I've now had a lot of experiences throughout the web, from my early teenage immersion into World of Warcraft, RuneScape, NordicMafia (text-based become-a-Mafia-boss discontinued browser game), Travian (interactive image-based 'roman'-vs-'galic'-vs-'germanic tribe' strategy browser game) to varied pornography, Age of Conan ("most sexy, brutal and savage MMORPG ever made"), forums culture, Facebook culture, anonymous culture, YouTube culture, Skype culture (if there is such a thing) and so forth (I yet to learn how to make good use of Twitter).
A lot of these experiences have been in way "not real", in that a lot of thought, a lot of feeling and lot of other experiences occurring while roaming the WWW and pop-computer technology is counter-intuitive and puts heavy challenges to description. First of all there's a lot of niche out there, subculture humour... you kinda have to "know it" to "feel it". How do you describe, in an engaging way with the reader: how a gamer gets adrenaline boosts by going with his "guild" or "clan" to fight enemies? How do you describe the cool feeling of becoming a drug lord in game whose entire system is based on text and a few images? Where you progress by clicking buttons and waiting a few minutes... it sounds so dull, but of course! That's not how the player feels like, so how do I describe intuitively what it feels like to rob old ladies clicking a button and making money out of it, or stealing a car which only exists in text and selling it on a virtual text-based market?
I mean, do you have to exaggerate everything like Sheldon Cooper and co. does in The Big Bang Theory? It makes a story, but an inaccurate story, of the lives of gamers and web-roamers, when you put things to the extreme like that. I may occasionally smile for myself, even laugh a bit, but never any significant amount, and still I can "feel" a lot, when I play, when I chat, when I watch movies, when I participate or observe cool web-phenomena, but to people who hasn't had the same "training", who hasn't experienced all of that, it's kinda hard to give a good engaging description of "why" or "how" I feel and react to things, but mostly "why".
"Why" do I feel shattered when my classmate stole his way into my account on Nordic Mafia and destroyed all I had worked so much to gain? All my non-existing cars, all the non-existing robberies I've done, all my non-existing cannabis plantations and all my power as a Mafia boss? It's easy to understand "logically", but when you read a good novel, one that grips your feelings, like romance, or ghost stories or war tales, etc., it's not just that you understand the logic, that people "can" feel that way, it's not just your acceptance, but you "know" how it feels because the power of the novel grabs you, and you may cry, either of joy or sorrow, of terribleness, or you may lie frightened in your bed, or maybe shocked. But when I tell you how I was devastated by the ruining of what I'd built, you understand it logically, but there's no emotional intuition that makes you understand my anger as if it were yourself, or my slight despair at the loss.
When I gather the clan, or guild, to great thoughts of conquest in game, I'm daily supplied with a stream of importance around myself as the leader who is going to lead these random noobs around the world into a great battle against some in-game grand enemy. This actually once occurred to me when I was young and started a guild in World of Warcraft with a goal of invading and holding the Undercity with army of players. Being a complete noob I had no experience to perform such a feat, and no idea how to even try although I managed to lead an expedition of under-equipped players to territories close to this Undercity (inhabited by a lot of enemy players) and eventually reach the place only to meet a metaphorical wall of rock when I tried to enter it as we were swiftly and repeatedly repelled before we were hunted and the moral of our entire expedition came to null.
However, I managed to instil a certain feeling, a powerful feeling, of being in a movement to do something thought to be extraordinary (but in the end just plain stupid) and a feeling of promise that we were the ones to do it. It's like that feeling of epic music, it's like flashes of all the epic movies you've ever seen, about great clashes and great achievements, and you feel like you are them, for a brief moment, and this intoxicating feeling, how do I give people this feeling in writing?
How do I convey this phenomena in a way that is, first of all not like an article, because I want to write like a novel most of all, and second in a way that gives rise to emotions in my writers, give them a sense of how it feels like to be intoxicated by the feelings that Anonymous gives as you install Low Orbit Ion Cannon and click the button to launch an attack with thousands of others, how it feels like to chat with strangers across the world, not just in a feedback way (that they make you angry, sad, joyous) but the feel of exploring the mind of a Swede, a Brit, an Irishman, an Arab, a Chinaman, a Jap, a Korean, or maybe an African? Because there also there is a certain feel, like wonder, excited interest, exploration in the vague meaning of the word.
How do I convey the feeling of voidness as you as a body cease to exist and your mind jumps from identity to identity as you go from website to website, game to game, program to program, or how do I convey the feeling of writing something on a game forum that may be put into a game with hundreds of thousands of players, the grandeur of being the mastermind behind such things? The social context, with the people you hate, the people you love, the people you admire, the people you appreciate, the people that upset you, but all this in the void, the empty space of the World Wide Web?
My project became this text below, which tries to put myself in a situation, where I try to give the general picture of a half-real situation I once experienced on this gamer forum, and here I try to convey the feeling by writing it in such a way that you experience it the same order as I did, that the text becomes a predefined order of "feed" to your mind, the key mainly not to describe things plainly, but to make people put things together intuitively themselves:
Virtual Biography: Prologue
The void of the world wide web. A forum here lies, dwelling in cyberspace, and in it the netizens in the black ignorance of night recreate each other imaginatively and repeatedly. Successively streaming symbols to unique minds from screens of varying size, shape, date, some black, sleek, thin, neatly designed, and some fat, white or grey, old, slow, lacking the perfection of modernity.
The forum-warriors are the front of the forum. From the nannies, jerks, netrats, ideologues, cyber sisters, toxic grandmas, to the philosophers, kung fu masters, evil clowns, perverts, godzillas, archivists, necromancers and ALLCAPS. The list of them goes on.
In one particular night, in a boy’s room out on the country, in steep side of a valley, on a farm, inside the end of stable, a particularly thrilled 17-year-old reads a particularly exciting message from a particularly exciting topic, or thread as the topics are called… this thread named ”Revolution!”
Sitting in his boxers, a fat belly covering up for any threat of indecent exposure to any intruders of his hall, two lazy but not especially tired eyes leaning on the original post-message in the thread:
FunCom we are tired of fighting computer-controlled enemies! We want mechanisms for fighting each other! Since launch of this game… Age of Conan… we were promised vast battles, systems where we could be each other’s mercenaries, systems where the world would be a place for conquest and competition!
What have you given us now instead? New dungeons with more computerized enemies, new playfields with more computerized enemies, new same boring ”go get ’x’ item and bring back” quests, new systems of advancing ourselves which gives barely anything and requires hundreds of hours spent doing the constantly same shit over again!
We want PvP action, player-versus-player action, NOW! Last time you gave us something YOU, instead of making us fight each other, you told us to pick up a pickaxe and go digging metal and chopping wood for reward! How serious can this be PvP? And now you are saying you will give us more PvP… by adding a new computerized chief enemy which we for some reason are supposed to fight each other to be able to kill? Where are the battles! Where is the political scene where my guild --- Iron Will --- being the top clan of gamers in ENTIRE EUROPE, actually can feel that dominance? When will we stop weaving shirts to be highest ranking! When will we stop building monuments to be the highest ranking! When will we stop killing computer-enemies to be the highest ranking!?
NEVER! You told us NEVER! This has gone too far, you will start making, all of your 100 artists, computer programmers and system desingers, ALL OF YOU will start MAKING PVP CONTENT IN MY FUCKINGS GAME OR MY CLAN, and ALL THE OTHER TOP CLANS, will CRASH every PvP-server in Europe, in America and Asia! This is your choice! We bought this game with a promise, and now we are taking action against lies and deceit!
The F5 button is pressed, updating the page… a new comment has arrived to the OP (original post):
I bloody hell support this! About time also! The Night Watch clan will stand at your side! Whisper to my ear in the game and you’ll see a rally to your cause!
Another F5, another comment:
I’ve dreamt for this moment for two fuckings years! This game director sucks my balls! Out with him now! The Ragnarok clan stands at your side!The Scandinavians will come! Whisper us!
Refresh…
The last five weeks my clan RusCorp has harvested thousands of pieces of wood, cotton and metal. THOUSANDS… NO PVP EVER INVOLVED! We’ve been taking turns with the other clans to maximize our common profit, we’ve all maximized our levels of advancement by running back and forth from trees to shrines of sacrifice for the advancement points, from mining rocks to shrines of sacrifice for the advancement points, from bushes to shrines of sacrifice for the advancement points… where is the fun in this? Where is the competition? Farel, master of Clan RusCorp, promises our russian support!
More refresh. More refresh. More refresh.
Let’s fight the bastards! Clan Vendetta; Italian resistance!
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Sinister Awakening clan will not let this continue. You have Swizz here!
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eXile clan grant any support to anyone who can get that PvE-slacker away of this game! British at your aid!
The refreshes goes on. More clans follow: The Law, Red Army, A Better Tomorrow, Taco Warriors, Tribunal, The Skullbreakers, Circle of Eternity… the list goes on, smaller clans voice their prospects, some offer themselves outright, others promise by conditions of time and place, some expresses ’maybe’ or ’might’ depending on available numbers of members online. But the pattern remains the same: revolution can finally be here.
The boy scratches his belly. Picks his nose, grabs an open can of coke and drinks some. He presses ’New Comment’, writes some, his hands weary of every key as if he was born with his hands on them; he knows every key blindfolded to an accuracy of 98% successful hits, he writes with one hand, not looking, sipping his coke with the other smelling a cold night seeping through all the open windowns in his room, including an open balcony door. Winter is at hand, but cold doesn’t touch his mountain of fat; comparing himself with his game character he would’ve called it ”frost resistance”, lowering the impact of frost upon himself.
He finishes… he presses ’Enter’, page refreshes:
This is my life. For three years now, I’ve spent day and night on this forum, and not a seldom time in the game. The game director, of a game of hundreds of thousands of players, knows who I am. People hate me here, some love me, some raise their flags to support me, but this was not written by me, I stirr the movement, champion it several places, but I am only a rebel leader among many, and right now a fellow rebel leader has taken the threat to a new height. And this guy is serious. This guy is hard ball.
I’ve spent hours, days, months, years now on visualizing a future for this game. The most brutal, most sexy, most visually stunning game ever released as a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game.It crashed financially the first year to technical disaster in the launch. The old philosopher, the old leader, the old game director, he left, taking his hat and abandoning not only his dream but the dream of hundreds of thousands of fans, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of admirers. He abandoned us.
Not many people knows who makes the games. That’s only for the specially interested, like us, but there is a fair amount of those specially interested here. Our game, seeing the loss of the visionary who brought us all together, more than a million people, was replaced by this dull-minded Player-versus-Environment, or player-versus-computer, lover. It’s like the military coup of popularly elected democratic president. Because we had elected our leader, our visionary, to make a home for us to enjoy in cyberspace, we elected him through OUR money, through OUR investments of time. We did NOT elect this shithole. His empty words has held our patience for too long. This is our revolution, and it shall happen now, or never! A last stand for the democracy of Age of Conan! I give my full support, for whatever it’s worth! You’ll see me there for sure when it happens, when we crash those fuckings servers and all the noobs will see what kind of game they are supporting stupidly… we can only take them down if we take their money, so we will give them a choice with a real threat: give us our game, or we’ll take away your chance of fooling innocent players into spending their money!
Refresh. Another clan showing its support. Refresh… a reply to our boy:
That’s the words we need, amen my friend! Viva la Revolution!
A smile contracts around his face. The night is secured, a sudden tiredness falls on his brain. This is not worth watching, only sleeping to. A night in a cosy bed for the awakening to a revolution…