My Online Life, Part One

It was March 22, 2005. I was a month and a half away from my 23rd birthday and already almost two years out of college after graduating from The Ohio State University in three years. I was living in a warehouse loft apartment with a T1 broadband connection in SoMa, the South of Market section of San Francisco. I actually remember the day quite well for several reasons. My boyfriend Roy, who is a microbiologist, was ecstatic about the fact that the United Nations had just declared it the first World Day for Water, or so my diary said at the time. The night before, I had also just finished the last in a long run of first person shooter games with the completion of Eidos Interactive's badly flawed and bug-ridden Project Snowblind. (tangent: I'm really hoping Eido's new Montreal studios can return the company to its former glory with Deus Ex III)

Project Snowblind, which I enjoyed immensely in spite of its flaws, was an experience that drove me in two directions. The first was deciding to apply my computer programming skills to writing patches to fix flaws in video games. The second was to seek out an entirely different form of visual-virtual entertainment that was open ended, changed from day to day, and could be influenced not only by me, but by thousands or perhaps millions of other people around the world.

I'd had a nice long run of FPS style games: Half Life, Deus Ex, Halo Combat Evolved, Battlefield 2 (strictly offline, although I DID host games on one of my servers), Far Cry, Deus Ex Invisible War, Half Life 2, and finally, Snowblind, to name just a few. The latter had started out as the third in the Deus Ex series, and went sharply downhill from there in terms of development. Eidos finally decided to release an error ridden version as a standalone game in Feb. 2005. It took me a month to finish it because it crashed so often and a patch was never written to fix the game.

But on March 22, 2005, something completely new and different was about to begin for me as I downloaded a new game and then waited for a few patches to load, online, in real time. Neat trick that.

By 2005, online computer games had already become immensely popular. In another month, April, Sony would launch the modern predecessor of World of Warcraft's auction houses and the Wentworth shops in City of Heroes. It would begin the first in-game item trading service for the massively multiplayer online role playing game or mmorpg called Everquest II, which turned into a near disaster when a counterfeiting scheme resulted in massive in-game inflation. Also that year, a real life man was arrested by real life police, in real life Japan, for stealing other peoples' virtual (as in not really real) possessions, during a virtually violent crime spree (so, it wasn't ACTUALLY  a crime spree in a pure technical sense) in another popular mmorpg called Lineage II.

Crazy, unpredictable. A kind of "We're going to try this and we have NO fricking idea of where it's going to lead" gaming entertainment that reminded me of the time that Richard Garriott finally decided to leave one of his Ultima Online creations alone and let it evolve. A player bandit had repeatedly waylayed a newbie in the game and stolen all of her possessions. Once, twice, thrice, Richard (the creator of Tabula Rasa) actually went online, tracked down the bandit, retrieved the stolen virtual goods, returned them to the newbie, until he finally clue-ed in. He had created a bandit class for the game, so why the frack wasn't he letting the bandits BE bandits?!?

This mmorpg thing was something I was going to have to try. Prime time television no longer interested me, unless it was some kind of documentary. I was no longer entertained by 44 minutes and 44 seconds (that's how much time your hour-long broadcast actually gives you after all the of the commercials) of television "drama" that always ended with the bad guys losing and the good guys winning. I wanted something more immersive and open-ended than novels that did offer much more depth, but still had a hard beginning and a hard end. And the better the novel, the more quickly you read it, and the more quickly it was over.

In the end, great novels suffered from the same entertainment problems as great first person shooters. You played them with relish and fascination once. Maybe you did it all again a second time, perhaps even a third time, and then it was over.

I wanted something new and different. I wanted an mmorpg, but which one?

Next up: Neo: I know kung fu.
Morpheus: [eyeing him, hand on chin] Show me.