Confessions of a Convert
Original Link (now dead) - http://acdm.turbinegames.com/featuredarticles/?action=view&article_id=43
Confessions of a Convert
By Dikk Kelly
This year I led three lives: one as a defeated investor, one as a bedraggled employee and one as a glorious warrior mage intent on ridding the universe of suffering and rudeness.Maybe I should explain.
For the past 14 years, I've been telling my son that videogames were a sinkhole of time and money and, because they're non-creative and non-productive, the cesspit of human endeavor. After a thousand hours of blasting aliens you have nothing to show for it: no marketable skill, no enhanced understanding of human interaction, no useful knowledge, no creative artifacts, nothing. Twitch games are bubblegum for the brain: They keep your thumbs and eyes busy and your adrenaline pumping, but neurons die by the millions whenever you pick up a control pad.
Now I'm singing a different tune.
Why? A friend of mine -- we'll call him "Alpha" -- who works for a company that creates a virtual world called Asheron's Call invited us to visit his workplace so my son could get a sense of what life was like in a videogame company. (Thanks, Alpha!) The lad was thrilled. He walked past programmers reclining on the floor in bean bag chairs with keyboards on their laps banging out bugs in a darkened room; past artists grooving to trypno while building insectoid monsters and past writers cobbling together lyrical lore and violent backstory. He was entranced. He was mesmerized. And I was utterly unaffected.
Until we sat down to view the game.
Alpha held his hand in front of the screen to dramatically block the Medusa's head from our view. In the serious voice of a drug counselor he said, "I'm warning you now that this is highly addictive. Don't look at it unless you want to take that chance." I laughed. It's a game! I've seen videogames before -- what a childish waste of time!
He removed his hands from the screen and what I saw was not a game but a virtual world -- the kind of world I'd spent eight years trying to create during my life as a researcher in the early 90s.I was hooked immediately: Within five minutes, I was intent on buying the game and I've spent between 4 and 16 hours a day playing it since August. I squabble with my son and daughter over who will use the computer to enter the world. I'm utterly absorbed. And, for the first time in my life, I understand this side of my son. It's as if a huge missing puzzle piece had come into being. Mind you, there are still plenty of things I don't understand -- but videogames, or at least MMORGs, I now comprehend.
I still see most games as a waste of precious time but I no longer raise the "non-creative" objection -- at least for virtual worlds like AC. What my kids and I do in our little world is creative, after all. I see that now; it's just that the medium is an unexpected one. Instead of creating in oils or language or clay or tones, we create in behavior. We create second lives for ourselves -- something I'd dreamed about back in my VR days when I was writing articles proclaiming that everyone would someday live a life divided between the V world and the real.
My son's creative process involves altruism. Most of his time in Dereth is spent helping people and giving away his possessions. His life in the virtual world is quite different from my daughter's, which revolves around clothing and socializing -- she'll croak half a dozen monsters to acquire some loot, then happily scamper back to town to cash in her booty, buy the new gown she's been eyeing and chat with the folks in the village about where the best shops are located.
My own life revolves around exploration and the collecting of trinkets, tchotchkes, googaws and doodads. I'm so mesmerized by them that, for a few weeks, I even had recurring avaricious dreams about Green Seeds, which I'd been selling to a dye-making player for lots of virtual money. And I've done the same collecting/selling with Ravener guts, Lugian sinew and Auroch horns. I'm a regular rag-and-bone man; I'm the Fred Sanford of the virtual world. But I've also cooked every food there is to cook -- just to see what they look like. I've experimented with every type of armor and spell. And I've traveled all over the island -- it's the novelty and sense of exploration that intrigues me.
One interesting part for both my son and me, since we're both linguists at heart, is the slang. All keystrokes are precious, so they're omitted whenever possible. TY is Thank You. NP is No Problem. RL is Real Life. AFK is Away From Keyboard. BRB is Be Right Back. LOL is Laugh Out Loud. ROTGLMAO is Rolling On The Ground Laughing My A** Off. Here's a typical conversation:
here r comps I looted frm a decomped twinked og mage hu logged after buffing me in cit
ty
np he wasnt usin m n e more
lol
ded lugies round m, smel better n live ones
rotglmao
brb
k
sorry was afk coffe ready dang rl
It's not literature. But it is a kind of poetry because it distills human experience to its essentials. And the francophones who inhabit the virtual town I live in use the same approach. Pourquoi becomes pkoi to save keystrokes. Quebecois becomes kebekoi. Qu'est-ce que c'est becomes kes k c.
I roam around in the morning looking for my corpses saying, "Un autre jour, un autre corps" (another day another body) and hear back "r)" (rire: to laugh) from the guys playing simultaneously in the suburbs of Paris.
I still can't translate the Swedish I see rolling by on the screen, except for "Hej" which I've learned is "Hello" (See! It is an educational game!). And the Portuguese I've been reading lately is so slang laden I can't make it out. But I know there are a few other students of Japanese roaming the monster-strewn plains because one of my characters is named Dai Niwatori ("Big Chicken") and occasionally I'll meet someone who'll LOL me when he translates my moniker. Usually it's someone with a Japanese name too -- often a character from a manga like Kozure Okami ("Lone Wolf And Cub"). But another of my characters is named Sugar Glider and I've been bumping into Aussies lately who recognize the reference (it's the name of a marsupial possum in Oz, similar to a flying squirrel in North America). They'll have names like VegeMight and WizardOfOz and they'll greet me from Perth with "gd m8!" (Good day, mate).
I realize how childish it sounds when I explain my odd virtual life to people; I recall every denunciatory word I've said to my son over the past 14 years when I explain the V world's creatures, battles, armor and magical spells to them. It sounds pointless and needlessly violent and juvenile -- but I don't care. It fills a void in my life -- the monster destruction and glittering trinket collection piece. And that was one of the things we always wanted to do within Virtual Reality, i.e., let the V world fill in gaps in a person's real life. If you can't leave your housing project to roam distant snowy peaks, you can do it in the V world. If you can't smack down the ogres at work, you can croak them in the V world. If some of these people think they can "see" what I'm doing in the game ("projection" and "acting out") and are tut-tutting over what a sad case study in elementary psychology I am, that's okay too; personal satisfaction is great armor. Even talking to French folks who refuse to respond to a word of English is fun.
The aspect that intrigues me most is how avatars are used. This was a subject we spent endless hours conjecturing on in the old VR gang: "Will people choose virtual personae that are similar to themselves in real life or adopt completely different characteristics?"
What I've seen in my little neck of the woods is that people around me choose avatars that are astoundingly similar to their real selves, even though their abilities are different from their abilities in the real world. For example, they can jump 30 feet into the air, shoot frost bolt spells at annoying goblins and distract monsters while their friends retrieve loot from their decomposing corpses -- but their appearances are often nearly identical to those of the real players. My own characters, for example, are all male with white hair and white skin, and the other graybeards in the game create similar characters. The darker skinned and younger players create darker skinned and darker haired characters. The women players choose female characters. They often experiment with hair color -- flaming red seems to be a popular choice -- but the basic configurations mirror real life.
I had thought that women might choose male personae and vice versa, or that older players might make their characters younger. But since there's no benefit in terms of abilities to choosing one type of character over another, most people seem to model their virtual selves after their real selves -- as if their avatar is an extension of themselves rather than a fictional creation. Quite interesting.
All of these things keep me occupied in and involved in the game. And I derive things from running around in the V world that I can't get in the RL, so I'm planning to stay a while.
The only suggestion I'd make to the developers of the game is to allow players who are not testosterone-driven and bloody-minded to get ahead in the game just as fast as the hack-and-slash folks. That would mean more high-level trade skills. Allow cooks to gain points for cooking difficult super foods. Allow altruistic players to gain more points for helping and healing others. Bring in tailors and armor smiths and enchanted weapon makers who can create useful products that don't exist in the stores. And increase the number of trinkets -- if, for no other reason, so that I'll have new doodads to dream about at night.