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There’s no apocalypse like the Korean Apocalypse
I don’t remember for sure how much more we developed our game, IPO (no, there was no initial public offering). I recall I fell out of touch with Hookdump over something petty, and I felt like my attempt at making a game had gone nowhere. But had it really? For one, I had learned a little something about coding, and a lot more about project management. And, most important for this next chapter in my life, I had discovered many other online RPGs.
One of those games had these lil fellas:
I’m talking about Ragnarok Online. The game that insisted on using 2d sprites on a 3d world, with vector calculation to determine in which of the 45 degrees slices your character was being “looked at” and load that sprite.
The game fascinated me. It had some years of success before even World of Warcraft showed up, and it danced to a tune that few could hear.
As it was the case for Argentum Online, the main menu music of Ragnarok gave me chills. This wasn’t a grand adventure you’d be embarking on. No. Here mysterious forces, faerie-like in appearance, would dance and invite you to join them. A slightly sad yet entirely captivating melody lured you further in.
In an almost socialist declaration of principles, all players started in the same way. There was only one class, novice. You would choose what to specialize in and “grow into” as a job later on, following a simple evolution path.
For example: a bard was an advanced class you only could apply if you had at least 40 “job levels” in the archer base job. Your actual level and your job level were separated. Equipment was determined by groups of “belonging”, so some classes shared different pools of gear.
I could ramble about the intricacies of RO for hours, even if I haven’t played it in over a decade, but that’s not what I want to focus on.
I still had creative energy in me, so it didn’t take too long after joining one of the many pirate servers that made the game so popular that I dedicated myself to create stories, event suggestions, and even questions on quests.
RO included large story-lines, acting as quests, while providing the user almost no indication that quests did in fact exist. You just had to pay attention. Both the quests, the monsters and the maps would be expanded on in bi-yearly content updates, that would eventually get pirated and distributed online. Sometimes, entire segments of scripts were in Korean.
Ragnarok didn’t pretend you, the player character, were going to change the world. The quests gave you access to another map, or to a different crating option. The story of that game occurred by itself, and you could read it while doing your own thing.
I began offering to help with quest testing and patch implementation, and was eventually given a moderator position in that gaming community. That was a lot of imaginary power for a 14 to 15 year old kid.
Ragnarok allowed users to group under “guilds”, and participate in player vs player wars at given intervals, in order to control large castles in different cities. The longer a guild controlled a castle, the more unique treasures they’d be able to get from the reserves. So these “guild wars” were a big thing on any server. You’d easily get 200 to 300 people fighting to [defend/attack] a given castle, in a set of weird free-for-alls and precarious alliances.
One guild in particular struck me as more interesting than the rest. A small group of players, all of them extremely talented in playing one or two classes, would offer their services as mercenaries. Their guild-leader, a guy nicknamed Bull, wasn’t above negotiating actual money in these contracts.
I got approached and joined them, playing first as a tank/distraction of sorts, giving the most sneaky members a chance to infiltrate further into the castle without being detected.
Later on I would try the class that defined the rest of my gaming years. The bard.
Bards in the game had several support skills, in the way of songs that affected a small 3x3 area around them. They had almost no offensive skills, but could inflict certain statuses on enemies, like freezing anyone within screen-range using bad jokes. The “frost joke” skill would iterate at random from a list in the client folder and each “cast” would have the character say one lame pun.
I remember the first guild war I joined after editing that file, so all my jokes were targeted at specific players calling them out (or pretending I was someone else giving their guild contrary commands). The chaos that this brought brought a tear to my eye and a warm, fuzzy feeling deep inside of me.
I continued to learn to script basic things, but most importantly, I started to hang in real life with this rather strange group of people.
Down the line, we got tired of playing the same old stuff on the same server, and there had been enough progress in the realm of pirated WoW servers that some options were available for us to move on to.
Lok’tar Ogar, baby
WoW was a hard beast for me. I played that game from the last days of Burning Crusade all the way to the last days of Cataclysm, which would put me at roughly 5 years spent there.
Did I enjoy it? No. Did I spend endless hours online trying to find rare drops, collect rare fish, and complete silly achievements? Yes.
The game was mechanically fun. You had enough build diversity (at least during WotLK) that I never felt pigeonholed into a role. You could out-clever your way out of sticky situations that would usually require a whole party if you planned your skills well enough. There were plenty of quests, and lore was available for you on every item, map, monster and tooltip you’d deign to look at.
So what made it so bothersome? Looking back, I can clearly say that WoW was the first game I played that made playing a job. If you weren’t chasing another objective to max a stat, you were being left behind.
All those quests and lore meant nothing when you had a giant arrow on your screen telling you where to go, and a pop-up updating itself with how many crab legs you’ve obtained for ye-olde-urchin-goblin to progress their fetch quest. There was so much to read yet you were incentivized to ignore it all.
For a game in which the entire gimmick was making you feel like a hero, your actions were largely inconsequential.
From my time playing WoW, only a few memories seem worthwhile, while all the rest blend into one endless dungeon delving session, muted colors and distorted faces.
I remember fondly receiving messages in-game from people that had found my forum guide “how-to update your client to the latest version by yourself”. They’d say “hey, you’re the guys! thanks dude!” and /wave at me.
And I remember the first time we defeated Arthas, all of us screaming inside my friend’s room (we organized lan parties to tackle big dungeons), to the point that his parents showed up to yell at us for waking them up.
Years later, in Germany, I would have a conversation with a Russian data scientist I was tutoring under. One late afternoon, after a particularly difficult day tackling a task of normalizing data from a vehicle app that we kept begging access to, we bonded over our shared appreciation for “old” mmorpgs. He told me he built macros to have all of his skills in a perfect rotation against enemies, and he kept a self-updating google sheet to track loot in WoW. I told him I had gone quite far as a shaman in pvp leagues. He looked up from his screen and without any irony he said “Of course you’d play a shaman”. I do not know if he meant that as a compliment, an insult, or a fact.
WoW had one important impact for my late teens. Our friend group got tired of pirated servers and bad emulators, and some of us had already started working in some capacity, so we could afford to pay for a monthly subscription for all of us. As one of the 3 members that had gotten a job rather fast, I remember feeling some responsibility in keeping my day-to-day in order as to guarantee we would all be able to play for another month.
My love for online rpgs started to dwindle at this point. I was getting tired of the daily log-in rewards, the mandatory weekly quests, the same old mechanisms of extraction that were applied to me as a player and source of income, and through me towards the game as rutinary and mediocre deliverers of dopamine.
I would spend more and more time living a real life that wasn’t touched by my online persona, or immersing myself fully on single player experiences like Neverwinter Nights 2 and Fallout.
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I’ve thought for a long time about my gaming experience over the years as something that ran parallel to my life, closely approaching it from time to time. At times, my own life seemed hard to accept and embrace, so I would fully embrace the escapism that games would provide. Then I would hate how crippled I felt from not cultivating real life skills and relationships, and I would try to step away from it for some time. I didn’t embrace enjoying gaming openly until I was in my mid 20s.
I won’t say that my most happy memories are tied to games or gaming, that would be a lie. However, my most mundane memories of feeling good and enjoying my day have always had some game as a central element.
From playing Smash Bros with my room-mate while discussing relationships at 2 am, to joining 3d chat services dressed like Jesus to troll religious fundamentalists with other online friends, games have given me something that reality always lacked:
The knowledge and certainty that even if I didn’t understand and knew about them, there were hard rules governing the actions we could all perform. And in that scenario, I think I found it way easier to relate to others, and to bond.
Nowadays I play as a habit, because it’s what I know I like, so it should keep on providing me with that sweet dopamine (as if a body fed with the same food for 30+ years could still get useful nutrients). From time to time, the new old games I play make me feel something. I marvel once again at the stories, the worlds that become realer than reality. And while I am sitting alone and playing, I feel deeply connected to my fellow human when I think I am experiencing an imaginary world in the same way some other person thought of it.
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