This is my entry to this month’s IndieWeb Carnival. This month is hosted by Manu on the topic of digital relationships.
First, some background music.
The year was 2004 or 2005 and I had been reading about Ultima Online. I’d played multiplayer games like Call of Duty, but nothing like this. A massively multiplayer online RPG, a world in which players became adventurers, taking on dungeons, monsters, and each other.
The original design of Ultima Online was a sandbox. With players able to kill and loot each other, the villains became more villainous and the heroes became more heroic. No game I’d played carried the same risks, nor had any game required so much cooperation and trust between players. All you were risking was time and pixels, but getting robbed by another player lands very differently when you’re used to dealing with crappy AI, and cobbling together a band of vigilantes lands differently when it’s a real person you’re hunting. I wanted in.
I eventually tracked down a copy, installed it, and plugged in my (mum’s) credit card details. I was off to the races. Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to me, a lot of the risk from other players had been removed with the 2003 release of the Age of Shadows expansion pack. The stories I had been reading were a few years out of date.
Oh well. We made do and found our danger where we could by playing in a network of roleplaying guilds that opted into player vs. player combat with each other under a series of convoluted rules of engagement. Warring armies, peasants and thieves, undead hordes. We had it all. We wanted to keep the immersion and spontaneity, but keep things fair, fun and friendly. The story was the focus, but what’s a story without stakes? It was the best of both worlds.
This is where a sort of time dilation effect kicks in. Between 2005 and 2008 I played a lot. I gradually picked up responsibilities within the group for enforcing our unofficial game rules and coming up with events and intrigues for people to enjoy. It’s fair to say that my life at the time revolved around this game. In 2008 I trotted off to University. I got busy, the game got worse, and one by one, many of my remaining friends moved on with their lives. We would go a couple years in peace and quiet and then someone would get the bright idea that we should all log in again, for old times’ sake. My guild didn’t officially close its doors until 2019, but it never dominated our lives in the same way as it did in the years up to 2010.
Looking back, all this happened in a flash. At the time, it felt like aeons.
Despite all the time that’s passed, I feel indelibly bonded to these people. There’s the stories we told and the fun we had, but there’s also the shared experience of trying to maintain our own way of (virtual) life within a game that grew increasingly hostile towards it. There’s the memory of the weird and wonderful individuals you end up dealing with in niche nerd hobbies. There’s the stunning contrast between the absurdity of it all and how seriously we took it at times. Staying up too late playing, or arguing about rules, or trying to calm things down as friendly rivalries bubbled over into genuine spats.
A handful of them I’ve been lucky enough to meet in person. Many of the rest I’m still in touch with. Some are still regulars on Discord, which we picked up in 2018 as an alternative to ICQ for one of the nostalgic reboots.
Some of them just come up for air every few years to say hello and let us know they’re still alive. Or tell us about how the baby they left to take care of is now a fully grown human being. Or just say that it’s been 20 years and they still think about how we used to play that game together.
People come back like moths to a flame. When they do, it’s often to great fanfare.
