base that monitored a million Dales per second, analyzing them six ways from Sunday. Any wisdom that proceeded from this sketchy conversation with Dale would be listened to, politely but incredulously, and then classified as “anecdotal” and forgotten. But Richard couldn’t help himself. Unlike the K’Shetriae, which were basically elves, and the Dwinn, which were basically dwarves, the Var’ had no discernible antecedents in folklore, unless you counted focus groups of nerds as folk. They were technologically primitive but capable of channeling the forces of weather, for example, shooting lightning bolts at their enemies but only during thunderstorms, freezing them to death but only during blizzards, and so on. A perfect match, in other words, for midwesterners. Just like Republicans or Democrats who spent so much time socializing with others of their kind that they could not believe any normal-seeming, mentally sound person could possibly belong to the opposite faction, Dale was a rock-ribbed Forces of Brightness man. As such, he exemplified a trend that had already been analyzed to exhaustion by the demographers. The Earthtone Coalition was 99 percent Anthrons, K’Shetriae, and Dwinn: the old-school races found in the works of Tolkien and his legion of imitators. Players who opted to belong to the newfangled races such as the Var’, on the other hand, tended to join up with the Forces of Brightness.
He was working on a theory that it was all related to the Rice Krispie Treats.
Bear with me, he said (not out loud, of course), showing his palms to the Furious Muses. Just hear me out.
Having now lived for a few decades in parts of the United States and Canada where cooking was treated quite seriously, and having actually employed professional chefs, he was fascinated by the midwestern/middle American phenomenon of recombinant cuisine. Rice Krispie Treats being a prototypical example in that they were made by repurposing other foods that had already been prepared (to wit, breakfast cereal and marshmallows). And of course any recipe that called for a can of cream of mushroom soup fell into the same category. The unifying principle behind all recombinant cuisine seemed to be indifference, if not outright hostility, to the use of anything that a coastal foodie would define as an ingredient. Was it too much of a stretch to think that the rejection, by the Dales of the world, of traditional fantasy-world races such as elves and dwarves was motivated by the same deep, mysterious cultural mojo as their spurning of onions and salt in favor of onion salt?
The recombinant food thing was a declaration of mental bankruptcy in the complexity of modern material culture. Likewise, Dale and his friends, living in a world where libraries were already stuffed with hundreds of thousands of decaying novels that would never again be read, where any television program or movie ever filmed could be downloaded and viewed, simply did not have the bandwidth to absorb a vast amount of detailed background material about fictitious races on a made-up planet. They just wanted to kick ass.