Shawn dug deeper in his inventory, searching through the things he’d been given that seemed to have no use at all. There was a spare tire from a boat hauler, the skeleton of a fish, an empty can of pork and beans, a broken floor lamp with no bulb. And then there was the poo.

That was the first thing Shawn had won in the game. Just after he’d logged in he was attacked by a pack of rabid dogs. They killed him. Three times in a row they killed him seconds after he materialized in the city. The fourth time he was ready for them. Just before his third death he had noticed a wrench lying in the gutter by a fire hydrant. The fourth time he stepped onto the mean streets he didn’t waste any time reaching for the single revolver his avatar started with. He dived to the ground and rolled over to the hydrant. As soon as he touched it the dogs stopped in their tracks, then trotted docilely over to him. He waited until they were lined up right in front of him, then used the wrench to open the hydrant and sent the hellhounds tumbling away in a torrent of water.

His reward for that bit of ingenuity was a massive heap of dog poo in his inventory. He’d tried to get rid of it, but there didn’t seem to be a way. He supposed it was a message from the game’s creators: You may think you’re clever for figuring this one out, but it’s the most basic of all the puzzles so don’t get cocky.

But over the course of his sessions, Shawn had learned a lot about the logic of this world. There was never anything in the inventory that couldn’t be used in some way, but the mode of employ was rarely what a normal person would expect. It was like that with the gas can he’d acquired a few levels back: When he tried to fill the tank of his car with it, the auto exploded into flames. This gasoline was intended only for external combustion.