MMORPG Story

I have been playing MMORPG's for 11 years. Throughout this time I went through game addiction, quitting, and finally found moderation in my older age. Looking back on my time spent playing MMO’s I have some regrets but overall it has been a positive experience.

Around 1995 I had played Richard Garret’s single player “Ultima 7: The Black Gate” and was hooked. All the games I played before Ultima 7 were linear in game play, point A to point B. The freedom of Ultima 7 allowed me to wonder around the virtual world exploring at my own pace. With the announcement of Ultima Online (UO) I could barley contain my excitement and read every detail before the official release.

In a lot of ways UO was originally designed to be, in my own opinion the perfect MMO game. The original documentation (before the release) had aspects that MMO’s of today do not even attempt to pull off. The world was to be a seamless environment of wild life and players in their own eco-system. I remember reading about how if player’s killed too much wild game in the forest dragons would need to roam closer to town to find food. The entire driving force behind playing the game would be to interact with this world, all the choices players make having a direct effect on events that took place in the game. UO never lived up to these expectations but did find something just as fulfilling.

I started my UO account around 1998 and got some minimum game time in, I still had plenty of school activates to attend (track, band, boy scouts). UO was different then than any MMO at it’s time and I didn’t know it then, but it was different from any MMO that would come to be. UO was the wild west of MMO’s, it was unforgiving; and I LOVED it.

My first memories of UO revolve around working hard to piece together a set of amour and gather some gold outside of the main town. I was killing red NPC’s and collecting whatever loot they dropped to bring back to town and sell. Occasionally I would die and have to run back to my corpse, sometimes loosing valuable items I had collected. One day, as I wondered into the familiar area I noticed a different looking character named “The Judge” where I had been killing NPC’s. Thinking that this was something special I immediately ran in to trample this new foe. A few second later I was dead and my hard earned loot was gone, “The Judge” had been a real life player to my surprise. This opened up a whole new concept of gaming for me; I wanted to be like him.

Over the next few years I went off to college and found a lot more time for playing UO. Many old UO players call this the “golden age” of MMO’s. Hours upon hours were spent traveling the UO world in groups of 3 and 4 killing all the players we came across and looting their remains. I became addicted. My characters in UO were well known, and feared. I would terrorize role player communities, epic poems were written about me, but I paid a high price. My longest session was in excess of 30 hours, my grades were suffering and my social life existed in the virtual ream only, something had to give.

There are plenty of stories that I could tell about my time in game, and the life I had in game but this story is about me, not about my characters. Around the time I was preparing to graduate from college I decided to needed to kick the habit. I sold off my items and gold on e-bay and logged onto UO to get myself banned (to make sure I couldn’t go back). After a slur of racial epithets my wish was granted, my account already had several warnings and was banned forever. My last year of college without UO was wonderful, I regret I didn’t have 3 more like it.

After graduation many of my friends moved away and I found a full time job and apartment. I decided to create a new UO account and try to play in moderation. I did find moderation, playing only on week nights and going out on the weekends. Since I have picked up gaming again I have never ducked out of an opportunity to spend quality time with real life friends or family for game time. I think my low point before quitting UO gave me the ability to put the game down, I guess it was a learning phase. Without the low point I had with game addiction I would have never found balance, I guess some people just need to hit rock bottom before getting their priorities straight.

I quit UO around 2003, it was not the same games it used to be, the Wild West was tamed. About a year later I began playing World of Warcraft (WoW) with some of the same players I met in UO. WoW is a great game that I enjoy playing to this day. When I look around the virtual world that is WoW I see and meet a lot of players that are going through the same thing I did in UO, I wish there was something I could tell them to help them; but I know better.

I hope that new MMO players can find the balance that I did without experiencing the grip of addiction. It really can be a fun thing to do and a great social experience when used in moderation, like ANYTHING else in life.