MMOrigins: The devolution of a gamer
It all started with a sick kindergartener. Trapped inside our tiny apartment, watching my feverish son flop listlessly on the couch, I was determined to find something to distract him. "He loves those wiggly, fiery pet things people have in that new game with all the rats," I thought, pulling up my husband's brand new EverQuest account. "I'll start him whatever makes those, and that'll keep his mind off how rotten he feels." After a hurried phone consultation with my husband on classes and stats, we found ourselves flitting about in front of Felwithe, searching for a way to summon our pet. "What's with this shield and sword that keeps popping up?!" I cried in frustration. Frantic inquiries to any enchanter who seemed likely to know how to summon the orange thing that wiggled its tail as it slowed down finally yielded the truth: we'd created the wrong class entirely. One re-roll and seemingly hours of dead bats later, our magician summoned her first fire pet -- firing an interest in MMOs that would become a family passion.
My son went back to school the next day, leaving me at home with my work ... and that magician. Felwithe was annoyingly dark, and I kept getting lost every time I got beyond sight of the castle ("I've lost my body again; you think that bard friend of yours will be online tonight? Every green hill and tree looks the same, and Sense Heading does nothing to help ..."). Still, there was something persuasive about the experience. It wasn't long before my character had outleveled my husband's, I'd made friends with a band of intrepid trailblazers and joined what would become one of the server's top two raiding guilds.
EQ sucked in first my family and then our friends. I made a package deal to get my husband and his gaming friends into my guild, and we started ticking off server firsts. It was all new: killing dragons, the flood of tells from envious players when they'd see we were fighting in one of the planes, guild drama, the development of loot rules and guild structures ... I loved it all. I joined the guide program, EQ's volunteer customer support corps, and relished my time behind the scenes. I ran orc NPCs in Crushbone and dark elves in Nektulos, solved problems from the peace of Venril Sathir's room (because nobody could kill him ... yet) and summoned players from all manner of hideous geometric catastrophes.
A change of pace
When my daughter was born, I knew the pace would have to change. Fortunately, Dark Age of Camelot was the new game in town, and it provided the perfect place to log in and dash about solo for the 45 minutes or so that naptimes afforded me. I inevitably fell behind our friends, though, and people began to drift to different groups, different servers, different games ...
Eventually, my daughter leveled up her sleeping skill, and evenings looked ripe for XP. By this time, EQ had evolved so far that there was no hope of "catching up." Getting into raids required keying and attunements that took weeks, if not months, of concerted, guild-wide effort. We made the next first step of our devolution from hardcore raiders by logging back into EQ with only a handful of friends. We spent night after night contentedly huddled up in zones like Dulak's Harbor seeing what was new and amazing content to us, with expansion after expansion left to explore.
The WoW era
Then came WoW. Older now, and wiser -- and busier at work and home than ever -- our established cadre never expected anything more than to hit the level cap, see a few five-man instances and go on our way. But then we managed to claw our way through UBRS with 11 people in greens (back when a full 15 players was the only way to roll). And then Dire Maul came out, and we started looting gear that the purple-geared Molten Core raiders mocked but that allowed us to min-max our way through all sorts of experiences.
When Zul'Gurub came out, we decided that 20 people wasn't really so many more than 11. It was time to be a "real" guild again. We recruited just enough players to make sure we could cover 20 slots several nights a week, and we tore into ZG. Sheer glory! It was a struggle in our DM blues and greens, but we conquered the zone right alongside the epic-ified 40-man guilds. At that point, the world was our oyster. We dove into Molten Core with our crew of 30 and our own odd, short-man strategies. It was glorious adventure -- but it was grinding administration. Thirty people was exponentially more management and drama than our little core of 11, and our leaders burned out like lava cores beneath a water elemental.
Chasing the elusive high
Since then, we've dipped in and out of WoW and other games with what's become an established crew of 10 or so players. With each game and each concept -- WoW's Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King expansions, City of Heroes (now affectionately known as our "default game," based on its easy play and relaxed atmosphere), Age of Conan, WoW on new alts and as PvP characters -- we've gotten more and more casual. Upon the group's most recent return to Northrend, I finally found myself at a loss. The group seemed radiant at being together again (if only for two short evenings each week), but raiding seemed mechanical and stressful to me. I find myself preferring the sidelines, toying with the alts and achievements I've never had time for before and hoping that the next expansion will breathe new life into the game for me.
Sometimes I wonder if I've outlasted the effective lifespan of this generation of MMOs. There's no going back to the age of innocence, when everything was a first, when nobody knew how to finish their epic quest lines and there was no such thing as prepping for a raid by watching the boss strategy on You Tube. If we can't go back, then, we'll have to go forward -- but to what, I'm not sure. I look back on those days as a guide in EQ, nailing players from the arrow slits inside Crushbone castle as they wailed and shouted, and I wonder if dynamic content -- real GM interaction, with people behind the NPCs -- might be the answer. I'm looking forward to trying Fallen Earth soon; fellow blogger Krystalle Voecks reports a sense of community that might be just the counter to the "what's-in-it-for-me," disconnected feeling I get from today's WoW.
I'm not sure where my gaming (or gaming in general) is headed right now. I seem to have started at the pinnacle of immersion and have been working my way back down the ladder, to be devolving as a player while game complexity also seemingly devolves in the wake of its growing popularity. But I'm convinced that I'm not the only one hankering for a new home, a new way to lose myself in an alien world with no precedents, no instructions -- but plenty of friends. I'm convinced that the "O" in MMO stands for Other: other worlds yet to be explored, other ways to attack the new challenges there, and other players with whom to discover them.
