So I don’t usually do these for a couple reasons. For starters, they always feel kind of like self-promotion, an activity that I am famously terrible at beyond the bare minimum requirements of “I may be an idiot, but I know X.” For another, for those of you who’ve been reading this column all year, I have a vague sense that I’m not giving you your money’s worth if I just post a bunch of existing columns and say, “Hey, it’s that thing you already read!” But this year, I decided to mix it up.
Why? Well, if you haven’t noticed, this year I spent some time experimenting with Vague Patch Notes on a whole. We had our theme months-and-change during which we talked about some interwoven concepts, we had some more out-there concepts, and I just generally tried to do things differently with the column format now that I’ve been running this for years to pretty good reception. (I had no real pitch when I pitched this column; it really is just 100% whatever I feel like writing about.) So this year, let’s talk about my five favorites of the years, what went into writing them, and any relevant postscripts to the columns.
Why we drift away from MMORPGs we still love
So before I did our theme months, I had some columns adjacent to that, and this wound up accidentally being part of one, but the individual installments work really well on their own, I think. And it was a response to something that I had definitely seen happening from friends when I wrote this, people who were drifting away from games they liked and not being angry at the games themselves but wondering why they wanted to do basically anything else.
I think we have this response to all media in fits and starts, and the problem is that most of us try to power through it, which is actually the greatest possible way to ensure you start hating or resenting the thing you used to love. You need to let yourself do other things instead of treating something fun like a job. But I think it’s also interesting how sometimes the love remains even as the desire to play doesn’t – and why that happens.
You might be the reason you no longer love this MMO
One of the wisest lessons that my stepfather imparted upon me, on top of a lot of other wise lessons, came when I was upset because it turned out my best friend from kindergarten was clearly not going to be my best friend through grade school and beyond. And as someone who did have a best friend from kindergarten, he sat me down and explained to me that my experience was actually way more unusual. “We don’t tend to have those friendships last forever,” he said. “We change.”
This sort of works as a companion piece to the prior one, but it was written more specifically when an acquaintance was grousing about Final Fantasy XIV still… being FFXIV, something that it had been for a decade and looked to continue being. And if you don’t like that any more, sure! That’s valid! Everything that keeps going is fun right up until it isn’t; you’re allowed to decide it isn’t any more! But there’s a tendency to assume that it’s the thing that changed and not us.
As I write this, I am sitting in an apartment without eggnog. I loved eggnog until I noticed that whenever I had it, I felt sick to my stomach. Guess what? The eggnog didn’t change; I did. So now I don’t buy it. It’s not the eggnog’s freaking fault.
Everything in an MMORPG is time-limited
When you stay stupid garbage, I see it, and then I will call you out for being a tremendous loser. If you don’t like that? Go to therapy, you tedious idiot.
The world does not start and stop on anyone else’s convenience, and quite frankly it shouldn’t. There are time-limited things I have missed out on in games I like, and sometimes I am sad about it, but I was doing something else with my time. The world is time-limited. Everything is available for sale endlessly until it isn’t, and that’s just how the world works, and I’m not insisting I should still be allowed to buy 56k modems at Radio Shack because how dare times ever move on if they aren’t immediately convenient for my nostalgia.
If you refuse to play anything that has any time-limited events in it, you refuse to play anything at all – because the nature of time as we experience it is linear. In which case you’re not my problem, and you should go away and find all of the nothing in the world that is never related to being a limited-time experience. Or, alternatively, you can go to therapy.
When did Blue Protocol really die?
At the end of Bruce Sterling’s shot story “Dori Bangs,” he has one of the all-time best last lines in human history: “Today I made this paper dream to cover the holes they made.” That’s how I feel a lot of the time, and it’s how I felt writing this piece, which was nowhere near as good as that short story but was at least an attempt at telling a story, a peek at a life, a thing that was wanted even if it wasn’t really very good, and answering a question that was answered in the premise where the question and answer didn’t matter.
Sometimes I am pulling you along because I have thought of a magic trick, and the thing about magic tricks is that you know they are fake. You know every single magic trick is fake because that’s the name; if it’s not fake, it’s just magic, and you have better things to do with your time. But you go along with them hopefully because the magic trick creates a story and a world and something you want to believe, and if the person doing the trick does it right you are left feeling magical at the end even when you knew right away that it was all fake. That’s what this was.
MMORPG accelerationism is a stupid sucker’s game
Yeah, this was just last week, but guess what? I really liked it. And you know what else? All of us sometimes need to be told that we are stupid suckers. There are lots of equally stupid sucker arguments like “MMORPGs used to be good in the Before Days but now they’re all Bad” or “gaming is a fallen state of being” or “we should go to Dunkin Donuts, that will hit the spot.” All of them are stupid sucker arguments, and most of them are comorbid.
The funny thing about being almost 42 is that I’ve literally seen how video games have evolved over the years and watched the ridiculousness seep through, and while video games are definitely not in the same state as they were when I was 10, the raw nuts and bolts are in a much better place than you might think from the accelerationist or purely backward-looking crowd. Heck, there’s a whole other column to be written about this, or two or three. It can share time with dissecting that cringeworthy Swen Vincke speech. Soon.
So, do you agree? Disagree? Were there columns you liked that aren’t on here? Do you want to see me do this again in the future or not? Are you going to therapy? Let me know in the comments, folks.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
