Welcome to Outside.
Press START to begin.
Good luck!

You zone into Des Plaines, Illinois; early 2000s.
The poplars rise from green plots in front of boxy houses.
You watch the other preteens skate down Westview Drive
and think how easy it would be to be them.

You make Mom buy you a board.
You bleach your hair, but it comes out orange, so you lie.
“Yes, I like it like this!” you yell when other kids ask you about it.

Then you hear a soft voice whisper, “Roll a Bluff check.”

Shift to black.
A twenty-sided die bounces through the blankness of your imagination
and lands facing 1.

NATURAL ONE. Automatic failure.
No one believes you meant to make your hair orange.
A bully makes fun of you.
You spend the next week listening exclusively to Fallout Boy.

Are you struggling?
Would you like to see a help menu?
Maybe hit up a tutorial?
Too bad, Friend: there is no tutorial,
there is no help, and you can’t start over.

Press START to continue. Good luck!

You zone into Phoenix, Arizona; 2000-teens.
You tell your girlfriend you love her.
She says she wants to see other people.

FLAWLESS VICTORY!
THE CAMERA FREEZES TO CAPTURE YOUR HEART
SHATTERING INTO A THOUSAND PIECES,
BLASTING LIKE SHRAPNEL THROUGH YOUR CHEST CAVITY!
FATALITY!

Stop crying! Is this game too hard?
Maybe you want to pick a different character?
No such luck! In Outside, you’re stuck
being the same til the game is over.

Sometimes it feels like God made real life too much like Dark Souls.
Sometimes it feels like I have to kill myself over and over
just to get by these obstacles, just to get by,
that I have to memorize the ways
this world’s trying to murder me just to survive.

Why this learning curve?
Why is Outside so hard?
Think about it long enough,
you start to realize it’s to keep our generation
from getting to the end game.

And who made it this way?
Was it the moderators?
Maybe the game designers?
No, Newbie: the Baby Boomers did it.

See, they bought Outside before we ever could,
been playing it since we were babies.
It was a board game for them, like Monopoly.
Now, it’s virtual reality,
fully immersive, but we’re still rolling dice.

Wake up and grind only to die to a Random Number Generator.

Why do I roll so low?
How can my d20 come up close to zero so many times?

I know! These Baby Boomers bought and burned all the strategy guides;
they’ve been bogarting the Game Sharks,
keeping secret the cheat codes.

But they can’t hide forever.
Our generation are hackers.
We will see the glitches and exploit them. We will climb up walls and save our allies
using unlocked weapons, infinite ammo, God Mode.

The Baby Boomers will be too arthritic
to use the controls; they can’t defeat us.
We will frag them, send them back to the starting zone,
and claim this world for ourselves.

Welcome to Outside 2.0.
Player 2 has joined the game. Good luck!

About The Author

Thomas Cooper is an Arizona poet from Chicago, Illinois who lived and worked as a teacher in Arizona. Learn more about him and more poets of Arizona HERE.