The purple-blue text in the corner reads, “Welcome to Eorzea!” and for a moment I think that I am home.
I am playing Final Fantasy XIV.
Deyen Melethor, a crammed together name of my two Final Fantasy XI characters, takes his first awkward steps in his brave new world. He is looking for something – adventure, companionship, sweet, sweet loot. I am, too – things much the same. I am attempting to re-ignite my passion for MMORPGs, of which FFXI was the brightest flame, through this strange, half-finished world called Eorzea.
Limsa Lominsa at night is a gorgeous ghost town. It feels all together familiar and foreign to a veteran of Final Fantasy XI’s Vana’diel. There is something here, I think to myself, but I am not sure if it is mine.
I am crammed in my girlfriend’s living room, sweating, hunched in front of my computer. It is a far cry from the comfortable, air-conditioned room that I would neglect my algebra homework in when I played the predecessor of Final Fantasy XIV.
That room was home to my favorite gaming experiences – days and nights poured into a virtual world. Algebra classes failed. Weight gained. It was blissful, the strange kind of numbness that only an MMORPG can bring. On the weekends, my ‘real-life’ friends and I would stay up late, questing, walking to Bob Evans at some Christless hour. We’d sleep only the minimal amount – too much shuteye would keep us from the game.
I continue to play FFXIV for several hours, and go to sleep. I do not walk to any breakfast joints.
***
The next day, I sleep in. It is a weekend. I walk back downstairs into the heat and begrudgingly begin to playFFXIV again.
XI and XIV are both kind of delirious, like fever dreams. Some people call the user interface in Final Fantasy XI horrible, but to me it is second nature, as much ingrained in me as riding a bicycle. They feel welcoming to me.
Other MMORPGs just feel different, and it’s not the UI. FFXI used to feel alive, brimming with laughter and rage. Its liveliness was more than the sum of its part, I think – or I imagine – an indivisible mixture of people and zones, and fuck-whatever-you-have-to-do-in-the-morning, this-is-more-fun. The mixture of ones and zeros we call Final Fantasy XI creates an overwhelming, transporting sense of place. At its best, it was not a game but somewhere I went – somewhere I was with friends. A second home.
Certain parts of Vana’diel are rich with memories, just like places on Earth; here is where I fell off my bike in 7th grade. Here is where my friend got too cocky and died in Palborough Mines. The fall from my bike left me with a huge scab on my knee; the incident in Palborough left me with screenshots. I remember making friends in the shadow of the windmills in Konstacht Highlands.
I have none of these things anymore.
I lived in Vana’diel as much as I did my other 9th grade reality. I used to stay awake on snow days, eating wheat toast with strawberry jelly, and playing. That experience is one of my fondest memories. Games likeLord of the Rings Online and RIFT are fun, sure, and pretty, and all together smoother experiences. But they don’t consume me. Sometimes, I think I don’t want to play games but be eaten alive by them – like XI did.
That is why, I realize in the sweaty summer heat, I bought XIV the way I did – impulsively. It was $14.99, it’s ‘broken’, there’s no subscription fees. I swept into Gamestop and purchased it without hesitation – I never do that, especially not on something that almost unanimously sucks.
I have deluded myself, I realize as Deyen gains another level. I didn’t buy FFXIV because it cheap, I bought it because it seemed like another chance at losing myself.
I realize my sword is woefully out of date, and that I have no idea how to get another one. FFXI and FFXIVboth either suffer from or flourish because of a purposeful or accidental lack of direction.
Pressing back into the city, I disconnect. My girlfriend’s internet is terribly spotty. In the old days, this would be a crisis. I was in a dangerous area, I could die. I could lose experience. Back then, I would scream and shout and fly back online in a flurry.
On this day, I feed my cat.
Later, once she is sleeping, I log back on. Deyen is fine, standing where I left him. I begin to wander back towards Limsa Lominsa, when a most dreaded question hits me: Why?
Why am I playing this? It’s boring. It doesn’t even make sense. What’s the point? I could be playing something better, more rewarding.
I have asked myself questions like these every time I play an MMORPG, and I play a lot of them. They are my chosen genre, my muse. They also revolt me. I can’t play them for very long; once the fever of a new world and character wears off I get bored. I start calling them hackneyed, nonsensical, and lazy. I start lamenting how they could be so much more. I quit playing whatever game I am playing that week, and a week later I am downloading another one, praying for salvation.
As Deyen walks into the weapons store– the most logical place to buy a sword, for sure – I realize something: I am not searching for my next MMORPG, or even a new sword.
I am searching for my youth.
I have been hopping from game to game for years, searching for that feeling. A game that gives back to me what I give to it. A game that becomes home, not a timesink. I am not sure, though, that that game exists. Or rather, I’m not sure that a game can ever become that for me again. I’m not even entirely sure that is what I was looking for.
And the problem is that I want it so desperately. I’m not sure if that feeling, what I’m looking for, is from Final Fantasy XI or if it is from my youth. Am I the slave of games or nostalgia or both?
Videogames and my formative years are so inextricable that those things might be the same thing. I am a grown-up now. I have a cubicle and a cat and a girlfriend and rent; I have grown-up things. In shell-shocked terror, I posit that I may be the one preventing that consumption, that carelessness, that joy: not the games.
Something whispers inside me: maybe I’m too old for that now. Maybe I’m smarter.
Did I lose something along the way? In starting to really think about games, did I forget about what made them so great in the first place? I’m not sure; but if I did, I would give back all this insight to feel that unbridled fervor, that delicious numbness again.
I may be damaged goods at this point, I realize. The golden yellow hues in which I recall my past gaming experiences – back then, when games were just better – might not be entirely accurate, but I am incapable of remembering them any other way. Every other game I play is measured against the impossible standard of the games I played back then, back when I could really play games, when I could sit down and feel them in my gut – but maybe that’s just the nostalgia talking. I am playing MMORPGs to reconnect with my bitterly missed youth, not to play MMORPGs.
What does this say about my relationship with games? They are undoubtedly at my core. I am still compelled to play them and write about them and think about them. Things are different now, though – and I miss the old ways. I am homesick for the Vana’diel I used to know; I am hungry for the kind of gaming I used to have; I am clinging desperately to my youth as it floats away. I have searched for these things, ways to reclaim them, or things that feel like them – but I have not found much.
In the end, it does not matter. They are gone, I am still here.
At the weapon store, it turns out, they don’t really sell the right kind of swords. Not the kind that I can use; I have to go somewhere else to find what I am looking for. This place can’t help me.
My fingers press the keys. Deyen marches dutifully on.
***
It is a few weeks later. I have moved to a new apartment. It has central air, like that old room, but I have determined that wasn’t the secret. I sweat less, though.
We haven’t had the internet for a week, so I haven’t played any MMORPGs. I might still go back to Final Fantasy XIV occasionally, it’s a pretty game, and I love the series enough to support it.
I eventually found a new sword, but I didn’t find that feeling. I feel that I may be expecting too much from games. I can’t expect them to help me deal with “growing up”, it’s unfair. It hurts our relationship.
However, I have been spending my lunch breaks at work watching videos for Guild Wars 2. I’ll be playing it on launch day, I’m sure. I may never find what I’m looking for, but people always say that MMORPGs should be about the journey, not the endgame. I guess that will have to be good enough for me.