Join or Die

Utopian Sedition

We'd been trying to inject some life into the world, and managed to plant seeds of friendship everywhere. We were about to get into a knockdown, drag out fight that we helped brew, but we lost any sense of allegiance to anyone but each other. Our only binding was a terrible secret, and it only served to corner us into having to choose between friends on either side of a war. Out ourselves for what we were, or completely obliterate the opposition and return the server to the boring utopia it was before the revolution we helped support started. We were some weird inversion of victorious revolutionaries; we devolved happy equilibrium in favor of happy violent bloodletting, and we tasted remorse for the first time. We may have been the first small group of players ever to actually change an entire server in an MMOG, and we learned what type of gravity that can have, first hand. Gods of a universe, unable to control the monster they created.

The argument raged for a few days. The fight was just beginning to develop, the new guild not quite organized enough for a run at one of our major outposts. Some of us reeled in their anarchism, while others understood we were the only hope the new guild had. I was going with majority, caught up in the situation, blown away by what we were able to accomplish. Did the developers plan this? Was this part of their vision? A handful of guys with too much time on their hands tipping delicate scales and shattering guilds? It didn't matter which side we chose, because we already won. This was our war. The rest of the server was just a group of pawns to the game our mutual boredom created.

And that's when it hit me. It was time to go. Like some chaotic notion that vanishes in the wind, I logged out with no intention of returning. We'd never be able to do what we did twice, and actually engaging in the climactic battle means our beautiful creation would die, and we'd be part of what killed it. I couldn't bear losing the war - not in the traditional sense, but in the way that a victor meant the fun was over. I was abandoning the monster I engineered, sure, but it was still alive, frozen on a server whose outcome has yet to be decided, at least by me. In a way, I'd reverted to the same mentality of the people governing the server. Losing everything I worked for was akin to erasing myself from existence, and I never wanted to understand how the people who brought about the boredom felt. So I took myself out of the race, and left them to their great war.

Joe Blancato is a Contributing Editor for The Escapist Magazine, in addition to being the Founder of waterthread.org.