This morning, MOP’s Sam busted into MOP’s work chat with a link to the Fridge Poetry game.
“It’s more like an art project than a game, but an interesting multiplayer thing,” he said in his pitch. “Basically a bunch of words spawn and people can move them around to say things.” He’d seen it on RPS, which described it as something like a communal poetry slam, though it sounded more like the fridge-magnet version of the once-viral Reddit Place game.
Anyway, I was duty-bound to click on that link; I’m at least going to go look at anything multiplayer to see whether we can cover it. I was blithely imagining all the poetic sentences my fellow internet people would be coming up with and how I could apply my editor’s touch to punch them up. Let’s gooooo!
Unfortunately, the first thing I saw when I opened the board was a slur. Specifically, two magnets spliced awkwardly together to spell the N-word, tacked behind the words “smelly” and “untidy.”
My first thought: Dammit, humans were a mistake. My anger instantly took over, both because of the slur itself and because somebody came into this wholesome game and tried to ruin it for everyone. Teach a man to fish and he’ll spell fuck on your bridge, right? That’s just how it is, and I hate it, and I can’t ever seem to get away from it in online games. Why are you like this, gamers. Why do you ruin everything anyone makes.
My second thought: Well, to hell with these guys – two can play at this game. I’m gonna graffiti their graffiti. Time for some vigilante justice!
And just like that, I was in an MMO.
Full of rage, I abandoned the article I was meant to be working on and started furiously rearranging all the slurs and repugnant lines, trying to delete the sexist and racist trash, flinging internet magnets around and away from each other, even as I could see others doing the same thing – some innocent, some not. “Untidy” was quickly plinked by my apparent Enemy into a new line about sniffing a gynecologist’s bottom, so I fired back, and on we went.
I did leave “murder smurfs” alone. That seemed reasonable, honestly. I didn’t touch Sam’s addition to the lexicon, either: “I love plump me.” Hell yeah, love yourself. Be a little bit raunchy, even. “Deepest throbbing colonic cheese juice”? I mean, you do you. I ain’t here to kink-shame. I was homed in on creepy shock trolls spreading bigotry. You picked a fight with a journalist, dipshits! I thesaurus for a living! You’re in my world now!
Approximately three minutes later, I realized that this was a mad social experiment, and we had walked right into it.
Impressive, I thought, and kept right on playing.
This dumb little multiplayer magnet game that nobody will even remember a month from now has transported me back to 1997, when I joined a vigilante guild in Ultima Online and set about trying to clean up our server of gankers by ganking them right back. You murdered a newbie miner? You thought it would be hilarious to pretend to rape some girl’s avatar? Welcome to the hit list, bucko. I’m going to wreck your face, cut off your dumb head, and put it in my red velvet-lined mementos box in my video game house, alongside all the other heads of dopes like you who Tried It. Let justice be done upon you.
“You can take the girl out of UO, but you can’t take the UO out of the girl,” MOP’s Chris quipped, laughing at me.
Of course, I can’t cut off any Magnet Racists’ virtual heads here, and I can’t keep fighting their online sewage forever. Reluctantly, I closed the game and went back to writing about MMORPGs, the job that actually pays the bills here on MOP. In fact, as I type this now, just to see how it’s developed since this morning, I can’t get the Fridge game to fully load, probably because a fresh wave of imagination-starved degenerates are vandalizing the proverbial bridge with the latest provocative slur they learned.
But hopefully, by the time you read this and click on it yourself, there are more stubborn weirdos like me fighting back against the wave of toxicity too. Maybe they’re even, oh, I dunno, playing the game. That hope is exactly why I’m still clicking on MMOs, all these long years later. These worlds – no matter what they look like – have always been what we make them. There are more of us than there are of them. We don’t have to settle for less.
The MMORPG genre might be “working as intended,” but it can be so much more. Join Massively Overpowered Editor-in-Chief Bree Royce in her Working As Intended column for editorials about and meanderings through MMO design, ancient history, and wishful thinking. Armchair not included.
