The Google search term “squirting blondes” resulted in a hit on this blog.

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It happens that I was in a troll temple the other day, killing the trolls there. Not in real life, of course. That would be silly. In real life I was leading a secret monastic sect of knights in a raid through the forgotten sewers of old London against the forces of darkness. As you do on a quiet Sunday afternoon. Anyway, I can’t remember if there was a reason for killing the trolls other than they seemed fair game at the time, what with me being an adventurer and they being monsters with hideous 80s-throwback hairstyles, enough reason for any man or mouse! So there I was killing indiscriminately when a patrol rounded the nearest corner. Now these fellows were pretty tough, and I had been carefully (read cowardly) picking my fights in order to maximise a one-on-one engagement of the non-matrimonial variety. “I’m fair rumbled”, I think to myself in some sort of bizarre Olde English that I only use when thinking to myself, but I’m determined to finish the fight before the inevitable trolling that will shortly be forthcoming. I dispatch the troll that I’m fighting and, thinking that running away like a four-year-old is the better part of valour, I head pell-mell to the nearest safe spot. I then watch in mild wonder as the patrol walks right up to the spot where I was just fighting, where the broken and mutilated corpse of what I can only assume was one of their temple co-workers is laying, have a bit of a look around, you know because they’re on the lookout for trouble here, and then turn right around and wander back the way they came.

One can only begin to envisage the scenario back at Temple HQ:

Chief Troll: “Right you two, you’re on patrol duty around the temple perimeter. Any sign of trouble and you raise the alarm, ok? Think you two knuckleheads can manage that?”

Timothy: “Sure thing, Chief”

Trevor: “Yeah Chief, no problem”

<Timothy and Trevor wander around the perimeter>

Timothy: “You’re a peon at work. Good. Good. And you’re another peon, well done. Ok”

Trevor: “You’re a guard, that’s fine. And here’s a priest, lovely. Lovely.”

Timothy: “And here we have the corpse of Tony, who appears to have been smashed to a pulp with a large blunt instrument of war. Ok, good, good.”

Trevor: “Well I think that’s everything, shall we head back to base, Tim?”

Timothy: “Sounds like a plan to me, I’m dying for a nice cuppa.”

<Back at base>

Chief Troll: “Back already? Well, report you two.”

Trevor: “Nothing untoward, chief, ten peons working, five guards on over-watch, four priests on duty and the horribly bloodied corpse of Tony from human resources.”

Chief Troll: “Tony is a corpse?!”

Timothy: “Well… yes. We thought it was ok though, there was nobody about so we thought it was probably nothing.”

Trevor: “Yeah, he probably tripped and fell on a stone tablet.”

Timothy: “Five or six times until his skull was… oh dear…”

Chief Troll: “I’ll say it’s ‘OH DEAR’. GET BACK OUT THERE AND SEE WHAT’S GOING ON.”

<Trevor and Timothy make their way out again and return shortly thereafter>

Chief Troll: “Well?!”

Timothy: “It’s ok chief panic over, there’s nothing.”

Chief Troll: “Nothing to report? Well that’s a relie…”

Trevor: “No chief, there’s nothing out there. You know, they’ve all gone.”

Chief Troll: “Gone, whaddya mean gone? The peons aren’t working?”

Timothy: “Gone chief.”

Chief Troll: “The guards, where are they?”

Timothy: “The guards are gone chief.”

Trevor: “Well that’s not strictly true, Tim, Toby was there.”

Timothy: “Ah, that’s true.”

Chief Troll: “Well that’s something, get him in here so that we can find out what’s going on.”

Trevor: “Ah, well there might be a small problem, you see it was only his head.”

Chief Troll: “Only his… well where’s the rest of him?!”

Timothy: “Gone, chief.”

Chief Troll: “GET BACK OUT THERE AND DON’T COME BACK UNTIL YOU HAVE SOME INFORMATION.”

<Five minutes later Trevor comes back>

Chief Troll: “WHERE’S TIMOTHY?!”

Trevor: “Who? Oh! Well, he was here when I left, I just didn’t notice that he’d gone.”

Chief Troll: “GET. BACK. OUT. THERE. BEFORE I TURN YOUR NIPPLES INTO BATH PLUGS.”

<Four hours later and there’s no sign of Trevor or Timothy>

Chief Troll: “Marvellous. Just… marvellous. I suppose I should raise the alarm, and go and see what’s happened.”

Chief Troll: “Or I could just carry on standing in the same spot I always do, and wait to see if anyone turns up. After all, it’s probably nothing.”

Either there’s a severe shortage of recruits for the position of guard, or Tony in human resources drew up the most bizarre list of requirements for applicants:

‘Can’t see over fifteen feet in front of you? Total lack of spatial awareness and inability to hear anything quieter than a demi-culverin fired three inches away from your head? Unable to identify the sights and sounds of comrades being slaughtered nearby unless you’re within spitting distance? Join Her Majesty’s Royal Troll Guards today!’

Often you’ll find guards standing outside a gate, usually there’s two of them – one for each side of the gate, just in case anyone tries to sneak past! – and they’re standing about five feet from one another. Now, get yourself within fifteen feet of them and they both rush after you like rabid bees, all furious activity with the pointy hurty parts and intent on destroying their enemy. For about another fifteen feet in a straight line, then of course they get bored and go back to standing around. But if you pull one of them, and for those of you not familiar with MMOs, pulling is just an MMO term for fighting like a pussy:

“Théoden King! Helm’s Deep is breached and the hordes are through to the keep!”

“Ooooh dear. Well there’s quite a lot of them, I suggest we hide back here, and try to get the attention of one or two at a time. Perhaps throw rocks at them from a distance and make rude insinuations about their heritage.”

“My liege?”

“You know, we’ll just hide back here as a group, trick one or two into coming and we’ll slaughter them in a heroic and testosterone-laden manner. Then we’ll trick another couple into coming and do the same to them.”

“My king, there are ten thousand orcs at the gate, surely…”

“Ten thousand you say? Hoo! Well, we’d better get started, this could take forever. Pull!”

Anyway, pull one of them from a distance and as long as you’re more than fifteen feet away then many-a-time just the one guard will run off down the hill as the other one stays put. You then proceed to slaughter the guard, with up to five or six of you ganging-up and making the poor fellow literally explode in a crimson blossom of corpse petals along with all the associated death wails and blood-curdling, ear-ravaging battle cries (although the latter is usually just me on Skype, I tend to get a bit carried away when playing as a dwarf) whilst their colleague stands at the gate and doesn’t bat an eyelid. You can imagine them standing at the gate when their friend runs off down the hill, and they’re calling “Doug? Doug?! Where are you going? Fine, sod you then if you’re not going to tell me!”, and then when their colleague is screaming in agony and to all twelve gods of the Umbra to save them, the guard back on the gate is saying “No Doug, I’m not coming now. You had your chance, but you chose to run off and ignore me. I’m not interested now, whatever it is”. Of course, five seconds later the remaining guard does find out what it is. And that it hurts very much.

And when the band of adventurers approaches and gets within his mole-like eyesight range, does he raise the alarm for the rest of the camp like any sane guard would? Does he run like the wind and try to get help? No, he takes the party on single handed, and finally when he’s almost dead, with an axe buried up to the hilt in his skull with half of his body on fire and the other half frozen in ice, only then does he think:

“You know what, it probably isn’t nothing.”

Many of the saints, sinners and supplicants have named it ‘burnout’, ‘slump’ and other such terms, for me MMO life at the moment is fractured. There is no one game that dominates my time over all other games, and indeed MMO games are not dominating my leisure time at the moment either. I could probably go into seriously deranged depth about the psychological ‘hows’, ‘whys’ and ‘do you mind if I don’ts’ for this, but for me it’s quite simple: I’ve given three or four MMOs my undivided attention over the past years, and every time I crack open a new MMO, it’s like I’m playing some bastard hybrid child of one or more of the previous games.

No, this isn’t a post about innovation.

It’s simply a statement of fact. The reason that Lord of the Rings Online held my attention until the character’s mid-twenties and was then shelved is because I’m lazy. I’m lazy in the fact that, after I’ve burnt through the initial content (about twelve times as I roll new alts and soak up all the new classes, races and starter areas) I hit the Charon factor. The Charon factor is that feeling that you’re just repeating the same journey, in a slightly different way, and that you’re merely ferrying your current PC across the wide abyss, not because it’s enjoyable or an adventure, but because it’s plainly what has to be done. And so you ferry your character along, you don’t feel for the character, you don’t form any kind of bond with it, you don’t care for it, you can’t empathise with it, in fact you begin to hate it. You hate your character for making you sit down and trudge through the same old landscapes, killing the same old monsters the same number of times (that being far too many times) because that’s what it wants you to do.

No really, it’s not about innovation.

Disappearing, it would seem, are the days where many people would commit large parts of their lives to shepherding around a virtual character, because their sense of adventure has gone. Even people who have only played WoW will have begun to see the language of the matrix, will have begun to see behind the stage curtain and notice the rigging and crew used to convey the world they were believing in, and that it is in fact a carefully engineered façade. And once you begin to see the sets, costumes and props of your world you then become familiar with them, and very quickly do you notice them in the next MMO that you play, and the next one after that. And the more MMOs that are released the easier it is for Alice to see that in this looking glass world, she’s simply a pawn. You no longer see the lever as a means to obtain a pellet, you see it as a plain and simple lever, one that you’ve pulled a thousand times and which you know will provide the same result the next time you pull it, and the next, and that that result is no longer satisfying.

It’s about catharsis.

I find myself these days playing MMOs a lot less than I used to, and I don’t focus on one MMO but tend to flit between them, paying for a month here and a month there. I also find that I am less excited about upcoming MMOs than I used to be, I know the names of the ones that are coming, and I know what Amazing Unique Revolutionary Features [TM] that they employ (most of which revolve around you killing ten rats in New! and Exciting! ways), but I just can’t believe the hype any more. Because I know how they will actually turn out. We all do. For me it means that I’ll probably try them, get past the initial ten or twenty levels where classes and locations are fresh and the rats die in new and interesting ways, and then I’ll catch a glimpse of the stage in a certain light, and I’ll recognise the set and crew from the last MMO production I was watching, it’s just that the set has had a fresh lick of paint and the crew are wearing different overalls.

And you know, I’ve been through this before.

FPS games were my absolute joy back in the day. From Wolfenstein 3D I was hooked, and I devoted many hours to playing various FPS incarnations, getting all psyched-up about the upcoming releases of Quake, Half-Life and Unreal and its tournament brethren. But at some point in time the genre really took off, before that point you’d only had a few games and they were executed well and brought something genuinely unique to the table, Quake was perhaps the king of the land at the time, and suddenly developers were churning out thousands of FPS games, all very much alike even though each one touted New! and Exciting! features. There were still the big releases, games which my friends and I spent plenty of time enjoying, but eventually the FPS genre seemed to lose its way, to strangle itself in its own desire to entangle every idea and theme and wrap it in the latest and greatest FPS imagery. I’m still amazed that we never saw a My Little Pony FPS.

So here we are in the tree of MMO life, where Everquest saw the graphical MMO genre explode out from its roots, and World of Warcraft brought it into the branches of mainstream popular culture as perhaps Half-Life did for FPS games. And now we begin to see the influx of MMOs released in the wake of this success, and the weight of all this extra growth that isn’t needed begins to damage the tree, it weighs it down and forces it to spend resources in keeping these branches alive which would be better spent in growing a few stronger and healthier branches. And if nobody comes along to prune it, eventually it will wither and fail, until it is a gnarled trunk unrecognisable from its former glory.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

This is the way the genre ends
This is the way the genre ends
This is the way the genre ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

— Bastardised from The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot