paralogue.org

I never really grew up with MMOs. Like, I did but I didn't.

I tried a lot. EverQuest 2, for one — and it was, like, 2007. I made a gnome rogue that looked like Blender vomit. I read Real Life Comics a lot in the mid-2000s and they always depicted Final Fantasy XI in a way that seemed like it was really cool to just live in, even though I know it really just plays like this.

Maybe it's fun to live in anyway?

I mainly played Guild Wars 1, which is sort of like going through PSO or Diablo II or something. You play through a story campaign in instances that require a party, but it can be AI or other humans. So I actually ended up playing a lot of it alone. I was in guilds, but no one stuck with the game like I did. They left in 2007 after playing for a year and I still play it now.

I remember playing a bit of World of Warcraft, but never breached level 20. I just didn't like the artstyle, nor the lore, and so I was at odds with the entire premise of my supposed existence. I spent most of my time figuring out how to play the auctions with custom GUI extensions or whatever before fizzling out.

I played Guild Wars 2 for quite a while — mostly in the mid-2010s. I spent a lot of time in World vs. World, which is essentially server vs. server map control. You'd see the same people day after day. I really relished being greeted by name — getting a reputation — just for doing a job, for being known for something. She always protects the towers. She's second in command of some guild.

I did that for several years — first just appearing now and then, poking my head in and taking objectives, but then eventually joining a guild. I was in a role-playing, player vs. player guild, and we were essentially a militia within the server. The ones who RP join the parallel corps. We weren't that bad, either.

Then over time it fell away. I lost interest in the metagame. I wasn't good enough to lead 50 people into battle. I did my best work from the sidelines.

What I did like about Guild Wars 2, though, was my first hundred hours, which was completing map exploration. I found everything in the world and got to max my level out by just taking my time and seeing what was going on in each space. I only found a game that recaptured that feeling in Breath of the Wild — and Tears of the Kingdom itself didn't quite match it.

I see a lot of friends play Old School Runescape now, and I wonder if the appeal is similar — to live in a space with other people, to explore. To change the context of working away at something in order that you might see it then as playful. I never liked the artstyle and so never played it as a kid. I just don't know what I would play now.

runescape (now old school runescape) was something i grew up on. getting lured into the wildy, leveling up, not knowing anything about the game and it feeling like an endless adventure. it helped that there wasn't such a thing as a wiki. the world felt bigger then. i later ended spending a lot of my teens rediscovering the game as old school runescape, and i guess its stuck with me now for years as an of on and off fixation. its a game that preys on your nostalgia by all means, and i don't think anyone who starts playing it today will have an experience representative of the one i had as a kid. people don't talk to each other much anymore and there is a big focus on minmaxing. but i guess that's fun too as someone who played it back in the day. it feels like doing justice to my older self.

Nostalgic and wanting for those rare and enchanting encounters where two strangers share compassion. Virtual worlds and sandboxes are reflections, and mmos give such a rich range of expression.

Think often of that one interviewer in VR chat and how to hold space for people to open up

As a social player there is no better format of game.

Started with SWG (RIP) played many since and just the odd hours with WoW Classic now.

Considering resubscribing to FFXIV just for bard (they have an array of instruments to play via Midi)

There's a bunch of RetroAchievements for Horizon XI, the private server for Final Fantasy XI that brings it closer to the retail experience. That said I'm not sure what the right choice is, if any. I feel like if I wanted an actual MMO, "hang out with other people in a guild," game, that appears to be XIV right now. And I never quite got into that. I could try again, I guess. Something about the XI feel makes me get a little more lost in it ... it's drab and lonely, even with people. It feels indifferent to me. It doesn't feel like I'm in an amusement park. I feel like I could die or I could survive and it's up to me how I choose to do it. I think that's something that bugs me about current MMOs: it makes you feel too special and then gives you too-curated, too-shiny experiences.

Thinking about MMOs awakens a lot in me, they always felt like a virtual space for me to be myself and my gender ever since I got into them.

I played WoW and city of heroes very religiously on release and got into SWG a few years after it released, settling on CoH as my permanent home away from the real world. I was a teenager who experienced gender dysphoria from a very young age and became increasingly disaffected with the real world and my own body as I tried to find virtual spaces to escape into, and MMOs felt like an escape like nothing else, almost like a drug, to be able to immerse myself in a roleplaying community, where people seemed to perceive me as my avatar and gendered me correctly based on how I spoke and presented myself through characters without question. That probably fucked me up a bit and is why I'm as RPG-brained as I am now (though I adore RPGs in general for giving me that escape from reality as a whole)

I still think back to the day the city of heroes/villains servers got shut down officially in 2012 and I spent the remaining hours of it with everyone holding an online eulogy for it, chatting away with my friends. It felt like the world, our world, was ending, and some part of us was dying along with it. It felt as real as anything outside the monitor. I really badly want to write a novel about the feelings I had back then, heavily based on my emotional state at the time. I'm pretty sure several indie devs made games based on similar feelings of experiencing a virtual world coming to an end. I wonder if people will mourn the death of facebook's failed metaverse experiment in the same way, but to me, even if those are in VR, I don't know if that medium could connect to me emotionally in the same way that MMOs did, even if they are materially more immersive because of the VR

City of heroes did eventually get a widely accessible private server infrastructure, in part because one of the former devs anonymously gave someone unrelated to the original game pretty much all the source code, so now there are several stable and playable versions of the game up, some even adding new content that was never in the original release, because of the dedication of those who loved this world when it was shuttered. I have played some of them(Primarily CoH homecoming) and something feels missing though which has stopped me from being able to go back for more than a month or 2 of sporadically playing. Maybe it's because I'm older and have a job and responsibilities now, or maybe it just feels like picking at the scabs of an old wound, knowing that it hurts more to continue on without the people I made those memories with instead of just letting go

If I could afford to hide myself away as a Vtuber or live my life on VRchat I'd probably enjoy that a lot

RuneScape essentially formed the backdrop of my teenage years. Though perhaps that isn't quite correct, maybe it was the other way around.

I have a lot of fond memories of it, and it really was a wonderful social experience. I very much enjoyed the quests as well honestly. I spent so much time in it that it was practically an alternative life of mine. I wonder really, how different my life would be had I not played it, or not played it so much. It didn't directly lead to anything but I presume it must have shaped who I am as a person quite drastically.