Gravity Interactive pulled the plug on Ragnarok Online Indonesia in 2015, taking with it most of the players who had made it such a cultural fixture for over a decade. What’s left are ghost servers cobbled together by hobbyists and nostalgia for the handful of people who still cling to a game years past its prime. Why keep playing after all this time? Maybe it’s the same reason someone might return to their demolished childhood home. Even if the house is gone the ground still remembers.
Read MoreWhen I was younger, I used to be extremely into Urban Dead, a text based MMO set during a localized zombie epidemic. Years later, the covid pandemic brought me back to the game’s undead infested streets. Fear makes you crave familiarity, and I wanted to return to a place from my childhood where the pandemic and quarantine were all just normal.
Read MoreThe 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. 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.
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