A Touch of Medieval

Whether an example of ubiquitous cultural desires, careful marketing research, and/or corporate copy-catting, a close look at the settings of the three active leading online-persistent-multi-player role-playing-game (OPM-RPG) worlds, reveals their almost identical arenas of medieval fantasy. Electronic Arts' (Ultima Online) "Britannia", SONY's (EverQuest) "Norrath" and now Microsoft's (Asheron's Call) "Derreth" are almost cloned worlds. All three game worlds are set in a medieval realm, offering players a selection of medieval characters, settings, and motivations. These are feudal worlds with kings, lords, castles, and swords; elves, dragons, devils, and trolls; blue skies and Anglo-Germanic countrysides, and yes of course a Magic lore, that holds them all together. Forevermore.

EndGame

What potentially differentiates each game-world from its competitors is a self-proclamation of technical superiority; "Our world is bigger", "our world is faster", "our world is more realistic", "our world has 3D graphics", "our world has more monsters". This is an Oedipal (or is it Darwinian?) drive most consumers are quite familiar with, and often susceptible to. The "Father" is displaced by a newborn who is perhaps identical in all respects except of course, he boasts a bigger hard-drive. The "Evolution" of OPM-RPGs progressed from silent text based Multi User Dungeons (MUDs) to graphical 2D isometric games like Electronic Arts' Ultima Online and Blizzard's Diablo, to real-time 3D graphical games like SONY's Everquest and Microsoft's Asheron's Call. The stakes of the OPMRPG industry are extremely high with millions of monthly subscribers already hooked and a new market of network-ready console-system users ready to join in the action (SONY Playstation 2, SEGA Dreamcast, and the rumored Microsoft game console are internet ready systems). Given the technical and financial infrastructure that OPM-RPG games require, it comes as no surprise to find giants like SONY, Microsoft and Electronic Arts (Electronic Arts is Canada's largest game company responsible for hundreds of sports games, the SimCity, Command and Conquer, and Ultima Series, and many more best selling titles) moving to monopolize this young multi-billion dollar industry. Maintaining a OPM-RPG is a gargantuan task, demanding massive backbone server support, impervious server security, (gamers make good hackers...), a continuously upgradable game world, 24-7 (zero downtime) server access, and the recruitment of online employees who can provide simultaneous in-game tech support, creative narrative twists, censorship services, dispute arbitration, and game balance research (more on this issue in the Spies, Barons, Wizards and Watchers scheme). Compared with other game markets like the first-person-shooter(FPS), sporting, or real-time-strategy (RTS) markets where thousands of titles are released every year, the massive OPM-RPG market is currently dominated by three lone titles(Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Asheron's Call). In this ecology only the whalers survive.

For an individual OPM-RPG player, there is no reason to play more than one OPM-RPG , as these gamers usually immerse themselves to the hilt in their chosen world and don't waste time mastering multiple universes at the same time. Time is best spent developing one Uber-Hero in the chosen world than trying to time-share characters in multiple worlds. In addition to this, OPM-RPG game developers have become more adept at prolonging the "moments of ecstasy" that stretch between Newbeehood to Godlihood, by slowing down character progress and consistently updating and patching the game words to include new sights sounds and spells. Although several new OPM-RPG's are scheduled for release in the near future (Ultima Online 2, Neverwinter Nights, Arcanum, and Microsoft's Dungeon Siege.) it seems inevitable, given the growing demands put on a OPM-RPG developer, that only heavies such as Microsoft, SONY and Electronic Arts can survive this endgame.

Double Fantasy

With their combination of state of the art 3D graphics and sound with intercontinental networked multi-user technology, OPM-RPGs are positioned as the ultimate "achievement" of today's technoculture. And yet, given the seemingly infinite possibilities that these technologies offer (not to mention, the extent of the human imagination), it is curious that they construct and occupy a context of pre-industrial medieval fantasy. Is the goal of these games to redefine the word "fantasy" to mean a "pre-industrial world?" Players of OPM-RPGs might think so. These games have duplicated a pre-industrial world using the most advanced post-industrial technology. An intriguing paradox arises as consumers demand their cyber-cultural "rights" to speed, a permutable identity, virtual regeneration, tele-presence, and access non-Cartesian space while simultaneously desiring a "true medieval experience." It seems impossible to maintain this double fantasy without either giving up cyber-cultural "rights" or spoiling the immersive medieval fantasy with modern technological interferences...Perhaps not.

Metaphoric Patches vs. Futuristic Artifacts

The term artifact is often used in tech-speak in reference to elements that remain undesirably exposed. Errant pixels or blurry patches in an image file, excess noise or hiss in a sound stream, unpredictable ASCII characters found in an automated log file, are some examples of artifacts. They are different from bugs (programming mistakes) in that they usually don't prevent functionality but instead present an unpredicted aesthetic incongruity. Technical artifacts are not necessarily caused by bugs but are usually a side effect of hardware incompatibility or unpredictability, or some effect of a lower level system operation. Many technological artifacts exist in the OPM-RPG worlds. It is obvious that to the "creators" of these worlds any visible sign of technology becomes an unwanted artifact; an anachronism that threatens the constitution of the fantasy, a hole or a wound that needs to be dressed or patched. The most prevalent form of "patching" is through the use of magic. Magic being so omnipresent in the cogent fantasy of forgetting of online RPG games, allows its use as a "metaphoric patch" for technology to go unnoticed. Following are some examples of how magic has been used (as a meta-metaphor) successfully and unsuccesfully to patch technological artifacts.

Artifact A: Trouble with Time

When logging into "Asheron's Call" a message reads "Entering world as XXX." This message is immediately followed by a fantasmagorically animated viewpoint speeding through a spiraling blue tunnel sucking the viewer into the virtual game-space. At times this journey can take a long time, over two minutes on a slow connection. One begins to wonder if perhaps the metaphor of virtual time-tunnel, or of cyber-birth (or perhaps the message that a fetishized cyberspace can only exist in the ("you gotta get yer' 3D graphics card") 3rd dimension) could have been edited a bit more deftly by the Microsoft animation department. In this case the loading time needed to "enter the world" is disguised by a visual "metaphoric patch" of 3D time-tunneled transcendent birth. When in fact, the tunnel animation serves an additional non-metaphoric purpose of disguising a technical artifact, a horrible artifact of techno-reality: that unfortunately time has not yet been completely mastered by technology, and yes, waiting is still a part of our glorious future-past.

Artifact B: Trouble with Speed

When too many players converge on a specific location in the game world the game engine can't keep up and character response and motion appear sluggish - this artifact is commonly known as lag. Lag can be the result of over-crowding, slow servers and/or slow net connections, and is probably the most ubiquitous artifact in the OPM-RPG arenas. Lag is a particularly sinister artifact in that it inflicts double damage to continuity. It disrupts the illusion of a real-time live show, and more significantly, it disrupts the illusion of smooth and direct control. The avatar is the player's alter ego (in some cases ideal-ego) and seamless control over its actions is particularly important in establishing the player's identification with his/her avatar. Identification with the avatar is the key step towards absorption into the game world. (note: Everquest and Asheron's Call can be played in third or first-person viewing modes, changes in viewing modes raise additional questions regarding the process of identification during role-playing. Issues of perspective shifts will be explored in the Bit Fiddling scheme).

An "Evolutionary" trend to increase avatar identification by increasing the range of "physical" control over the avatar can be observed in the increasing amount of animated actions that an avatar may perform. In the early MUD games, text alone was used to evoke spoken words, emotional inflections, gestures and avatar movement. This allowed for a very developed sense of identification and immersion. But gamers wanted graphics. At least they were told they did. In the graphical isometric world of Ultima Online, avatar motion is restricted along an 8 directional axis in the horizontal plane, and up or down in the vertical plane, only bow and salute gestures are represented visually (hmm...) while all other avatar control remains text driven. In the three dimensional world of EverQuest the selection of animated gestures was increased and avatars can visually jump, duck, crawl, swim, dive, wave, bow, cheer and gesture obscenely. Asheron's Call brings a further increase in the number of animated gestures and actions. As more and more elements of avatar control are shifted into the visual, the stakes surrounding lag become more significant. One can imagine a "metaphoric patch" for lag as a voice or scrolling text may announce a message: " Ahh, citizens, so many of thou have converged together in one blessed spot that I shall place thou all under my spell of slowness, so thou may admire thy fellow citizens' fair faces in comfort".

Artifact C: Loading Zone

One of Asheron's greatest claims to superiority over EverQuest is in the elimination of inter-game loading zones, This means a player never needs to wait while their computer downloads zone data. The world of EverQuest is divided into many small zones each containing character event information for that zone only. A player's computer only stores the information about their current zone. When they cross over into a new zone the information from the previous zone is discarded while the new zone's information is downloaded. At the beginning of the download a short message: "Please wait while loading new Zone..." is displayed, the game window freezes, and after a 10-60 second wait (depending on the players modem speed) the game resumes. The zoning of the game world reduces the lag artifact that notoriously debuted in Ultima Online. The loading zone artifact in EverQuest is an example of an artifact that was left exposed without a "metaphoric patch".

Artifact D: Trouble with Space

OPMRPG spaces are vast and densely detailed. The player is presented with a triple gift of infinity: infinite expanse + infinite detail + eternity = infinite possibility. The question of traversing infinite space is a question of time and speed. In our strict medieval context, finding speedy transportation is a curious problem. Having a character ride a horse for 3 hours to arrive at a distant city would just not fly. So the solution procured in Ultima Online, EverQuest and Asheron's Call is the magic portal, a shimmering gateway that allows the condensation of a sprawling Cartesian virtual space into a compact non-Cartesian data space; it allows the player to instantaneously "teleport" to a remote location. Portals either exist as permanent magical fixtures at specific locations or are created by magic-using characters. Magic portals serve as "metaphoric patchs" to the artifact of non-linear travel allowed by instantanous Random Access Data Retrieval, a "right" many post-industrial citizens demand as they jump around in their CDs, DVDs, and Databases.