Matter Anti-Matter

Sometimes, late at night after I’ve had one of those days that’s just a little too long and filled with a few too many unanswered questions, I think it might be a good idea to play Morrowind or Oblivion and let myself get lost for a while. Other times, I write. And when those things come together, I learn weird things about myself:

The Elder Scrolls: My So-Called Life as a Dark Elf

I’m not by any means what most people would consider a gamer. I’m mostly obsessed with word games (Scrabble, Boggle) and I used to be obsessed with chess (which I had to quit after one 6-hr long match that gave me heart palpitations). These days I don’t have much time to immerse myself in games, due to the whole “I have to be a responsible adult and go outside sometimes” part of life, so I end up playing those casual games designed for people who don’t have time for more involved gaming.

There is, however, a game that I occasionally let myself get utterly lost in, and that’s The Elder Scrolls series. The first one I ever played was Morrowind, and what a rapturous experience it was! I loved the feeling of infinite space, that you could walk from one end of the game world to the other without ever being stopped by artificial walls. Almost everything in the game could be picked up, opened, or harvested, and I delighted in collecting things.

At the time, I was in graduate school trying to get a PhD in English, and feeling utterly lost and unmotivated. After three years, the romanticized vision I had of being a literature professor had faded away and all that was left was the realization that I may have made a mistake, one that cost me a lot of money. I was waitressing more often than I was going to my classes, and finances were about as tight as they’d ever been.

Morrowind proved to be the escape I needed. I would stay up all night adventuring around, trying to build my dark elf (named “Freethrow” — it’s a long story) into a master thief. I never killed the innocent (at first), but I also didn’t hesitate to steal from the rich. Morrowind had so many delightful cheats that let you have infinite health, infinite magicka, and infinite endurance, and I exploited them with gusto, using my immortality to achieve unlimited power.

In Morrowind‘s economy, being rich meant you could literally buy your skills and level up very, very quickly. Instead of completing the main quest, I became obsessed with collecting as much gold as possible so I could level up, make insanely powerful spells, and essentially become a super-being. With enchant, conjuration, and alchemy skills maxed out, I had the power to become permanently invisible, fly, and run around the game world killing and taking whatever I wanted from other characters without any repercussions.

I was drunk with power. I became fixated on having complete sets of all of the most highly valued armor. At this point in the game, I had so much gold that buying things from merchants wasn’t interesting anymore. I scoured the internet forums and wikis looking for information about rare items to add to my collection. I had moved into an empty manor in Balmora and was stashing all my loot in chests, sacks, shelves. My house was like the fantasy-game version of that show about people who hoard things.

It gets longer. Continue reading the rest here.

KoL, if you’ve never played, is a free online mmorpg.  It’s known for its meta-mmorpgous humor, witty text, and very simple graphics.  I signed up for an account in 2004 and spent many a late night questing around the land of Loathing.  It’s been at least 2 years since I’ve played regularly, and the last time I logged in since this morning was around Christmas (for the advent calendar!).

I’m not exactly what anyone would ever call a gamer, and when it comes to video or online games, I’m a lot like a raccoon.  I like wandering around dumpsters and dark alleys, sewers, monasteries, caves, tombs, castles, thatched huts, sorcerer’s towers, mage’s guilds, and enchanted forests, all while collecting bright, shiny objects.  Like the raccoon, my drive to collect the shiny is at times gluttonous and impractical.  And I don’t know if raccoon’s are agile (let’s just say they aren’t for the sake of the metaphor), but I really suck at games that require jumping from one thing to another (damn you Mario!!!).  So RPG’s are really the way to go.

KoL was an instant match for my level of gaming.  The “it’s free” aspect is pretty darn cool for anyone who doesn’t want to have to pay for their addictions.  But most importantly the quests, deceptively simple while simultaneously hilarious, result in multiple and satisfying item drops.  The currency in the game is “meat”, but it’s not meat I’m interested in.  It’s what you can buy with meat.

Before KoL modified it’s bartering system, there was a time when free market trade inside the KoL marketplace made today’s economic crisis look like an afternoon purse-snatching.  Enterprising players would artificially inflate the prices of key stat-boosting items, causing a huge run on the various components needed to create those items.  I remember very clearly the hell ramen craze of ‘04.  For a time, hell ramen was one of the best items in the game.  It’s easy to make and when consumed, gives you extra turns, stat boosts, and meat.  The two basic components of hell ramen are dry noodles and hell broth (scrumptious reagent + hellion cube).  As you can imagine, selling any of these ingredients became very, very profitable.  Occasionally stores would run shortsales, pricing a limited quantity of hell ramen at cutthroat prices and causing a frenzy.

During this time I became obsessed with trying to amass 2 million meat so that I could buy a Mr. Accessory.  Mr. Accessory is a special piece of in-game equipment you can acquire in only two ways: 1) Donating $10 to the gamebuilders, or 2) buying one on the meat market.  What many players would do to get rich quickly was buy several Mr. Accessories through donations, then turn around and sell them in the marketplace. These players would quickly find themselves with many millions of meat in their coffers.  Very, very shiny indeed.

At the time, I had about half a million meat and decided that with perseverance, I could buy a Mr. Accessory in the game instead of in the real world.  I watched the marketplace very carefully, trying to see which items were steadily increasing in value for whatever reason.  Then I would adventure around and try to collect as many of those items’ components as possible and price them at 1 meat under the market rate. It got to the point where I was adventuring purely for profit.  I had become an evil, capitalist, meat baron.

Well, after months of this method of “playing”, I finally got my Mr. Accessory.  It was a proud day.  I never equipped it, but held onto it in my inventory as a special item I would occasionally look at and admire like Gollum stalking his precious.  Having achieved my goal, I still enjoyed the game but that gnawing desire to have the shiny thing needed to imprint on something else.

Luckily, the geniuses behind KoL (known as Jick and Mr. Skullhead) implemented the ability to Ascend and then play in Hardcore mode, meaning that you would start over again but stripped of any fancy skills, buffs, items you may have acquired in the last run (you’d get them back when you finished).  Hardcore mode made replaying the game harder and slower, but when you finished, you would get a component of a special, shiny, plexiglass armor set.  I was once again feverishly hooked.

Then tragedy struck.  On October 26, 2005, Jick apparently accidentally deleted a huge chunk of data while updating the servers.  This caused player inventories to revert to a previous state—and in my case, a pre-Mr. Accessory state.  When I logged in a saw that it was gone, I felt a return of the relentless urge to acquire more meat.

But by this time I was supposed to be working on, among other things, a dissertation proposal, recording an album with my band, dealing with deadbeat ex-boyfriends—the stuff of real life, I suppose.  And while my meat stores were hearty, they were nowhere near the many millions I once had.  I would never again ascend to the great heights I once knew.

I’ve only played off and on since then, logging on around the various KoL and real world holidays to acquire limited special items and occasional rare items (the spooky hockey mask!).  I like to think that I’ve moved past cutthroat in-game capitalism.  But the truth is, I’m still wondrously drawn to the “stuff” in video and online games.  I have no idea what I’m going to do with all the stuff, but it sure is neat.

Want to become a ruthless meat baron?  Sign up and play here.