Thoughts on Games and Books "Middle class" sensibilities

I sit here today imagining what sort of MMORPGs the future could possibly unleash.

Personally, as a person who has often drifted rather carelessly between both reality and the irreality of the MMORPG games over the years, I tend to find that I often seem to have a slew of ...well, lets just say, very, very strange ideas, when it comes to exactly where the gaming world - and particularly the MMORPG gaming world -could go in the future. I really want to see it all become that much more immersive and realistic, and in order for it to accomplish that goal, I personally believe that it has to also accept a certain element of plain old rudeness. I think that a lot of the games right now -- once you forget the shooters -- are almost painfully polite, and it annoys me to no end. Even the shooters ,in fact, I could argue are too polite, since they tend to paint war as though it is a cartoon one can easily win, rather than a vicious and terrifying slaughter fest of anxiety and horror etc.

In truth, I think my view on gaming -- and remember, MMORPGs in specifci -- is really quite similar to how I am with my books or my music: I tend to find the "middle class" and/or "median" product to be a bit too tame and 'family friendly' for my own tastes. I feel like it lies about the world.  This means to say that I generally enjoy what is pretty much a more adult spin on almost anything I tend to want to do or partake in. When it comes to my own stories, they are generally pretty extreme, I would imagine, by most peoples standards. In a way it is sad, because I admittedly do find some of my stories to be too extreme to want to send out to any agents (whom, of course, I find prude) but, at the same time, they are the stories I enjoy writing....so how, exactly, am I supposed to stop? I think I tend to look at myself as a sort of modern Marquis de Sade really....

And its because, put simply, in my most inspired moments, I typically  like to write about rather hardcore sex, murder, slavery, hangings, war, so on and so forth. I like to make rather evil characters. My topics are never typical. It's hard for me to write about a pleasant marriage, or even a typical divorce scenario that is rather "clean" or "Acceptable". I get bored quick. Someone always winds up dead. A husband suddenly wakes up in the middle of the night and decides to chainsaw the wife to death. Another one decides to sell his as a slave out to vicious lunatic kings on a" boonie rat planet" light years away. Its a book and it isnt real, and no one (at least no one physically "real") is actually getting hurt or sold: I therefore cant help it. I do ridiculous things. I am silly. I am mean. I am anything but boring in my stories. If my characters are real in some galaxy far, far away, I am terribly sorry for them. I have been a terrible God.

   A lot of my inspiration for my weirdo writing comes, of course, from things I have seen on film. I don't find any shame in admitting this because I think that film is a crucial part of our lives today, and I also tend to think that it is quite fun to pplay around with film type ideas on the page, where it starts to look all quite a bit different. In fact, I often write stories where my main character will be doing nothing other than sitting and watching a film, and usually the film is something unbelievably grotesque and strange, etc etc. In other words, a middle class character who, through a screen, is exposed to a horrible outer world.

What I often find so odd, however, I think, is the way that fairly popular film tends to give me a lot of my most vulgar inspiration  and yet .... when you look, again, at the world outside of film, like to the world of, yes, video games, MMORPGs, books, or even music, you start to see that the so called extremes that film has gone to have actually never been met, more or less, in any of these other mediums.


All of this stuff of course is essentially just  echoing a reality that slips **immediately** into recorded form, often totally unedited and unscripted, and it is clear to me that millions upon millions of people are watching it all - if not everybody -- and yet, still, when you look at all of our art forms or our games, you'll see that it is all, still, no where to be found. We basically insist on maintaining this middle class polite vision of the world when it comes to our art, and personally, at this point in the worlds history,  I cannot understand why. Years ago , when TV didn't exist, when computers didn't exist, I suppose it made sense. Now it makes no sense.

Of course this is not to say that we have not had little tears in the fabric from time to time. A video game like Grand Theft Auto, for instance, was definitely a tear in the fabric and a major break away from middle class values that shocked people, but still, when I look at that game now, it looks pretty tame to me, and it also looks sort of plain, too. Grand Theft Auto has no real fantasy element to it. It's essentially just the real world cities twisted into a rather cartoonish video game . It was also, last I heard, never really that great of an online multiplayer game. What I am looking and hoping for instead with the future of the online multiplayer games is something that will rather ingeniously mix the real world vulgarity of a game lik Grand Theft Auto with the rather "absurd" high fantasy of a franchise like World of Warcraft or Game of Thrones.

I think I essentially  want to see a sort of dirty, disgusting prostituted world of drug addicts,  criminals, sex freaks,  goths, and slaves come to life in an MMORPG, but I do not want the game to be set in our reality, like Grand Theft Auto is, but rather another reality, that is filled with the elves and the wizards and so on. I want to see a sort of EverQuest or World of Warcraft that actually becomes truly adult. I want to have the option, say, to begin a character who is not simply a "high elf wizard", (which is of course the case now) but rather a high elf or a dark elf etc whose function in the game world will be to, yes, sell herself as a prostitute, or work as a slave, or a murderer, or a seller of slaves etc. I want to see something that will bring the dirtiness of reality -- particularly our ancient, pre Christian reality-- to these fantasy games. And how it has not yet happened is, quite frankly, perplexing to me. But of course I then think: this is always the way of the world and innovation, isn't it? Everthing that always seems so incredible and even adult  at the time of release, like the MMORPGS initially did, often starts to seem strangely tame and prude in the years to follow.

EverQuest (I always go back to it) is really the perfect exampe to use for all of these reasons and more: At the time it came out, it seemed like such an adult oriented world in its own way, and to a degree it even sort of seemed quite dark. I can remember playing it as a teenager and thinking that some of the storyline behind the evil races were particularly dark.  Many Marilyn Manson type goths were heavily into EverQuest and still are. These worlds of magic and sorcery have always had one foot in the "weird goth" world, and Dungeons and Dragons in particular has been linked to all sorts of real world strangeness since the 70s.   EverQuest even got linked up, in the early 2000s, to a sort of Judas Priest style "suicide cult' that people thought it was inspiring. Middle class values were somehow, in the beginning, threatened by this game.

 This all sounds absolutely preposterous of course because now I look at it, and I can already see just how people might interpret it in the future, if not already, and I honestly think they'll look at it sort of like we look at something  (and I know it will sound odd) but sort of like  the Andy Griffith Show or the Brady Bunch: It will be seen as this game that was good and innovative and set things forward in terms of the mechanics of the engine, but that, in terms of storyline, and what you could or could not do (or say) in game, was absolutely ridiculous, and trying **way too hard** to be 'family friendly' rather than real.

The future EverQuest or World of Warcraft, I have absolutely no doubt, is going to go far, far beyond this sort of thing. The developers and the storywriters and even the players themselves: They are not going to want to be bothered trying to hide 'harsh realities' like the developers of EverQuest, etc, were forced to do. The evil races in the future games are going to be truly evil. The good races, perhaps, truly threatened by them.

Its easy for me,again, to imagine a game where one will perhaps start out as a struggling dwarf wizard, just like you 'sort of' do now , but who is then captured by other actual players, and sold into something vicious and confusing, all before even really getting out of the starting zone.  I can imagine the storylines getting more and more "horrific" and "strange", certainly more complex. The specific zone maps, of course, will get darker right along with them.  And I can also imagine the storylines becoming more and more permanent and longlasting, which seems to have been something that EverQuest Next was looking to do before it crumbled: A slave trading character will build some sort of enormous tower (filled with slaves and brutalities of course), and that tower will outlive him , even long after the particular character has logged off the game.   Essentially, you see, everything is going to take a more 'real world' spin, and as a result, the manner in which everything is family friendly in our time...will quickly crumble.

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l0gging off
thoughts