Warcrafting for the Whole Family?

When I started out playing my first Massive Multiplayer Online Game, Asheron's Call, my immediate family bought three copies: I was in high school at the time, and my parents and I decided to move from Diabloesque games where only the three of us or visiting friends played to a larger scale. We weren't alone: my cousin, uncle, and aunt all joined up too. We occasionally joined up with other players, people who weren't members of the Salter clan, but mostly these games became our family pasttime. They live in Florida, so actually seeing them often would have been quite a feat while a weekly or more night of Asheron's Call--and later Asheron's Call 2, Anarchy Online, and now World of Warcraft--is much easier to arrange.

I was reading Laura's blog about some of the fears for isolating effects of virtual worlds: the lack of refined manners and conversation out in the real world, the tendency to substitute virtual contact for "real" ones, the problems that can arise from spending too much time interfacing with the world through a screen rather than through physical closeness. There are so many ways too meet people in virtual space, and all of them filled with that looming risk a person might not be who they claim to be. I've met many people in my life that way, and several have stayed important to me, and many of whom--such as my fellow writers on CinCity2k--provide me with communities of knowledge and interest I would not otherwise have.

This virtual connections can be meaningful, but mostly the Internet is indispensable to me for keeping me in touch with people who are geographically distant. When I was younger I lost my connections with the friends I grew up with in California when I moved back to Maryland, and the plans to be "pen-pals" seemed doomed to fall through. Now I've found some of them again on Facebook. I don't live near my extended family, but I can play Warcraft with them or send out a quick email whenever the thought crosses my mind. This seems to me to be the essence of the new structure: not that it makes new connections possible, but that it makes sustaining connections easier.

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This brings me, in a roundabout fashion, to the virtual world sexcapades I'd like to address this semester. Consider again the question of virtual adultery. Say a married man enters a world, Second Life for simplicity's sake, and meets a lady there. There's conversation, drinks in a fully equipped bar, and fully animated connection. Nothing real has happened in such an encounter that can be documented. It's an affair with an on-screen set of pixels and words. Is that an affair at all? Is it any different from playing a game--Monkey Island, say--where the player leads the avatar of Guybrush Threepwood on his continual attempts to win the heart of Governor Marley? It's all just text and pixels after all.

Change one detail: say the man meets a lady at a real bar. They exchange avatar names finding they share a passion for Second Life. Now the encounter is entirely in-game, but there's a face and a remembered connection behind the pixels. Is this more real? Would any wife be satisfied with the explanation "It's just a game?"

Here, the line seems clear to draw: no one's going to be happy with any flirting with girls met in bars, even if it does all go to the Internet. But it's not a long step from the first fully online lady to this level. Would an emailed exchange of photos [even if the lady's image is probably pulled from someone else's myspace page...] make the lady real enough to be a threat? How about a switch from text-only chat to voice over IP?

When, in short, is a connection "real"?

Garage Gaming

Booting up Rise of the Dragon for the first time my parents and I huddled around our tiny new computer and spent hours just trying to get out of the first screen: a static, comic book style image of an apartment room where our avatar “Blade Hunter” was preparing himself for his task of saving the world from horrible death by mutation. Most of all I remember the death scenes – comic sequences where we took a drink from the water fountain and ended up mutated and dead, or shot in an alley, or otherwise eliminated, over and over again.

Now I log on to World of Warcraft – still cartoon graphics, but now 3D, beautifully realized, huge worlds where my avatar is no longer alone and thanks to the web we have whole communities of elves and trolls and gnomes running around killing each other. The progress the industry and the Web have made in just over ten years is absolutely breathtaking, as now games with the same quality of Rise of the Dragon can be produced by a teenager working on their computer in the basement, and developing tools that were once for the elite of design teams and companies are now accessible to the general web user. With the constant improvements in creation technology allowing for literally the “garage Kubrik” and digital media being, at least for the moment, just as much in the hands of the individual as the commercial studios, the future of digital works is yet to be determined.

My own interest in independent digital creation is focused on the adventure game genre, which in itself is now a fairly antiquated genre--adventure games are driven by story and puzzles, and generally contain no major violence, so naturally most publishers have abandoned them as unprofitable when presented to a general audience of attention span lacking teenage males. The number of adventure titles released by computer gaming companies has dwindled and even when projects are announced they are quickly cancelled with a few impressive exceptions such as the recent Sam and Max revival. However, the form is being kept alive in a fan maintained world of independently created computer games. Using fan created software tools that allow for the mimicking of classic game interfaces, fans are creating both sequels to classic games and their own orignal works. These intensive processes of creation are embarked upon not with the hope of financial reward, but for personal satisfaction and the opportunity to make something a popular success within a discriminating niche market.

In theory, people entering the realm of independent game design in this nature are limited in their storytelling only by their own imagination. On the website for one popular 2D adventure game design program, AGS or Adventure Game Studio, there are games listed that don't generally live up to that hope. Many are parodies, some clever, others are simply exercises in escaping a puzzle house [or castle, or island...]. But the occasional moments of brillance make up for the general lack of innovation. A fantasy story, A Tale of Two Kingdoms, bring's back the King's Quest era with an original, if slightly Tolkeinesque, fairy tale. Cirque du Zale starts with a story of a young man brought to save a fantasy princess--who starts a circus instead.

These are not the games you'll find reviewed in the latest Computer Games magazine. They owe their existence to digital distribution: the ability to freely make available large files of creative efforts without vying for shelf space. The closest parallel to these endeavors in pre-Internet society was the zine movement, when the photocopier allowed for the home "publication" and mailed distribution of fan writing and news to groups of subscribers. The digital distribution of these games seven suffers from some of the same limitations: they are unlikely to reach the attention of anyone who doesn't know where to look.

If a tree falls...

The internet is a vast world of opportunity where anyone can put out their voice and reach out to the world. Did you know that? I think I heard it somewhere once or twice. I think I believed it when I was younger: I started a blog once before, in the 90s, then retreated to the comfort of LiveJournal where pretensions of granduer could be abandoned in favor of quiet talk among friends.

What I find most amazing about the Internet isn't those moments where one voice gets through and reaches multitudes, whether it's through a frightful video on YouTube or the rising fame of a webcomic or a well-timed political sex scandal blog.

No, what amazes me is the number of voices that ring out on the Internet and reach...silence. Every second people post to Livejournal or blogs or forums or fanfiction websites with work that will go virtually, if you'll pardon the pun, unnoticed. This post, for instance, can hope for at best the casual gaze of a few class members in a small graduate course. Anyone else reading it might have stumbled in and can just as quickly stumble out. The voices that get heard remaind the loudest: those powered by the money to create good site design, advertising, and presence. Everything else is an exception, not the rule. Yet people continue to make all this content, devoting hours of their time to everything from Mummies Alive fansites to passionate political tirades, all with the knowledge that only a few people will read it and even fewer will care.

It's not particularly meaningful that younger folks can no longer name the big 4 TV networks, as they once might have been able to with ease. It simply means there are other outlets competing for their attention--and quite often, those outlets are just part of the same old picture, with most of secondary television and many major sites on the 'net following under the control of one or another big media powers.

The Internet is not yet the promised land of any to many communication. It offers the potential for great things, but not the follow through. And let's face it, in an unedited world, there are a million things on any topic not worth reading waiting for Google to find. With so much noise, it's a wonder any of the great ones break through at all. But it's even more a wonder that so many voices continue to reach out when there is so little to expect in return.