Ethan Tison

Prof. S. Ingram
UWRT 1101 T/R 2:00 -3:15
September 22, 2014
Its Greek To Me (Draft #3)
It was a cold winter day, and I had long since given up on layering myself within bigger
and thicker sweatshirts. I now sat cozily in a wooden chair, cocooned inside a gigantic blanket
that effectively warded off the biting January drafts in our Maryland townhouses basement.
Thankfully, the room wasnt flooded, like sometimes happened after a heavy rain, so I was
content to sit there, slippers on, arms and head the only things emerging from my blanket.
Though the rest of the house was considerably warmer, I could not betray my favorite spot; The
basement chair in front of the computer. I was a computer fanatic, though I still knew very little
about what made the big lump of metal in front of me actually work. Luckily for me, that was
about to change.
After completing my homeschooling for the day, I had curled up in the dungeon below
our house to smell the damp, mildewy goodness of the computer- housing room. I was just
messing about with the computer as usual, wasting time on stupid games like pac- man and
Tetris. I was warm and happy in the digital world, despite the cold, smelly realism around me.
When suddenly, I noticed a button that Id never seen before on the menu screen of my ancientgreek- warfare strategy adventure game. Hidden in plain sight, beneath the Play game,
tutorial, Options, and various other boring things Id never taken the time to read, I

discovered a button that sent me on an exciting quest. I smiled at the inconspicuous button,
labeled Level Editor.
I had messed around with a level editor for a puzzle- based simplistic game before and
had quickly appreciated how amazing of a feature it was. It allowed me to move around, add, or
delete elements of a level to create customized, complicated sequences and logic puzzles. This
taught me how to test things with trial- and error, how to logic through problems, and more.
However, this new level editor Id found was for a far more complicated game. Therefore, this
level editor was much more complicated, and had options beyond anything I had ever dreamed!
I clicked the button unsuspectingly, and was taken to a page with over a hundred different
options. Curious, I clicked one, and found myself greeted by a bunch of text with punctuation Id
never seen before. My computers fans ominously hummed to life, as if to underline the
importance of my amazing discovery. It was a code editor. I had discovered the actual
instructions for the computer that made the game function. I knew enough to understand what
magical kind of information that I had found. I did not, however, understand the power I now
held. I saw a bunch of squiggly lines and grammatically- incorrect fragments. Big Deal, I
thought. This is too complicated for me to understand How can I use this so- called level
editor to edit the levels if I dont know what the heck a single line of this is!? Just for fun, I
opened the level editor for a level that I knew reasonably well, and started reading through.
After only a few moments, I was able to pick up on the fact that the beginning
introductory text was the same text written in the first few lines of this programming language. I
had a bit of fun changing what the text said, and then looked a bit farther down the page. I then
saw another conversation that occurred later in the game, again dictated by lines of code. This

helped me realize that these statements were in a sequential order, and thereby looking between
those two blocks of text, I would be looking at how the game worked in the sequence of events
that fit between the two in game texts. I examined a little, line by line, until I found the point
where one character died in the game, and I found that there was a rather conspicuous command
that had the word kill in it, as well as the name of the character that died. Curious, I cut that
one line of code from the program, saved it, and ran it to see what happened. As I suspected, my
random gibberish text was the new intro to the level, and exactly at the point in the game where
the character would have died, the character merely froze and sat there while the rest of the game
continued, presenting more conversations that progressed the story by pitying the dead one.
Normally, the character would have vanished, but I managed to change this integral part of the
story, and now the character merely stood there with nothing telling it what to do.
I sat there, stunned by what Id just found. If I could manipulate the game just by
switching around a few names, then what could stop me from doing something else? I quickly
copied the kill command back into the game, but instead of the original characters name, I put
the name of the main bad guy, whose death is the sole purpose of the entire mission. I ran the
game, and lo and behold, at exactly that point, the enemy dropped dead, and the game suddenly
awarded me with a YOU WIN! screen, even as the conversations about the original characters
death began. The bluish glow of the monitor illuminated the tip of my nose as I leaned closer
toward the screen, blocking most of the computer screens light from the room. I smiled at the
chaos Id just caused as the cold basement room behind me fell into darkness, and my face, quite
literally, lit up. I smiled mischievously. Now THIS is going to be fun.

The next thing I remember is being extracted from the virtual world Id been engulfed in
by my parents complaints about it being time for bed. My blanket had long since slipped
completely off, and I had grown uncomfortable with the wooden chair, so I now knelt in the
frigid night air. I had completely lost all sense of time as I reverse- engineered many new
commands through trial- and- error, and then began to apply them to a new level of my own
design that I was creating as an entire other game for my sister. With no prior knowledge of
computer science, code, or even what some of the words in these programs meant, I had taught
myself how to program, and this was a monumentally- useful step in advancing both my
enjoyment of computers, and my technological literacy. As my father carried me up to bed, I
sighed wistfully after the basement stairs, wishing I could figure out how to change one foreign
command and make the day return faster.