A little bit more on virtual tourism, here, but this time, someone else’s words. I had wondered in my last entry how Star Wars Galaxies players had felt about that game being shut down. I said then that most of what I could find about it focused on the loss of social connection. Fortuitously, Scott Taylor, one of the bloggers for Black Gate has recently written a post on the topic.
First, his post reminds me that he has written an article on the game’s shutdown before, in 2012. He focused in large part on the amount of human effort, from both players and developers, that was put in to the game and now lost forever, but, critically, he also makes an interesting comparison with going back to the house where he grew up. Although he discusses the game’s world as art, there does seem to be an implicit sense of place he associates with the game. In fact he even says of the “world” he and other players created in Galaxies, “That world, that ‘home’ if you will, was as real as any you could imagine, and so it is for so many who play these games.”
He continues,
To the players, those that invest countless hours building a character their strange new world can be proud of, these games are something far more valuable than digital ones and zeros on a distant server in Arizona.
The act of creation, both by the artists who design the games and the players that utilize draft material to make the mundane magic, becomes a thing of beauty that has to be recognized for the untold investment it requires.
...
Still you have to wonder if, in some way, what I did in the game somehow relevant in real life? Does it truly matter in the long run? Who can ever truly say, but it is a fact that in December 2011 Star Wars Galaxies shut down for good, so anything I created there is no more. Whatever home I had is gone and there is no more visiting for me. In this case, I simply can’t go home again.
In his more recent post, he focuses more I think on the sense of loss of social connections and and the former communities of the game, but he also addresses the strictly aesthetic loss. His post does not regard the virtual reality of these places per se, though again it seems implicit in the way he speaks about them.
He concludes thusly:
In conclusion, and wrapping this back about to my original question of “what does this have to do with Art of the Genre”, well, it has to do with the perception of what art truly is, and at the very core it has always been perceived in the eye of the beholder. Video game art, even if found only on a hard drive, can also be as profound and moving as anything else in the fantasy and science fiction gaming and literature world, perhaps more so because it is art you can actually interact with. This interaction has always brought depth to me, and so I continue to think of it fondly and wish on occasion to see it one last time. Sadly, for games like Star Wars Galaxies, that art is forever gone [unless as Sarah Avery attests that future grad students will fire up old servers to study early 21st century behavior], but some images remain on wayward internet sites, like potshards of a lost civilization, and I think we should cherish them because they are as real and meaningful as anything else created by the will and imagination of the human condition.
Finally, in the comments one person mentions that an old MMORPG “haunts” them. Taylor responds, “... I like to know that there are others that feel the same and are ‘haunted’ by their experiences as I am, because indeed I do believe haunted is the perfect term for it.” Well put.
Haunted, unable to go home again, to a home that was “as real as any you could imagine” and that is “as real and meaningful as anything else created by the will and imagination of the human condition” — I think I am not the only one to experience memories of places I’ve never “been."
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