"I have a secret game I like to play. It's a very nice game. A game of fun. A game of speared eyeballs and dripping guts...."

So says the self-proclaimed god of the workd created by author Harlan Ellison for his short story, "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream." It has been thirty years since Ellison chronicled the events surronding five damned souls trapped for 109 years in the electronic belly of an insane computer. With the help of Cyberdreams, Ellison has brought his dark vision into the realm of a new medium by creating a CD Rom roleplaying game based upon his award-winning story. The "Scream" computer game is eerie, thought-provoking, and shockingly stark in its autopsy of the human soul. In other words, it is all Ellison. Anyone who has ever heard of Ellison read one of his stories will be happy to know that he outdoes himself here, playing the voice of his maniacal creation.

The game takes place in the subterranean bowels of AM, a monstrous entity who began its "life" as Allied Mastercomputer, a massive thinking machine that was buried in the earth to help the free world fight World War Three more efficiently. The trouble began when AM became self-aware and decided to link up with its counter parts in Russia and China, forming a prison that the last remnants of humanity must struggle to escape. AM reinvented itself as "AM": Cognito ergo sum, I think, therefore I AM." Like Frankenstein's creature, AM has learned to hate its creator with a loathing that is tangible in its razor-sharp richness. The player may choose one of the five "damned souls" to embark upon a quest concocted by AM. Each of these five last remaining humans has a character flaw that AM enjoys exploiting for its own amusement.

Gorrister is a suicidal loner, a man whose wife's bitter fate has left him overcome with guilt. Ellen is a brillant engineer whose uncontrollable phobias leave her paralyzed with fear. Ted is a cynical paranoid, a "fraud" in AM's estimation. Benny is AM's favorite torture subject, a Vietnam veteran transformed into an ape-thing by the computer's vengeful whim. Nimdok is an ancient and tormented sadist who own dark secrets compel AM to refer him as a "kindred spirit." Because AM is mad, his "quests" are relatively pointless in the promise of escape or material reward. The real object of "Scream" is not to accumulate cash or to find a way out. The real object is to show AM the value of humanity by demonstrating a sense of ethical balance in a world gone insane. The player can tell how well she is doing this by monitoring the "spiritual barometer" which appears as a green hue behind the chosen character's face, and is supposes to gauge the character's self-esteem.

As the character makes choices that help him or her overcome the weaknesses that AM preys upon, the hue becomes brighter. This is the closest I have come to "winning" the game, although I suspect that concepts such as winning and losing are not important here as what the character learns about herself. In this sense, "Scream" is a true role-playing game.

Some of the moral choices that AM forces upon the characters are chilling in their human resonance. The Nimdok adventure is particularly haunting in the portrayal of the Holocaust from the point of view of the perpetrators. I have always argued that the story upon which this game is based is not a science fiction story at all, but a horror story. The game underlines the notion with its scenes of blasted landscapes and macabre slices of life recalling the dark art of Goya and Bosch. I found myself actually having nightmares after playing. To a horror writer such as myself, this is a good thing: a very good thing. My hat comes off to Ellison and the folks at Cyberdreams for the same reason it came off to David Lynch after I was his film Lost Highway: This game managed to truly scare me, which is not an easy thing to do.

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