This Year's Holiday Greeting

MMORPG

For the uninitiated, the acronym stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game. As I was answering phones at work today, the concept of the MMORPG formed a sizable portion of the trademarked Bipolar Flight of Ideas which I experience whenever the slightest bit of noise or motion distracts me from my phone-answering.

To be quite frank, this rarely makes the slightest difference to my job performance, because I answer phones like a computer. But that's a digression in which I will not be indulging tonight. Instead, I'm going to do something completely unprecedented and stick to my stated topic.

If you don't want to be on the world when it explodes, better to get off now.

So, off we go.

The MMORPG moniker is only half true. And, conveniently enough, it splits right down the middle. Are they multiplayer? Indeed they are; it can hardly be disputed that there are not multiple players on the servers of any given one of them. Are they massively multiplayer? Considering that the number of multiple players is in the tens of thousands or so, I think we can agree that they are indeed massively multiplayer. And, of course, they are online. That at least is obvious.

Of course, the other half, the RPG half, is a damned lie. Role-playing? Don't make me laugh... I'm drinking Dr. Pepper, which hurts the most of all sodas when making a hasty improvised exit through one's sinuses. Now, granted, there are roles to be played. The trouble is that nobody really bothers to play them. Furthermore, those that do play them are mocked relentlessly and ostracized by all.

Let's face it: if there are thirty thousand people playing, and you are one of the dozen who actually chooses to play the role of the magical elf swordmaster, you will be condemned as a freak.

Ironically, we on the outside can condemn not only the dozen but also the rest of the thirty thousand as freaks. Because the one noun in the nomenclature, the "game" for which stands the G, is a cold falsehood as well.

Why? Because a game is something that one plays for entertainment, an enjoyable activity in which one engages for amusement, or as a substratum for a good time with friends, or something along those lines.

Show me the pasty-faced slug-man, his eyes fixed unblinkingly upon his computer screen. Show me his sweaty palms, scrape off for me the salt that has crusted beneath his fingernails from the evaporation of the pungent ichor he perspires. Count for me the hours upon hours spent playing his "game", to the exclusion of social interaction with his friends and family... the hours during which he neither sleeps nor eats, the hours during which he urinates into a jar so as not to waste precious minutes of playing time to relieve himself in the toilet.

And upon consideration of this fleshy pixel-burned lump, tell me that I have just described an individual playing a game. These are not games. They are obsessions, manifestations of an inner sense of worthlessness and incapacity that drive flesh-and-blood humans to make their online characters rich and powerful in all the ways that they themselves are not.

(You may be wondering at this point why I have used exclusively male pronouns to talk about our game slug. I have done this because of the nature of any online gathering of online persons, from chatrooms to text-based games to the slick games with the blisteringly good graphics. On the Internet, the men are real men. Also, the women are really men. The children are FBI agents.)

I actually inflicted one of these games upon a roommate of mine. My rationale was partly driven by malice, and partly driven by an intense hatred for video-game music. My victim was the sort of fellow who not only plays games until he has beaten them, but also plays them until he has "mastered them". This "mastering" is his own term. In short, it means expanding or strengthening or leveling one's character to the point where it can knock out the Big Boss with a flick of its finger.

Naturally, this meant hours and hours out of each day spent playing whatever was the current game to be mastered. And, therefore, hours upon hours spent listening to the same old video-game music. This drove me insane.

So I turned him on to an MMORPG... a text-based one. All I heard then was the clatter of keys... soothing, like rain on a tin roof. I watched with amusement as his relationship with his girlfriend began to stutter and die. I smiled quietly to myself as he got suspended from the university for lack of academic progress, and then disenrolled for continued lack of academic progress. I got a little warm fuzzy feeling in my appendix every time he surfaced from his game-world to make a half-hearted attempt to put together an appeal to the Faculty Senate to let him back in.

So soothing. Like rain on a tin roof. And the sweet smell of burning lives, like pine incense. It was worthy of haiku:

Keys fall, blue needles,
flurries of ash to the sea.
Snowflakes by moonlight.

He even brought out the most ironic part of these games: the screwed up economics of it all. Here he was, spending real money in order to get items that really don't exist: solid chunks of legal tender in exchange for the rearrangement of some ones and zeros on a server somewhere in Canada.

Furthermore, he was paying the people who owned that mystery Canadian server even more real money every month for the continued right to pay them real money for virtual stuff. I watched him work delivering pizzas to get the money he needed to pour into getting his virtual fix. And he only delivered the bare minimum of pizzas needed to cover his game costs; the rest of the time he called in to ask his managers "do you really need me to come in tonight" and suchlike.

So, what's the moral of the story? Well, we have two.

The first moral of the story is that the Interwebs are a system of pipes and the Devil lives in them and destroys lives using his Warcrafts and his Everquests and his Consecutively Ordinally-numbered Lives.

The second moral of the story is that if you overplay your video games and piss me off, I will ruin your life.

But I will ruin it in a way that is evocative of beautifully clean images, like the stark blackness of a cherry tree in winter, a few ice-cased blossoms clinging to the branches as if in hope of a sudden spring.

Doesn't that sound nice?