Playing God: the cart, the beanies, the ferrying

pivotal · 8 Nov YDAU, I-Day afternoon

• When: 8 Nov YDAU (Interdependence Day, Sunday 11/8), through the game's diplomatic phase.
• What: Lord's Triggering Situation unwinds nicely — when EndStat generates Italy's bizarre invasion of Albania, it is a development "Otis P. Lord will only smile enigmatically about." All afternoon he is the game's whole civil service: "The only harried-looking person on the 1300-m.2 map is Otis P. Lord," legging it continent to continent behind "a rolling double-shelf stainless steel food cart purloined from St. John of God Hospital with a blinking Yushityu portable on one shelf" — "Lord tear-asses back and forth between Courts 6 and 8, food cart clattering," donning the white beanie for the AMNAT-SOVWAR cessation and ferrying deliberately oblique scrambled-call messages, "Lord having to dramatize manually the effortless dictates of real logic and necessity." When REDCHI and INDPAK dispute a Karachi strike, the theology gets stated straight: "But God here is played by Otis P. Lord," and this God was number-crunching too fiendishly to have seen the strike. Pressed by Pemulis's map-territory orthodoxy he cries, trying to please: "The real world's what the map here stands for!"