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The Arcade of the Gods

Let’s be honest: gods are easily bored. There’s only so many wars one can wage over magical objects—and it’s always so messy. Restoring everything to how it was before gets more tedious than the initial boredom pretty quickly.

Luckily, one very clever god had the idea of building an arcade: one machine spouted sunset-coloured clouds the player was to fit together into a complete line to gain points, a laser beam allowed the gods to erase every single star from the night sky and then place them all back without any fuss, and a clever little pixel game played with joysticks let them all flee a seven-headed, drooling terror with a god-killing axe—without ever being in danger, and while picking up golden apples on the way.

But the most popular game was one the gods would have deemed utterly mundane if they’d heard its description before they started playing it. Most of the time, this game didn’t involve monsters, or battles to the death, or even the joyous sweep of destruction. It made something new, let the players choose features for land, for seas, for air, for all kinds of equivalents of fire. And even more features for characters, great and small, and the stories they might create through their experiences. More and more of these machines were set up. Since that moment, no one has ever heard the gods’ sighs of boredom again: now they are always tending to their worlds.

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Smackdown 2: Know Your Role