I’ve been an electronic gamer for as long as there have been electronic games. Yes, I’m that old: I remember when Pong and Asteroids were the cool new thing. So when online gaming came around I was an early adopter. First were the BBS games: Trade Wars, Food Fight, and the the like. BBS games were pretty much like playing chess by mail due to technical constraints. Then came games like DOOM, which were played in real-time. However, modem tech being what it was, if I played with other people I played most of these games on local area networks. My first real online game was Ultima Online, and that’s where I had my first real lesson in online games.
Mainly, that lesson is that while it’s hypothetically cool to be playing with other people because they’re unpredictable, and therefore more interesting than the optimistically-names Artificial Intelligence subroutines that make up most of what one meets in an electronic game, in practice it often exacerbates latent anti-social tendencies. For example, in Ultima Online you could build houses and store your stuff, or have your friends over, or whatever. It was almost no time at all before some gamers were finding ways to hack into other people’s houses and vandalize or loot them.
If you follow the news about electronic games then you’ve probably heard about what a toxic environment the internet can be in general, and online gaming in particular, especially for females. News flash: It has ALWAYS been that way. I’m pretty sure that the reason most often proposed for this phenomenon is correct: put socially underdeveloped people in an anonymous, practically consequence-free environment and they turn into assholes. Personally, I think that people that are assholes online are also assholes in real life, but they have some shred of social awareness that keeps them from acting like it most of the time.
I go through phases of online gaming, where I play for a while and then stop for a while. Rinse, repeat. I played a Star Wars themed MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) called Star Wars Galaxies, and then years later another one called Star Wars: The Old Republic. With Galaxies I stopped having the time to play and my friends stopped playing so that one just sort of fizzled out. With SWTOR, I grew so disgusted with other players it just wasn’t fun anymore. I guess I should mention at this point that when it comes to third person perspective games I frequently use a female character and/or avatar. I figure that if I’m going to have to look at a backside (my own) for hours at a time, it might as well be a shapely backside. So when it comes to online games in general and MMOs in particular, I’m frequently asked if I’m really a female. (Note: Nobody has ever asked if I’m really male when using a male avatar. That should tell you something about the gender dynamics of online games.) On one occasion I was starting a new SWTOR character and working through the starter adventures for my character type. There was one Boss that was a lot easier with two people, and the game mechanic allowed for joining other players in a party on the fly. So I teamed up with another player who was also using a female avatar. As we were going through the encounter, at a couple of points I said things like “if you go over here, you will find Helpful Item X.” The other player did the same; as it turned out we were both experienced players working up new characters so neither of us needed the help. My new friend asked if I wanted to stay teamed up as we moved onto the next part, so we did the next part together as well.
When we finished that encounter, my new friend said, “You’re really a girl, right?” I said, “Are you assuming that because I’m being helpful? Are you really a girl?” “Yes,” she said (but, y’know, who knows, right?), “are you a girl or not?” “No,” I said, “I’m really a guy.” That player then logged off right away and never responded to any in-game invitations to group up again. All of the possible explanations for that made me sad but for different reasons depending on the explanation. Was that player really a female who was so tired of toxic masculinity that she didn’t want to play with males? Sad. Was that player really a male pretending to be female who was only interested in playing with real female players? If so, why? Again, sad… and maybe creepy.
One reason I never became more heavily invested in MMOs is that, as somebody who’s been playing electronic games and paper-and-pencil role playing games and so on for over 35 years, I am D-O-N-E with the whole sword and sorcery thing. For example, I never finished Skyrim, even though it was a groundbreaking single player game and was awesome in its own way, because it was swords and sorcery. I just got bored eventually. I never played more than about an hour of World of Warcraft because it was not only a fantasy setting, but the art design was very cartoon-y on top of it. I was always hoping for an MMO that was both good and set in a genre I liked, such as science fiction. That’s why I tried the Star Wars MMOs.
At this point I should probably mention something about the game mechanics of games such as World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic. In those games, your character has abilities that you use to interact with the game world, whether it be to craft an item or fight an enemy. Almost always, what a player does is select a target, select the skills they want to use, and cue them up in the order the player wants the skills to be executed. In other words, during a combat the player skill involved is lining up the character’s skills in the correct order. There’s no reason to worry about things like hitting your target because the game engine takes care of that. That isn’t what I like in a game; it feels a bit automatic and I get no sense of accomplishment. I wanted something that combined the best aspects of first person shooter games such as the Battlefield games, which reward hand-eye coordination and accuracy, with the online persistent world environment of an MMO. To me, that’s the closest to “realistically” inhabiting another world a player can expect.
For that reason, I was very excited when I learned that Bethesda Game Studios was releasing an MMO set in the game world of Fallout. The Fallout universe is a post-apocalyptic setting with a dark sense of humor. While it isn’t made by the same studio, the setting is the “spiritual descendant” of a game called Wasteland, a computer game from the ’80s that was a favorite of mine.
Fallout 76 was the MMO game that I’d been waiting for as long as there have been MMO games! I’d been wanting a game like this literally for decades. I was willing to put up with the assholes that I knew, for sure, that I’d encounter in an MMO just to play this game. Of course, when the game finally came out is sucked. Because that’s the way the world works, right? It was a perfect storm of rampant bugs due to a rushed release, questionable design choices, and limited content. It was so bad that it got an article in Newsweek. There are so many things wrong with the game that it would need another article or three to explain. If you want the sordid details you can follow these links.
So now I’m back to playing the single player games. At least if I’m going to be disappointed in them, I don’t have to deal with assholes along the way.