Lance Fry / Scroll staff

The Conquest of Virtual Worlds

The upsurge of multi-player Internet games has created a following of players; downsides and addiction abound

by Brian Schweider Scroll Staff

For hundreds of thousands of players, this mystic adventure is played out every day and night across the telephone and fiber-optic lines of the Internet. For one player in particular this fantasy occupies a large chunk of his life.

Brian Eborn, a 25-year-old former student at Idaho State University, sits silently in a worn reclining chair in the dark of his bedroom. Surrounding him are four speakers that fill the room with the sounds of a medieval battle. The only illumination in the room comes from the large 21-inch monitor on his computer desk and a television tuned to VH-1.

Without taking his eyes from the flashing screen, Brian reaches down, plucks a Dorito from a sack, and stuffs it in his mouth. On the monitor a large white dragon sits with nearly 100 other players swinging swords and casting virtual spells against the beast.

Brian began his gaming lifestyle in 1996 when his parent bought a computer.

“He began obtaining games from friends at work and school. He would then bring them home and play all night,” Don Eborn, Brian’s father, said.

Shortly afterward, he began hanging out at the Hard Drive Café, a now out-of-business cyber café in Rexburg.

“I met a lot of people who had the same interests as I did. We were all interested in video games as well as more traditional games,” Brian said.

From there he steadily collected video game titles, often working to complete many games during the same period of time.

“I’ve worked on as many as six titles at a time,” Brian said. “Each game can take anywhere from 35 to 150 total hours played to complete.”

After a while he got tired of playing a game to the end and set them on a shelf to collect dust. He then heard about massive multi-player online role-playing games, or MMORPGs, and the concept that these games didn’t have a normal ending.

Three years ago, Brian began playing Everquest, a fantasy MMORPG. He regularly joins online friends in the game to participate in what they call raids. During these times, Brian and his friends will fight against computer-controlled opponentes in difficult areas of the game for long periods of time, sometimes in excess of 10 hours.

“They [MMORPGs] are known as persistent world settings, meaning that when I log off the game is still there,” Brian said. “The only beginning or end to your game play is when you complete a goal you’ve set for yourself.”

Brian recently completed one of this goals in the game. He reached level 60 of the game, the highest level a player can reach. He’s since set a goal to become a master potion maker in the fantasy-based game.

“There have been times I’ve played for eight hours straight,” Brian said. “I don’t see it as a waste of time, I’m doing something I enjoy, and I’ve even made real money from my experience.” According to Brian he has been able to sell virtual items in the game for real currency.

Other players of such games echo Brian’s views of these games.

One such player known only as VB3D responded in an Internet message board on MMORPGs: “Every outing [in the game] can be a new challenging adventure, because the characters can compete and cooperate in ways that the designers never imagined.”

Another player from the same message board said, “Wouldn’t you rather be an elf ranger striking your foes with a silver-tipped arrow? And wouldn’t you want to be a Jedi, a smuggler running from a bounty on your head, or a successful businessman who has enough money to be above the law? These things are hard to do in real life, but not so hard in a game.”

Nicholas Yee, a graduate student at Harvard University, states in his study of Everquest that, “Everquest provides its players with a sense of instant gratification as well as a sense of community.” He explains that as you move through these online worlds, it is the sense of accomplishment that drives players to continue. In the following example Yee takes the concept of creating virtual items in the game to explain the attraction.

“The simple tasks that you did to improve trade skills have become trivial, but the rewards you get—the blue skill points and the metal bits—drive you to perform tasks more elaborate than before because trivial tasks are no longer rewarded,” Yee said.

To Raph Koster, creative director for both Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, these worlds aren’t just games. He believes that the social interaction’s people encounter and the social bonds that they create in a virtual world make that world make that world more than just a game.

Brian sits down and enters a user name and password to enter the game of Everquest. He presses some buttons and is transported into the mystic world of Norrath in the guise of a female barbarian. He quickly locates members of his guild, a group of players who play the game together, and begins exploring a new section of the game that was just recently released. Despite the sudden upsurge in users of these graphical worlds, they all owe their existence to simple text-based games.

The current generation of online worlds began years ago during the infancy of the Internet with a database of text messages and commands. Players would connect to these text-based worlds known as MUDs, or Multi User Dungeons, and were able to interact with other players around the world. In these text-based worlds, players would fight imaginary monsters, create items made of ones and zeros and socialize by typing messages to each other.

While some of these text-based MUDs charged a subscription fee, the majority of them were — and still are — free services.
As the years passed the first graphical based MUDs appeared, the first of which was Meridian 59.

Meridian 59 was created in 1995 and supported up to 250 players per game server. Meridian 59 was also the first graphical MUD to use a subscription-based service. Meridian 59 ended its run in 1999.

The second major graphical MUD created was Ultima Online, created by Origin in 1997.

“Ultima Online was designed with a basic philosophy in mind: that we were providing an online world, one that could live and breathe and develop in new and unpredictable ways. We wanted to provide scope for players to develop online communities in a way that no other online world had done,” Koster said.

It was Ultima Online’s success that began the massive multi-player online game revolution. At its peak, Ultima Online had 400,000 players and was charging each of them roughly $10 a month to play. Currently Ultima Online boasts 200,000 players at the same subscription rate.

“Ultima Online proved to the industry that it was plausible to make money on virtual worlds,” Haden Blackman, executive producer of Star Wars Galaxies, said. “Had that game flopped, we wouldn’t be here today.”

According to Koster, the only things that makes or breaks an online game is its ability to retain customers. “It still boils down to providing an experience that players wish to return to time and time again,” Koster said.

Everquest was released in 1999 selling 20,000 copies the first day of release, a record for the computer game industry. During the past three years it has grown in size and scope, selling three-game expansions and drawing in nearly $5 million monthly in subscription fees.

Three years after Everquest came out, six other MMORPGs have hit the video game scene including the first MMORPG to come to a video game console.

These new games helped the video game industry to gross $9.5 billion in 2001, and it is expected that by 2004 that massive massive multi-player online games will bring $1.4 billion to the gaming industry.

However, this new genre has not been without trials. Ever since the popularity of Everquest hit the scene there have been concerns of Internet addiction increasing. A quick search of www.google.com, an Internet meta-search engine, for “Everquest addiction” produces 1,370 Web pages. Many players of the game refer to it as “Evercrack.” Indeed, an online community has grown to support partners of Everquest addicts.

Everquest widows was set up July 1, 2000. It now boasts over 2,000 members. A spokesperson from Everquest widows states that their Web site “is a form for partners, family and friends of people who are hooked on Everquest. We turn to each other because it’s no fun talking to the back of someone’s head while they’re busy retrieving their corpse or ‘telling’ with their guild-mates as you speak. We’re here to support each other, and to discuss the trials and tribulation of living in real life while our partner is immersed in Everquest.”

The group tells stories of husbands losing jobs, neglecting family responsibilities and going into debt for the game.

Despite the problems associated with some of these game titles such as Star Wars Galaxies, Worlds of Warcraft, Final Fantasy Online and Everquest 2, all to be released within the next year, are expected to draw many more fans to this new genre giving them the opportunity to live in the universe of some of their favorite movies and video games.

“I predict you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” Koster said.