Every so often, MOP’s Bree and I engage in a game that I like to call “She’s Not Crazy” wherein Bree will talk about a thing that happened pretty routinely in older MMORPGs, people will insist that she is lying, and then she asks me whether I remember that too or she may in fact be crazy. As the name of the game implies, the answer is always that she is not crazy. Also, it’s not really a game; it’s more of a “why do you people remember a fictional past?” But I’ve already written that column.
The most recent edition of this game was people acting shook about the idea that people in older games would sometimes share accounts. And the reality is that… yes. She is remembering a thing that absolutely happened. Games like Final Fantasy XI or EverQuest in particular had a number of things you might need to camp at for days at a time, and you usually handled that by having friends who would also log into your account when you couldn’t be there. The very idea was responded to with aghast insistence that no one would ever do that because it’s unsafe, which leads to the natural question of… like… do you guys not make friends?
If you’ve been reading my columns since Massively-that-was, you may remember that I used to do a Final Fantasy XIV podcast on a weekly basis. I bring that up because my co-host needed help getting fan festival tickets for the first fan festival, and I was able to do that, so said co-host gave me all the login information needed (which was mandatory for buying tickets at the time), and I took care of the purchase.
Could I have then used this information to log in to FFXIV and somehow screw around? Yes. But I didn’t because I’m a normal person and was doing a favor for a friend. And we weren’t friends who went to college together or something. We had literally met in the game. Our friendship was based on the game. It was just an abstract trust relationship.
And that isn’t really weird to me. I can think of lots of friends I would be willing to trust to take care of something urgent via a login to one of my game accounts – including accounts that I have had for multiple decades. Most of these are friends I met in the games in question. Which leads back to the first question about making friends because… this is just always how the world has been.
I have had friends from MMORPGs into my home and sleeping under my roof. I have helped friends from MMORPGs move across the country. You could say that I’m just a particularly social person, but that would be a lie. I’m not terribly social. I’m nervous and weird (I wrote that column, too) and have a hard time making friends. I just still try, and as I write this I am coordinating plans with a friend for the evening while talking to friends elsewhere through a Discord channel formed just because I made the right friends.
As someone who thinks making friends is hard, I promise you it’s not actually that difficult! MMORPGs are a great place for doing it, even, because you start off with a shared point of friendship. You’re both doing something you enjoy! It’s not like I’m standing in the toy aisle not being sure whether someone is looking at toys because they’re a collector or because they’re trying to figure out which toy it is that Hunter wanted and this is their one chance to buy it before Hunter’s birthday.
I have helped a lot of moms buy the right toy for a lot of Hunters.
When I say that MMORPGs are social games, I mean it, and part of why is that it gives you the tools for interacting with others. You can make a joke. You can say “hey, you look great” to some rando in your party. Group finders don’t make it harder to make friends; they make it easier because you wind up with randos you’d never look twice at and sometimes you all wind up singing “Rocky Road to Dublin” together as you’re pulling through the dungeon.
The thing is that all of this requires an effort on your part, though. And I think sometimes that’s the part that gets lost. MMORPGs have changed insofar as they no longer make “getting into a group” difficult; that means people only really want to be around you if, y’know, you’re fun to be around.
But that is also a skill and something that you can refine. I mean that very authentically. You might not have a natural talent for introducing yourself and interacting with others, but that is a skill you can practice. Not everyone can be The Funny One, but you can make friends and have a nice time with randos and get friends out of it.
And maybe you think I’m full of it. Maybe you want to yell at me for the idea that people ever shared account information because you really aren’t supposed to do that and that’s not something that you can do and it’s unfair and it’s impossible to make friends and you shouldn’t trust people online like that.
You’re allowed to have those viewpoints. You’re allowed to feel like it’s not supposed to be that way. I can tell you that factually this is all something that happened all the time, but that doesn’t mean you have to agree with me about it being fine and normal.
But I have a bunch of friends I’ve met in FFXIV. I have hung out with them. I’ve cried on their shoulders, and in turn, been their shoulder to cry on. I’ve celebrated story and life milestones with them. I have things I am excited about in Warframe not because they mean anything to me personally, but because I know some of my friends will be so hype to experience this.
And there are a thousand little moments of being able to put a spring in someone’s step by saying something nice to them in a dungeon run or making people laugh in a raid and feeling a warmth and positivity out of these moments. There are thousands of chances to make friends in these video games, something that I can’t do while reading or playing single-player games. This is the fun, unique property of MMORPGs. They are online. They are shared experiences. You can share this world with other people and not all of them are going to be your friends, but isn’t it good to try?
I think so. And I’m glad that so many other people think so. I’m glad that I know so many people I can share with, just like I’m glad that I know I can ask Bree to log in to my EverQuest account to camp jboots for me while I’m going to be asleep.
I mean… theoretically. Neither of us plays EverQuest anymore, and neither of us wants to. But if we both did, I could ask. But I won’t.
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.
