Man is by nature a social animal…Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.
Aristotle, Politics
In the late 1990s, we were all still discovering the radical effect that the Internet was going to have on society. Amazon was changing commerce to become “e-commerce”, e-mail was replacing the postal service, and in gaming we were just discovering that it was a lot of fun to game with other people from the comfort of your own home office.
To be sure, multiplayer gaming had existed before. The technorati were playing games like “Airflight” (a multiplayer flight simulator) on mainframes as far back as the 1970s. Home video game consoles (the Atari 2600, the Nintendo Entertainment System) allowed up to four players to game together from the comfort of your couch. In the early 1990s, a little PC game called Doom swept the country, bringing university computer networks to their knees because the multiplayer “deathmatch” games were so thrilling.
Although there had been “massively” multiplayer games prior to the late 1990s, they were typically limited to expensive, closed networks (e.g., Gemstone on the GEnie network or Neverwinter Nights on AOL). Ultima Online, and then EverQuest, brought multiplayer to the masses – and were the first games to allow not just hundreds, but thousands of players to inhabit the same, persistent, virtual world. It was easier than ever to connect your computer to the Internet, and it was easier than ever for people to game together in real time.
It’s important to remember that these were the days before the dark and seedy side of the Internet was widely known. The Internet grew up, after all, within the environs of government research – and employment within that small community was the de facto gateway for admission. There were no safeguards, and there was no identify verification, built into the network itself – a “feature” that some exploited (e.g., Markus Hess, one of the first well-known individuals exploiting the Internet’s anonymity for espionage). It was an age of naiveté – an age before malicious cybercrimes, one when it simply didn’t occur to people that computers could be used for mischief and mayhem…although by the 1990s people were starting to get a clue.
It didn’t take long for things to go off the rails in the first MMOGs. The most famous incident in MMOG history happened before Ultima Online even launched – the assassination of Lord British. EverQuest might have learned that particular lesson (no one ever killed Aradune, for example), but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t plenty of other ways for people to cause grief. EverQuest was nothing if not a large amusement park, with each zone, area, or monster a different “ride” that someone could enjoy (read: kill). There was only so much content to go around, and competition for that content could be fierce – especially when the “prize” at the end of the ride was a unique and valuable piece of loot that could carry your character forwards in their progression of power.
At EverQuest’s most advanced levels, where players are taking on “raid” mosters that require the cooperation of dozens, only a select few players typically experienced that content (by design, according to Holly Windstalker, famous for saying “Casuals shouldn’t be allowed to fight Nagafen“). While this could sometimes lead to player strife, it was also the cause of some of the greatest cooperation in the game, in the form of “guilds” – player-made associations for communicating and coordinating efforts. At launch, EverQuest’s guilds typically allowed chatting together and…that’s about it. Later iterations of the game allowed for shared banking (among other things), but the main feature of the guild was to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and to make it easier to find friends to group with.
Of course, given that individuals spent so much time in EverQuest, the social aspects of coordination and cooperation sometimes tended to lead to other socializing that was less directly connected to the game’s content. Players found friendship, confiding the personal details of their lives – or even finding romance and having in-game weddings. For some folks, the relationships they find and forge online have more history and weight than those they find out in the real world.
While writing this post, I logged in to the live EverQuest servers and discovered the menu that would allow me to view the Silver Circle guild that I left long ago. Starrhawk – probably my best virtual friend from that time long ago – was no longer a member; she’d moved on to other guilds and I’m sure had an immensely successful EverQuest career. Mungalung is a guild leader. None of the others I recognized…and almost none of them had logged in for the past 15 years, most so long ago that it didn’t even display when. I certainly wish I could contact most of these folks, but I haven’t a clue how to do so – we’ve certainly lost touch over the years, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them didn’t even remember me.
All that to say, suppose, that this pillar of EverQuest’s “game” design worked. It did allow folks to get together, to meet each other, to socialize. The combat was fun; the virtual world was fun…but I really don’t feel as strongly about those as I do about the relationships I had with folks. I was miles from home at the time, off at college, in a dreary city where I didn’t know a ton of folks. In many ways I was adrift – the world had suddenly opened up and I am not sure I had quite been prepared for it. EverQuest allowed me to meet a need for interacting with people (a need I am not sure I was quite mature enough to realize I had) in a way that didn’t feel quite as chaotic.
To summarize: the early MMOGs allowed people to interact virtually in a way that had never been done before. You could meet and “spend time with” folks all over the world. Sometimes that could be a bad experience, as some used the relative anonymity of the Internet to make mischief. But for many, it became a great experience. EverQuest’s great gameplay might have been the lure, but the social aspects – that was the real hook that kept people engaged.