Creative Use of Game Mechanics
Button Mash sat quietly in his room, not bothering anyone, as his CubicColt Game System slowly booted up.
He tapped his hoof impatiently; these older titles always took ages to load. A low whine filled the air as some internal component began to spin, signaling the start of the mechanical symphony that would eventually climax with the Ponytendo logo and the game's title screen.
Button Mash grinned. With all his homework done and a long weekend ahead of him, nothing would stand in the way of some quality game time.
It was at about this moment that half a dozen guards in tactical gear smashed down his front door. Three more burst through the window, sending shards of glass and wood flying. Two guards thundered in from the kitchen and five burst out of the hall closet. One rappelled down through the ceiling, which was considerably impressive since there were another two floors between him and the roof.
Half the guards tackled Button Mash into the ground while the rest began mercilessly beating down his unresisting game console. In seconds it was little more than sparking rubble. Not even the innocently bystanding TV was spared their wrath.
As they wrapped up their tactical assault, one final guard entered, his cleaner and slightly fancier uniform indicating he was important. He approached the dogpile and addressed it. "Button Mash," his voice came out husky and garbled through his raid mask. "You are under arrest for suspicion of future fiendishness, eventual evil, and potential power-hungry conquesting. Anything you say can and will be held against you."
After a few seconds of wiggling, a brown-furred head managed to escape the dogpile and loudly suck in a sweet lungful of air. "Aaaaaah! Sweet Epona, what's happening?! What's going on? All I was doing was just playing some video games!"
"Oh? Talking back are we?" Though the mask hid the superior guard's face, his voice gave away the menacing smile that grew beneath. "Good. That means I get to do this." With a swift whip of his foreleg, Button Mash's world went dark and he knew no more.
Button Mash awoke to the sound of murmuring voices. What happened? Had he fallen asleep on the console? That seemed unlikely; he didn't even remember playing anything.
The quiet voices picked at his ears. Who was in his house? Had his mom's book club come over? Or maybe her O&O group? No, in either case, neither group would have left him sleeping on the floor as they held their meeting and/or campaign. Though now that he thought about it, the living room carpet felt an awful lot like a wooden bench.
Before he could muse further, the powerful strikes of a hammer pounding on wood jolted him to full awareness.
The room he saw when he opened his eyes was high-ceilinged, mostly wooden, and filled with ponies glaring at him. It also looked disturbingly similar to the courtroom from Diamond Defendant, his second favorite logic-based puzzle game.
And then the other horseshoe dropped.
This didn't just look like a courtroom, it was a courtroom! And judging from where he was sitting, it looked like he was the one on trial!
"All rise for the Honorable Judge Maximum Sentence."
As the room shuffled to its hooves, Button Mash likewise tried to stand only to find his hooves shackled both together and to the bench beneath him.
The stallion that entered was as ancient a pony as Button Mash could imagine. His judge's robes hung off his skeletal frame like a burial shroud and Button swore he could hear the impatient tap of the Reaper's scythe with every step the emaciated judge took. He seated himself, in due time, and cast a scowling glare across the room until his non-milky eye latched onto Button Mash like a predatory bird onto a field mouse.
"Button... Mash," he rasped, pronouncing each syllable like a curse in another language. "You stand accused of plotting to pollute the bright future of our grand nation of Equestria with your nefarious evil. How do you plead?"
Button Mash's mouth went dry. He tried to reply, to voice a grand statement about his innocence and the injustice of the proceedings thus far, but all he managed was a weak, "W-What?"
"Don't get smart with me, boy!" Judge Sentence spat, his voice dripping with poison. "Answer the question!"
"Er... not guilty?"
"Wrong!" The judge slammed the gavel down with more force than his bones looked capable of. "You stand condemned on your own testimony, gathered by our peacekeeping force in your lair where you declared and I quote 'I was only playing... videogames'."
"I don't understand..." Button half-whispered.
"Of course you don't, you fool of a foal! You are far too young to understand the implications of your actions. But ignorance of the law is no excuse!"
The folds of his face flapped indignantly like the plucked wings of some prehistoric bird. "Why, everypony knows that the sinful act of playing video games leads foals down a dark path. It breeds nothing but thoughts of violence in their formative minds: molding good colts and fillies of today into the dark sorcerers of tomorrow. It is a well-known fact!"
The ponies in the observation box murmured in agreement.
He held up a graph. "Just look!" One axis read 'Amount of Evil Doers in Equestria'. The other read 'Video Game Sales'. The scales on each were printed far too small to read, but the positive trend line was heavily bolded and in red.
"That doesn't make any sense," Button argued. "I'm not a violent colt. I've never even been in a fight!
"Irrelevant!" Judge Sentence fired back with vitriolic ferocity. "It's only a matter of time before you snap and unleash dark powers on unsuspecting innocents! With such heavy risk, it only makes sense to lock criminals like you away now before you can become a threat. For the greater good of Equestria!"
"For the greater good," the jury of equally elderly ponies echoed.
Anger fueled his confidence as Button Mash raised himself as tall as he could. "Objection! This is ridiculous! I dispute these charges; I haven't done anything wrong! Where is my lawyer? I know how courts are supposed to work! I demand a proper trial and-"
"Enough of your childish nonsense!" Despite Button's anger, Judge Sentence's elderly self-assuredness overpowered him in an instant. "I shall now pass judgment. For the crime of becoming an evil sorcerer in the future as a result of playing violent video games, I sentence you... to life in prison!"
His gavel slammed down one final time, striking the desk like the judgmental hoof of Faust herself casting him out of paradise.
It all seemed to go by in a flash. Leaving the courtroom, arriving at the jail, prisoner processing, having his photograph and hoofprint recorded. Like a cutscene that he clicked through too quickly, it felt as though he'd merely blinked and the courtroom transformed into the exercise yard of the prison.
He scratched at where the cheap fabric of his vividly zebra-striped uniform irritated his skin. They didn't make inmate uniforms in foal sizes, and even the smallest one they had still left him rolling up the comically oversized sleeves so he didn't trip with every step.
Button found his moment of reflection suddenly shattered by the disappearance of the sun. The culprit? A towering wall of flesh in the form of five or so titanic ponies. The number was really more of a guess, as with so much bulging muscle and identical orange fabric on display, it was hard to tell where one pony stopped and the next began.
"So," one of them growled. He had no idea which. "This is the fresh meat the guards were talking about?"
"Don't look like much," commented a second.
"Hey. You got ears, meat?" the first asked. Or maybe it was a new voice? Button could only distinguish so many subtle variations of menacing gravel. "What you in for?"
Perhaps it was stress or shock setting in or even just a good old-fashioned mental breakdown, but for a moment Button swore he could see something like a video-game-style response tree appear before him.
With the mental speed only possible of someone who trained against computers, he considered his options.
Fighting was out of the question. He'd once read a book that had said that the first rule of prison was to find the biggest inmate there and beat him up to assert dominance. But he doubted the author had had this kind of weight-class mismatch in mind when he'd written that.
He spared his visitors another glance. They seemed about average for the yard, and yet even then the scrawniest one still looked like he ate dumbbells for breakfast. While Button did know strategies for taking down larger opponents, most of them relied on access to diamond swords, buffing potions, and at the very least the promise of a respawn. As it stood, he was worse off than a merchant NPC trying to fight the end boss.
Since fighting was no good, he could try and pretend to be crazy. Yell and scream gibberish and drool all over himself until the bruisers didn't want to even bother with him. Then again, if it worked then he'd have to keep the act up for the rest of his sentence. Which was forever. Maybe not the best plan.
Which left him with a single option. Talking. Pretend that the mountains of VIT/STR/CON minmaxers were just normal ponies and pray to every deity and developer he could name that his Charisma stat was high enough that this didn't end with a Button Mash colored smear on the ground.
"W-what am I in for?" his voice cracked in a sacrificial ploy to buy his composure another minute. "Er.. potential of dark sorcery, I think."
Whether it was the confusion in his voice or the strangeness of the charge, this caught the group off guard. A pile of muscle to the far left frowned. "How the Tartarus does an earth pony, and a kid at that, get put away for the big DS?"
Button laughed awkwardly. Maybe a bit of humor might help him make some friends? It was worth a shot. "Heh, search me. All I did was play some video games and suddenly..."
Their reaction was not what he had expected. Pity? He could work with that. Amusement? That was fine too, at least it laid some groundwork. What he did not expect was for five faces that could curdle milk to suddenly go bone-white in terror.
Four fled outright, leaving behind a single member who seemed to have frozen in place. Button Mash gave him a poke and the stallion shrieked like a mare with the shower curtain pulled back. He fell over himself, kicking up gravel and dirt as he scrambled to get away.
"I-I'm sorry!" he wept, "I- We didn't know! I'll never bother you again! Please don't hurt me Mister Video Game Colt!"
Just like that, Button Mash was once again alone. That had been... successful? Maybe? He hadn't gotten squashed, so that was a plus. Though it raised even more questions about how and why he was here.
But now wasn't the time to wonder about that. There was still the much more pressing concern of how to survive his first day in the Big House.
He remembered reading from the same book that the second rule of prison was, in light of failing the first step, was to make yourself useful, invaluable if possible, so someone stronger will offer protection.
Button Mash considered his available skills. It was not a long list, and he rather doubted any inmate was looking for someone who could beat Super Mareio in under four minutes or who knew all the cheat codes for Maretroid Ultimate. Maybe somepony might like his original pixel art, but he'd have to find the iconic "stallion who can get you anything for the right price" to sell him some graph paper first.
Then again, though his experience in the real world was limited, in the virtual world he was a veritable Renaissance Stallion with countless professions under his belt. He'd been a bounty hunter and a soldier. A wandering hero and town mayor. He'd bred animals and raised crops. Mined for ores and inspected passports. Why, if he could apply his gaming skills to the real world, there was nothing he couldn't do!
He looked across the yard with new eyes. No longer did he see inmates and guards, but NPCs brimming with quests and potential unlockables. Prison was a game, like any other.
The first step in any game was to get money to buy basic equipment. A bit of stealthy eavesdropping under picnic tables and around corners quickly taught him a valuable lesson: bits were no good here. They were contraband in fact, as the guards had deemed them far too easy to turn into bludgeoning weapons. Instead, the currency of incarceration was cigarettes. Now that he spotted it, Button could see the exchanges going on everywhere.
Five cigarettes for a magazine, seven for a sip from a flask. Fifteen got you a bag of bright blue powder and twenty bought you a few minutes of blind eyes from the guards. It was a bartering system! As advanced and developed as any game's. But unlike the bartering system in a game that had been optimized and balanced by a team of dedicated QA testers, this one had formed organically. Which meant nopony had stress-tested it to find the bugs and game-breaking exploits.
Unfortunately, it was not that easy.
The first, and biggest problem, was that nopony wanted to trade with him. Apparently those stallions he'd sent running had spread word of his "crime" far and wide. And while a lot of ponies didn't believe them, at least half the prison population did. Of those that didn't and were still willing to even talk to him, well...
"Hey there!" He walked up to one mare standing alone by the fence, flicking a switchcomb open and shut. She wore a leather jacket over her prison uniform with a obvious package of cigarettes in the breast pocket.
She tucked her gadget away and glowered down at him. "What?"
Button Mash mentally put points into his Diplomacy skill and turned up his coolness as high as it could go. "Mind if I... bum a smoke, muchachos?"
The mare coughed and nearly swallowed her lit cigarette. "You kiddin'? Don't you know it's illegal for foals to smoke? You know what they'd do if somepony found out I gave a cig to a kid? They'd lock me away!"
"...You're already in prison."
"I know, and I'd like to get out someday! I got a potted philodendron waiting for me on the outside. Aiding the corruption of a minor ain't gonna get me out any faster."
That had actually been one of his more successful negotiation attempts. Most ponies just looked around nervously then ran off right after he asked for one. He couldn't crack the inequalities of the barter system without anything to trade, and no one would even tell him where cigarettes came from!
After several hours of fruitless attempts to barter (or even start a dreaded fetch quest chain) yard time ended and he was escorted back to his cell. All he'd managed for his efforts was a little stub of a used cigarette he'd found half-crushed off the side of the path.
The cell bars slammed shut behind him punctuated by the ringing of the guard spitting on the lock as Button Mash took in his new home.
It was a bare as they came. Solid stone walls, packed dirt floor, and a slab of wood bolted to the wall for a bed. His first home in Ponycraft had been nicer.
With literally nothing else to do to pass the time, Button Mash contemplated the burnt-out cigarette butt he'd picked up. It was almost fully used, with just a little left beyond the filter. Just what was in these things anyway? Some careful unrolling revealed leaves? Something that looked like shredded leaves, anyway. Cigarettes came from a plant?
With that epiphany he got an idea. An idea that grew as clearly and easily as if he'd leveled up and unlocked a new tech tree. If cigarettes were plants, then surely he could just grow more, right?
Now, Button Mash was not the most experienced with Earth Pony magic. None of his family were farmers and he was generally more of an indoor colt besides. But that did not mean he was lacking in experience. He'd played plenty of games where farming was an important side quest, if not the main objective. All he had to do was apply his gaming skills to reality.
Piece of cake.
Since his standardized primary education did not contain the finer points of how magic works, he stuck with the systems he knew.
That is to say, he visualized a mana bar over his head.
With the 'bud' planted in the dirt floor and magic on his mind, he did the mental equivalent of pressing B. In his imagination, he visualized the blue bar dwindling as pixelly particle effects covered the plant.
And lo and behold! Just like magic—which made sense, since it was—a green shoot began to push its way up through the dirt!
...in his mind, at least. In reality, the little pile of dirt and ash failed to react in any meaningful way.
"Huh. Okay. I guess Son of Harvest wasn't the way to go. No problem! I got plenty more games to try. Now where can I get some bone meal?"
With bone meal sadly unavailable, he tried spam crouching... to no effect. He made magical wooshing noises and tried to cast [Overgrowth]. This too failed, as did casting [Enrich Soil], [Summon: Plant Familiar], [/grow], and [Harvestus Maximus]. When lunch arrived he watered the 'seed' till he ran out of liquids, but no handy interaction prompt appeared. He sacrificed his sandwich in the name of Plantera, his hash browns to Shaymin, and his pudding to the Dryad Queen. Not a single fictional deity answered his call. He danced in flailing circles, converting the complex controller inputs of Saplings vs Wereponies: Brawl Edition into physical motion.
As luck would have it, just as he finished the last gesture that normally would have sent his opponent flying off the screen into a KO, a dim green sparkle twinkled into existence and a frail shoot pushed its way out of the soil.
"Yes!" Button Mash hoofpumped as the shoot turned into a stalk and rose past his height. "Haha! I did it! Now that's how you exploit game mechanics!"
In truth, it wasn't entirely through his own efforts. Part of it was due to a pony he'd never met named Chipped Urn who had spent an internship translating ancient Earth Pony Tribe ritual tablets for his taskmaster of a professor. Another part was due to Bug Hunter, a developer for SvW Brawl whose boss' insistence on authenticity had led him to Urn's transcriptions, which he liberally borrowed from for designing in-game spells. Between Urn's mistranslations, the modifications of Bug's coworkers, and Button Mash's untrained interpretations, the colt had actually managed to perfectly recreate the long lost Dance of Crop Fertility... completely by accident.
The cigarette tree stopped growing as its highest leaves brushed the ceiling. White and orange flowers bloomed and burst like fireworks, raining down clusters of ripe cigarettes by the dozens in every flavor from Mild to Unfiltered.
"Wow," Button Mash marveled as he had to start pushing the bounty to the back of his cell lest it bury him alive. "I wonder what this many cigarettes can buy me?"
As it turned out, quite a lot.
Now that he had fungible goods to exchange, the other inmates were more than eager to fight for prime trading rights. By the end of the first day he'd traded his cramped cell up to a four room suite, complete with sitting room and dining area. By the end of the second he'd decked it out with plush furniture, shelves full of comics, multicolored lights, and even a water bed.
And yet, even with everything he could want to buy at a prison... there were no video games for sale at any price.
It was on the third day that his good luck ran out. As he relaxed in his jacuzzi, a team of guards burst into his cell and dragged him bodily out. As he was frogmarched away, Button could just make out the sound of his precious plant (that he'd so carefully repotted) being ravaged to shreds by addicted guards. He sighed. Easy come, easy go.
The guards led him all the way to the Warden's office and tossed him inside like a sack of potatoes.
"Ah, and there he is now."
A chill ran down Button's back as he looked up into the eyes of a figure he'd hoped to never meet again in his life.
"Morning, boy." Judge Sentence greeted far too cheerily. He'd replaced his coiled white wig with a flat brown cap that read 'WARDEN' in bold letters.
"It's alright young lad, there's no need to be afraid. You're not in trouble." The judge/warden rasped with what may have passed for a laugh a hundred years ago. "Quite the opposite, in fact."
The warmth in his voice was so shockingly genuine that Button could scarcely believe it was the same stallion. But there was no way two ponies could survive to be that old. "Your mother has explained everything."
"My- my Mom?"
"Hello sweetie." He turned at the voice to find his mom, sitting just out of sight to his left. She waved and gave him a small smile as if she was only picking him up from Gram Gram's house instead of visiting him in prison.
"Yes, after I got home from the store and found out what happened, I tracked down Mr. Sentence here and explained that all the video games in the house were mine, and that, of course, you would never touch them." Button's mom gave him a look then. The same look she'd give him in a restaurant that meant 'I'm going to kick up a fuss so the meal is free'. In short, it was a look that said 'play along'.
"R-right," he agreed hesitantly. "All mom's. Not mine."
"I wish you'd said something earlier," Sentence sighed as he took a fat rubber stamp and started smacking it onto the papers on his desk over and over until they were nothing more than soaked sheets of red ink. "We could have avoided this whole hilarious misunderstanding. After all, there's nothing wrong with an adult playing violent video games."
"Wait, what?" Button exclaimed, breaking character in his shock. "How can that be?"
"You see Button, when a foal plays a video game it fills them with violent and aggressive impulses. Truly a terrible thing. But when an adult plays a video game, it's a welcome release and an escape from the stress and tedium of their everyday lives. Quite different."
"That... that makes absolutely no sense!" he exclaimed, "What kind of double standard is that?! And what about foals with stress?"
The judge shook his head and chuckled good-naturedly. "You're too young to understand. It will make sense when you're older. Besides, what stress could a foal possibly be under?"
"I was just in prison for three days!"
"Yes, and we're all very sorry about that. Here," he reached into his desk and pulled out something bright and colorful on a stick. "Would a lollipop make you feel better?"
Grabbing her gobsmacked son, Love Tap began moving for the door. "Thank you, but I think we'd better get going. Somepony has school tomorrow."
From one prison to another, his fate was inescapable.
