EverQuest – 10 Years Later
I stumbled upon an interesting journal at GameStudies.org. The current issue is titled Special Issue – EQ: 10 Years Later. (EQ aka EverQuest).
The article entitled Towards a Critical Aesthetic of Virtual-World Geographies, focuses on the first few years of EverQuest, when it was still a game very much oriented towards the hard-core player. It was an extremely dangerous world, with harsh and unforgiving penalties (corpse runs!). Without many of the forms of instant travel that appeared later in the development of EverQuest, the continuity and spatial layout of the world was preserved. It took a long time to get from point A to point B. Because of this, there were secluded areas that were hard to get to, and there was a real sense of a large, dynamic, and truly epic world. This brought rise to trade and economic systems that closely mimicked the real world.
In EverQuest and other online worlds, the game designer and the player indirectly work together to shape the geography of these virtual playgrounds. Geography, as described by Wikipedia, is split into two main branches: Physical Geography and Human Geography. In the case of EverQuest, the designers physically create the world, and are therefore responsible for the physical geography (walls, terrain, building placement, etc). The players are the inhabits of the world, and are responsible for the human geography (social, cultural, and economic aspects).
Through the course of the article’s analysis, I came to understand why players often established their own trading outposts in areas such as the East Commonlands Tunnel, Greater Faydark, and North Freeport. Although these locations may be very different from where the designers intended them to occur, they have a root cause that ties back to the original game design.
East Commonlands and Greater Faydark are both easily accessible via druid and wizard low level teleport spells. North Freeport is a little farther from it’s closest teleport location (West Commonlands), but it has a bank, and is easily accessible by both good and evil races (via the sewer system).
Although I am only pointing out a very specific example (ad-hoc market creation and trading in EverQuest), it sheds light on much broader concepts of migration and human interaction in the real world.
There is never any explicit consent or agreement from the players as to where to create these ‘hubs’ of interaction. Creation is driven unknowingly by the player and the player’s necessity. This creation process is guided (also sometimes unknowingly) by the rules that the game designer has created, and which are governing the world. These ingredients serve to create a truly living and dynamic virtual world.
I will end, in tribute, with an extremely nostalgic video – the original EverQuest intro video.