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The Hoel Chestnut Tree
Mastery, the first major online game that Neelay Mehta creates, represents the human need to endlessly grow and consume, as well as just how unsustainable this practice is in the long term. As a teenager studying at Stanford University, Neelay is inspired by the trees at the school’s inner quad and experiences a vision (as though receiving a message from the trees themselves) of a game that he will create: an incredibly complex, immersive world for the player to explore and build in. The game—called Mastery—becomes an incredible success, and its many sequels make Neelay and his company extremely rich and famous. For a while, Neelay thinks that Mastery is the culmination of his vision from the trees, but soon he grows dissatisfied with pursuing the same model over and over, and a conversation with a player one day makes him realize that the game has a “Midas problem”—all it can do is add ever more resources and space to exploit and control, like the mythical King Midas turning everything to gold but finding no joy in his ever-expanding wealth.
Instead of being the realization of the trees’ message to Neelay, then, Mastery is actually an allegory for humanity’s need to endlessly grow, consume, and take control of everything. In the world of the game, the developers can always add new continents and resources—but this isn’t the case in real life, where our current rate of growth and consumption is unsustainable and is leading to the destruction of both nature and humanity itself. When Neelay comes to understand this, he abandons the Mastery franchise (which also means losing his immensely successful company) to start on a new project. His new, more enlightened goal is to create a game that reflects the real world of growing things and the complex web of life, a game that can help people learn more about the planet that is their home.
Mastery Quotes in The Overstory
The The Overstory quotes below all refer to the symbol of Mastery. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Part 2: Trunk
Quotes
He looks up at the peaked roof of the construction office and thinks, What the hell am I doing? The clarity of recent weeks, the sudden waking from sleepwalk, his certainty that the world has been stolen and the atmosphere trashed for the shortest of short-term gains, the sense that he must do all he can to fight for the living world's most wondrous creatures: all these abandon Adam, and he's left in the insanity of denying the bedrock of human existence. Property and mastery: nothing else counts. Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.
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Part 4: Seeds
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The words Neelay writes add to a growing organism, one that has just now begun to add to itself. At other screens in other cities, all the best coders that several hundred million dollars can hire contribute to the work in progress. Their brand-new venture into cooperation is off to the most remarkable beginning. Already their creatures swallow up whole continents of data, finding in them the most surprising patterns. Nothing needs to start from scratch. There's so much digital germplasm already in the public domain.
The coders tell the listeners nothing except how to look. Then the new creations head off to scout the globe, and the code spreads outward. New theories, new offspring, and more evolving species, all of them sharing a single goal: to find out how big life is, how connected, and what it would take for people to unsuicide. The Earth has become again the deepest, finest game, and the learners just its latest players.
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Get the entire The Overstory LitChart as a printable PDF.
Mastery Symbol Timeline in The Overstory
The timeline below shows where the symbol Mastery appears in The Overstory. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Part 2: Trunk
...eating and sleeping—because they are so obsessed with playing it. This new game is called Mastery.
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Meanwhile, Neelay’s game Mastery comes out, and Sempervirens explodes in popularity. Neelay has a new office overlooking the redwoods,...
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...is clearly starstruck to be talking to Neelay. He asks Neelay about the success of Mastery and admits that he himself is addicted to the game. Neelay answers his questions while...
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The narrative returns to Neelay, whose successive games Mastery 2, Mastery 3, and Mastery 4 grow ever more successful, profitable, and technologically advanced. Meanwhile...
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...bones performing simple tasks, and his skin is plagued by bedsores. He has now completed Mastery 6, in which players can create entire self-operating civilizations within the world of the game....
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In the digital world of Neelay’s newest Mastery game, two avatars stand together looking out over the sea. One, a blue-skinned god, is...
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...he’s doing—there’s no point to their actions, he thinks, as humanity’s need for “property and mastery” will always win, expanding until the last forest is gone.
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Part 3: Crown
Neelay is now playing Mastery 8, experiencing the world anonymously among the millions of other players. At a market exchange...
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...to Neelay. Neelay lays out what he sees as the problem at the core of Mastery—its “Midas problem.” The others object, giving examples of how incredibly successful the games and the...
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