No war crimes in chat
I’m sitting at a terminal, reading an email from my friend. I open a game where many moments of my life become compressed. After enduring the absurd loading screen I am greeted by a rotating blue monument at the center of a stuttering and labyrinthine city.
Dot Hack is a game about players. Across four volumes scattered between 2002-2004, it tells of a then-near future 2010s Japan where environmental disasters, infrastructure failures, and hospitalizations are occuring due to internet outages. In an MMORPG (simply called “The World”) a small group of players discover that these incidents are happening at the same time as events which defy the game’s logic. Using a mysterious hacking power, they work together to unravel the threat and reveal the AI behind it.
Released when the kind of high-speed internet required to play online games wasn’t yet widespread, Dot Hack attempted to simulate the feeling of an MMORPG and the production of “the player” as a cultural identity. Pressing start, you are brought first to a mock computer desktop rather than an immediately recognizable game world. Dot Hack is entirely offline, but much of its gameplay involves reading emails and forum posts written by fellow fictional "The World" players. These texts are of course pre-determined by the developers, but are integral to the illusion of being part of an online community (before they were ubiquitous).
An outgoing email from the player character.
Culturally, the term “MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online game)” functions as a genre; a user experience of being rendered in a shared digital space. MMOs are always online by definition. You must access the internet and be able to interact with another person (or, more accurately, many persons).
There are no inherent verbs for MMOs, the way shooting is to FPSs or jumping to platformers. Dot Hack looks to popular MMOs of the era (Phantasy Star Online, Final Fantasy 11, EverQuest, World of Warcraft) to assemble a game that visually and mechanically reads as an MMO, but it can’t fake the internet.
Dot Hack’s solution to not having other players is to emulate the internet as a horrifying and contradictory place. When you move from the desktop to "The World", the “20-million players” game is populated by only the same 30 odd look-alikes running around. Progressing through the game, effects that appear to be genuine texture failures corrupt dungeons and cities alike, engulfing bloodless monuments to warped mythical figures. The static JPEG sky cracks with a heavy claustrophobia, as if at any moment the digital void will push in and swallow the game whole.
A possible randomly generated dungeon entrance.
In combat, the game quickly becomes antagonistic and difficult to understand. The tutorial establishes a logic of play that you must often break to combat the eroding environment. "The World" is an action game where you play as a weapon specialist in a small party. You pause the real-time encounters to select special attacks or give conversational commands to your friends. These fights are simple affairs, allowing you to move calmly between encounters only occasionally pausing to direct your team to heal or use specific skills.
When "The World" crumbles and computer virus creatures appear, play becomes a frantic and lurching spreadsheet puzzler. The magnitude of damage these enemies do and the speed at which they act forces the player to pause combat so often that animations become illegible. Your character becomes a spectator to the action, hanging off to the side throwing healing items because using the communication menu is too inefficient. Surviving long enough will give you a chance to hack the encounter and return to the original mode of play, but the correction needs to be managed carefully as it exposes you to a rising infection threatening to end your game. (epilepsy warning: linked video contains flashing lights.)
These fits of number management never end with an explicit reward. You may be shown an uncanny image or animation or be given a clue towards fixing the disaster, but your understanding of the world is never made complete. Sometimes, you overcome a combat scenario and nothing happens at all. Your experience level negligibly increases, you get some items to sell, and you leave "The World" to wander down another trail. In the worst case, the real-life game ends and you have to buy the next volume to continue.
A room you are “rewarded” with after completing a required dungeon.
Like the endless feeling expanse of the internet, Dot Hack is also a multi-installment and trans-media franchise stretching far beyond these four games into manga, anime, novels, and films. Being a fan of Dot Hack is an ongoing investment of time and money, the same way MMOs require lifestyle changes and financial commitments. MMOs do not end, they just go offline. While live they are meant to continue endlessly, to drip feed new content with the regularity of a Pavlovian feeder. As I enter my third year subscription to hit Square-Enix MMORPG Final Fantasy 14, I’m forced to reckon with how much of my life has and will continue to be spent inside it.
Playing any game requires you to immerse yourself in a certain vocabulary. MMOs are unique in that they create a communal place for you to share this vocabulary with hundreds and thousands of other human players doing the same thing. You dress-up an avatar and hang out in digital social spaces, performing identity both within the game (as a character) and outside it (as a gamer). You complete tasks the game demands of you and get virtual money or goods to make hanging out feel more expressive.
In Final Fantasy 14, the narrative’s heavily detailed regime changes are interspersed with idle moments playing dress up and loitering with friends in common spaces. Your character is enlisted as a paramilitary agent of a high fantasy UN-like coalition of powers, deploying on missions to kill members of inconvenient species (literally called Beast Tribes) and defend resource rich territory. Sometimes, you’ll be chosen to support a rebellion if it suits the interests of the nations.
My player character on the Crystal data center of Final Fantasy 14.
While playing a game doesn’t twist your brain and make you violently disconnected from reality, it does indoctrinate you into a certain kind of logic and representational language. When you get a high score in an arcade game it asks you to sign your initials, marking you as a player on a leaderboard in competition with other players. Your in-game name becomes known apart from you; a character for someone who plays the game but never meets you; just someone who's really good at eating Pac-Man pellets.
If I meet someone in Final Fantasy 14, we are meeting as two characters who have done horrible things as military agents of the state. In the fiction of the world we are at some bar or gathering space, celebrating or planning or just idly talking. I can object in chat - put some distance between my character and myself (the person doing the actual chatting) - but this is an immutable fact about my character. I’m reminded of it each time the game updates and presents me with new acts of violence. Even if I, the human, object to being an arm of in-game imperialism, the game fulfils its objective of rendering my character an actor of conquest and death.
The horror of Dot Hack (and more immediately, my time with Final Fantasy XIV) is the realization that the online game, the company, and the state are working exactly as they are meant to when at their most frightening. The designers of these games are making the player work to be recognized, reidentifying as subjugated categories produced by ruling powers: disability, race, class, education level, gender, occupation. If you can’t represent something about yourself through the offered tools you have to compromise through whatever means of communicating the software accepts. You hack the game’s logic on its terms while upholding the system that does not acknowledge you. Anything truly subversive is swiftly deleted by moderators, whether a single act of deviance or your digital existence entirely.
The anxieties of Dot Hack are, in some capacity, grounded by a reactionary moral panic about the internet changing culture too much and videogames being avenues for escapism. It entertains that there are people who turn to the internet for comforting fantasies, but it also reminds us that the architects of those fantasies are driven by the pursuit of extreme amounts of wealth, fashioning experiences that simultaneously reinforce and obscure our material experiences under capitalism. You continue to be a person governed by culture and ruling power before, during, and after the game.
In completing Dot Hack’s four volumes (Infection, Mutation, Outbreak, and Quarantine), the disasters caused by the game are fixed. You discover the cause of the chaos is a post-human, fully sentient AI named Morganna Mode Gone who was baked into the game at a prototype stage. It was made to produce Aura, the “perfect AI,” who would then destroy its creator. Morganna caused disruption and error in an effort to continue living and be recognized by the system, but in doing so closed itself off. You and your friends try to stop Aura from having to kill its own, but are unable to communicate with Morganna. At the eleventh hour, the players fail. Aura interrupts and completes its goal, resulting in mutual destruction.
The decay of "The World" felt like a mystery because it was designed after the posthumously released and unfinished epic poem Epitaph of the Twilight (which Morganna Mode Gone liked and styled its appearance after). The poem is written by Emma Wielant, a character sequestered to the footnotes of the PS2 games. It lives like a creepypasta through forum messages and tucked away fragments in corrupted areas of “The World”.
The game only provides fragments of this information. I am pulling the rest from a loosely cited fan wiki about some other Dot Hack material I will never read, attempting to complete assumptions I have about the game that make sense in my head.
The most known part of the poem is read to the player in German when they start the first game:
Yet to return, the shadowed one
who quests for the Twilight Dragon.
Rumbles the Dark Hearth,
And Helba, Queen of the Dark, has raised finally her army.Aperion, King of Light, beckons…
At the base of the rainbow do they meet.
Against the abominable “Wave,” together they fight.Alba’s lake boils
Light’s great tree doth fall.
Power - all now to droplets turned in the temple of the Arche Koeln.
Returns to nothing, this world of Shadowless ones.Never to return, the shadowed one
Who quests for the Twilight Dragon.
Axe Binondo (they/them) does writing, visual art, music, and games in no particular order. Check out all of their work here and follow them on Twitter @wing_blade_.
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