Real world events online? Thoughts and remembrances

Some days, I can’t help but feel the need to look back on parts of my life. Even if some part of that life is spent in a virtual world, there is some aspect of being online that translates into real-world change and somehow, there’s also a good chance that whatever changes the real world has effected upon me will inevitably show themselves in how I think and play games.

One thing I wondered about recently was how a good number of online games don’t happen to refer to the outside world in creating events for players. Sure, there’s Christmas, Halloween, and even the Chinese New Year. With the World of Warcraft expansion, there’s even the chance to relive specific historical points previously accessible only through stories, games, and canonical lore. What seems to be lacking, at least in my opinion, is the virtual counterpart of a real-world event in history.

More on the unbearable lightness of being a gamer after the jump.

Some days, I can’t help but feel the need to look back on parts of my life. Even if some part of that life is spent in a virtual world, there is some aspect of being online that translates into real-world change and somehow, there’s also a good chance that whatever changes the real world has effected upon me will inevitably show themselves in how I think and play games.

One thing I wondered about recently was how a good number of online games don’t happen to refer to the outside world in creating events for players. Sure, there’s Christmas, Halloween, and even the Chinese New Year. With the World of Warcraft expansion, there’s even the chance to relive specific historical points previously accessible only through stories, games, and canonical lore. What seems to be lacking, at least in my opinion, is the virtual counterpart of a real-world event in history.

The reason why I ponder over this one little point during those long boat trips and griffon flights across Azeroth has roots in my own past as an MMO player. Many years ago, I participated in the beta testing phase for the Philippine release of Ragnarok Online (Thank goodness I was far from RO newb status by then). It was a chance to play the game for free, and I wanted to see what it would be like to play the game with a different culture steering the game from its original direction.

I was surprised one day to realize that they had made a world event that is so completely out of canon with the Ragnarok lore, yet fit quite well with the game itself. Simply put, they reenacted the institution of martial law in the Philippines within the game’s boundaries.

Proclamation 1081, otherwise known as the declaration of martial law in the said country, was instituted one bleak September day in 1972. With the declaration of martial law came the ability of one man to rule over the country indefinitely and with utmost power. 1081 enabled the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, allowing police officers and the military to arrest (or beat the stuffing out of) people without the need for a warrant, much less any rational justification for taking away random people off the street.
 
That officially lasted for nine years (unofficially, far longer). Now, expect all the chaos of nine years condensed into a few hours, and you have an inkling of a literally historic world event. Superpowered monsters roaming the streets of towns, picking off teams and individuals at random. A horde of orcish NPCs (not kidding) taking over vital map areas meant for fast transition. GMs scripting the actual televised proclamation from 1972 by typing it as in-game text with in-game references. That was my first world event, and it was one worth remembering.

Not every game can pull something like that off, especially in a large-scale fantasy with players from different countries and cultures existing in the same virtual space. But it is doable.

Second Life managed to pull one such event off with much aplomb, even if it was unintended. The recent blow-up between a French political party and Second Life denizens in-game shows that the real world can expand on the tensions and problems that people are facing or have faced in the real world.

Even World of Warcraft did this by accident. In 2005, the introduction of the Zul’Gurub instance also brought the equivalent of a virtual black death. Hakkar the Soulflayer’s corrupted blood debuff was bugged, allowing it to be transferred by infected pets into major cities, killing everyone within. It even caught the attention of disease researchers for a little while, as it was an unexpected epidemic that killed no one, yet represented a sad reality from our world’s past.

Of course, shooters and strategy games probably have the monopoly on semi-accurate historical reenactments. That doesn’t mean, however, that MMORPGs can’t do something more than replicate the passing of seasons. I suppose you could say that I miss the feeling of being taken away from the grind by virtue of the real world.

As much as I’d hate to say it, I’d like to have my escape from reality get purposefully interrupted by a timely reminder: that the problems we face in the virtual world pale in comparison to the mistakes and catastrophes that have been repeated throughout human history, and we should probably get back to making sure those mistakes don’t start happening in the real world again.