"I find that playing on console ... There are fewer distractions and I tend to play for longer sessions which also helps with immersion...
On the PC I’m constantly distracting myself with FOMO around Twitter or Discord. I run with 2 monitors and always have social media up on monitor two and constantly scan it. Because of this I just don’t “sink in” to a game quite as much; my attention is always divided."
This triggered me. I got a flash memory of playing EverQuest in the distant past. Shivers.
For many, EQ was the very definition of "immersion", a true virtual world, where people set up home, lived their lives. That scared people.
These days we hear very little about the supposed addictive nature of the hobby but back then MMORPGs were frequently cited as potential mental health nightmares. In the early 2000s, one of EverQuest's most widely-used nicknames was EverCrack, a reference to the infamously addictive and soul-destroying cocaine variant that was by far the most demonized drug of its day.
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| I have no extant screenshots of EQ before about 2004. This looks likes a very early version of the moveable, windowed UI. |
For a while. As anyone who's been around for longer than a couple of decades soon begins to realize, these things are cyclical. If you google "trends in crack cocaine news stories" you'll find that, as reported, ironically by the BBC, crack is back.
As in drugs, so in music, movies and gaming. What was old is new again. What goes around comes around and like that.
Fortnite, of course, is the new EverCrack. Or it was last year. Are people still worried about Fortnite or are we on to some new demon already? The roundabout keeps spinning faster and faster. It's hard to keep up.
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| And this appears to be a slightly later, cleaner version. Actually, this is better than the UI I use now... |
Getting back to EverQuest, what Pete's comments made me think of wasn't so much the addictive rush of early EQ as its sheer purity. He's absolutely right about the modern approach to MMORPG gaming on PC. Compared to the original experience, what we enjoy today is adulterated, fractured, incomplete.
One of the reasons frequently cited for the decline of the genre is the contemperaneous rise of social media. It's become a truism to assert that turn-of-the-century MMORPGs were the social media of their day. For many hundreds of thousands - millions - of people, playing an online game provided their first and for a while their only experience of talking in real time to friends and strangers around the world.
This is entirely true. What's less well-reported, I think, is the focus the primitive technology of the late 20th and very early 21st centuries brought to the mix. In those increasingly difficult to remember days we tended to do one thing at a time. Well, perhaps not one. Fewer, though. Certainly fewer.
If you played EverQuest you had to concentrate on that. There were consequences if you let your attention slide. Corpse runs. Experience loss. Misery and despair.
More than that, the game itself resisted distraction. You could not tab out to look something up on Allakhazam let alone check your email. EverQuest could not be windowed. It used all your screen space and all your processing power. You played it until you'd had enough then you closed the program and did something else.
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| There are surprisingly few images of the original UI online and I strongly suspect that those there are come from P1999. |
Unless you were bad. If you were, you might download a piece of third party software called Win-EQ which, among other things, allowed you to play EverQuest in a window. Illegally. Against the terms of the EULA. Risking a ban should you be caught.
I'd been playing EQ for several years before I even heard of Win-EQ. When I found out what it was I wanted nothing to do with it. It was cheating. No-one I knew (and at that time I knew scores of people in game) admitted to using it. It was for bad people.
We goodies sat and medded with our spellbooks open, filling the entire screen. I played for years with no distractions or media other than the official EverQuest display, a nine-inch square inside a UI that filled the rest of my 14" CRT monitor, my only contact with the outside world the chat box at the bottom center of the screen. That was immersion for you.
I did sometimes hear of people who had two PCs running at once. I occasionally grouped with someone who had Netscape upon on a second monitor so they could check things on Caster's Realm or EQ Atlas. We did in fact have two PCs in our house from early 2000, with Mrs Bhagpuss playing EverQuest in one room and me playing EverQuest in another. I don't think it ever occured to either of us that you could have two in the same place...
As for internet access via a handheld device, well that was the stuff of science fiction. Imagine it - something the size of a paperbook book or even a pack of cigarettes that you could tap with your fingertips to look up what spells a Level 27 Druid got or where to go for the Level 24 Mage pet. Fantasy!
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| I envy even this level of simplicity. Although why I have Group and Target on the right I cannot imagine... |
What I had, in point of fact, were three ring-binders with sheafs of paper printed out from the various essential online resources. And a book to read during long med breaks. After a couple of years I also started to listen to the radio while I played, if I was soloing. An actual radio, in the room with me, not some online app.
Perhaps, looking back, the experience wasn't entirely pristine but it was undeniably less diluted by distractions and diversions than it has been these last dozen years. I never tabbed out at a loading screen and found myself twenty minutes later, watching Rilo Kiley on YouTube with no memory of how I got there.
As Pete says, consoles don't generally dicker with such dilletantism but they can't stop you from having your laptop open beside you on the couch, your phone on the armrest, your tablet on the side-table. Nothing any games designer can do can prevent you from spoiling every surprise or taking a wrecking ball to your sense of immersion if that's what you want, or if that's what you can't help yourself from doing.
Genies can't be put back in bottles even though that's a quest we've most likely all done, successfully, many times. The wave of faux-retro MMORPGs still in development hell - Pantheon, Lucimia, Camelot Unchained et al - all rely to some extent on reviving and recreating that sense of immersion and community. Holly Longdale, in the numerous interviews she's given for EQ's 20th, has been hammering home the rediscovered belief at Daybreak Games that "social dependency is who we are".
It may be who they are. But is it who we are, any more?
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