Why Do We Play the
Games We Play?

by Larynn Avari

It's funny how the reasons that we
buy a game are so often not the reasons we continue to enjoy it for years afterwards.
I remember quite clearly the day I bought Everquest and brought it home to load
it into my computer. The store in which I worked had a video game demo display
set up to attract our customers' attention, and I debated with myself for a
week as to whether I should buy it. Time and time again I found myself returning
to watch the (then) stunning graphics of dwarves, gnomes, high elves, trolls
and erudites as they walked, ran, and fought their way through Norrath. To this
day, I still remember the graphic of a dragon, red if memory serves, walking
down a road in a zone that resembled West Karana. I spent many hours searching
for that road, where dragons appeared and wandered about the countryside-I never
did find it.

We buy games to play them, looking
for some sort of engagement in our minds, some melding of ourselves with our
machines. We part with our hard-earned money seeking entertainment, a type of
detachment from reality and the world at large, preferring instead some creation,
a mimicry of our own world. What is it we find once we enter such an imitation?
Why, nothing more or less than several hundred of our fellow humans; humans
who were those very same people we were trying to escape by entering this world.
Yet suddenly things change, people who strain your last nerve at the office
are standing beside you in a pitched battle at an orc camp, pounding out on
their keyboard "I'll hold him off, you make a run for it…" It
took time, I think, for me to understand what I was truly trying to escape…not
people, though many do truly test my patience at times, and there are moments
when I want to escape to a desert isle like Robinson Crusoe. What I sought a
respite from were expectations, both my expectations of my world at large and
the expectations of me held by those around me.

I played for almost a year before
I began to get bored. Everquest was the first online multiplayer game I had
played, and thus I approached it as if it were merely another single player
game to be explored and conquered. I played the first year almost entirely alone,
only rarely grouping or talking to others…that simply wasn't why I played
the game. As the first anniversary neared, I began to wonder what more there
might be to the game. I had explored all the zones I could make it to alive,
and I had seen (if not killed) most of the creatures that inhabited the world.
Yet, I knew there was more to the experience that I had not found. One day,
a traveling halfling observed my solo attempt to kill several orcs; impressed
by my bravery (or more likely pitying my suicidal tendencies) he extended an
invitation to join his guild.

As I read the scrolling green chat
text over the next few hours, I realized that my connection to Everquest had
suddenly solidified from a part-time hobby to a genuine love affair. Online
gaming validated something in my own life. Being one of several thousand people
who share similar goals and ambitions within a game gave me an anchor; the shared
purpose within the game allowed me to meet people and make friends at a pace
I had never experienced in my life, not surprising, since I was finally meeting
people who enjoyed the same experiences as me. A game became my community that
day, and continued to be so until the day more than four years later when I
left, having seen my guildmates wander into the ether, our challenges conquered
and no more presented to us.

I never was a social person, preferring
the world to be a book created in my brain to the reality surrounding me. Perhaps
that is why online gaming opened up so many things for me; it tapped into my
imagination and made real all those experiences on the screen. I spent the last
two years of my time in Everquest logging in merely to talk to my friends. Yes,
we still grouped and hunted, slaughtering countless hordes of our enemies (especially
those horrific snow bunnies), but the bonds we had built over sleepless nights
continued to hold. I myself am here now for that same reason. Community. I hear
people ask each other whether Vanguard will be able to recreate the experience
that Everquest gave so many of us. I can only speak for myself, but my answer
to you is that the experience is already here. They are giving us a world to
explore; our community has already formed, albeit a bit rabid and foaming at
the mouth currently. All of the experience that was Everquest still lingers
in the posts I read on the various message boards. The banter and camaraderie
still sustain us; we freely share things in posts that many who know us might
not know. The world we await is present and around us…for we are that world,
its physical form has yet to take shape on our computer screens, but close your
eyes and tell me if you aren't already dreaming in that world.

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