This Gaming Life by Rossignol Jim

Author:Rossignol, Jim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

REYKJAVIK

The Special Relationship

EVOLUTIONARY CHANGE

The success of my Quake team didn't last. About a year after my new job started, we began to break up and drift apart. It wasn't just us, either. The Quake III scene was beginning to fade across Europe, as new games were released and old communities began to lose their collective enthusiasm. Some of the people from the team were already getting involved in other online games, such as the pseudomedieval wars of Dark Age of Camelot and the bite-sized World War II escapades of Battlefield 1942. Eventually we decided to end it.

Mildly despondent, I found solace in off-line games, work, and writing a terrible novel about sentient graffiti. I yearned for the camaraderie and the conflict that running the team had provided. And the void the team had left didn't seem to fade or to be filled up with other projects. I began to dabble in other online games, but none of them really suited my method of play. The entire world seemed to be in the thrall of the team-based combat of Counter-Strike, with its counterterrorism theme and realistic weapons. But it just didn't suit me. I no longer felt part of a community.

One of the games I began to experiment with during that time was called EVE Online. I loved the massively multi-player concept it offered: thousands of people playing side by side in a vast, persistent galaxy. Trade, fight, build spaceships, and then fly them through the heavens—it was just the kind of gaming concept and fiction I could invest in. The only problem was that I didn't really understand how it all worked. Grabbing a rocket launcher and defending a flag I understood. But trading on virtual markets, mining rocks, and fitting out fictional starships with a hundred different pieces of equipment? Well, that was too much for me. I soon gave up and looked for my fun elsewhere.

A couple of months later, I was back in EVE again, this time on the promise of a friend who was playing the game. He claimed that we'd be able to set up and run a mercenary company within the game world. We'd be bounty hunters, taking on contracts and hunting down villains for cash. It sounded thrilling. It became obvious quite soon that there was one crucial problem: we had no more idea how to become bounty hunters in this game than we did in real life. After a couple of months of floundering and aimless hours of exploring, we finally caught and killed our first miscreant. But he was also our last. I gave up on EVE and started playing other games.

And yet again, I was enticed back. My first two forays had imbued this game with a sense of mystery: how could a game be so complex that its workings were beyond my appraisal, even after weeks of play? What was it about this space game that made me return, despite the fact that I'd been so bored, frustrated, and perplexed? I began trying to answer some of these questions in an article.

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