goodbye, world

The World is ending. In twenty-three minutes the servers that sustained the World for almost thirty years, housed in datacenters strewn across three continents, will emit their death rattles. Players have shown up en masse for the occasion. In the streets of the non-human faction’s capital city they jump up-down, up-down, mashing Space Bar and WASD. Spamming emotes and magic spells and musical instruments. Crowding the screen with particle-effects and jumbo-sized mounts. Phasing in and out of each other. Nameplates superimposed to the point of illegibility. Chat exploding with text-speak eulogies. o7, they say. o7, (ᅲ_ᅲ), sadge, gn, it’s been real. It has, it is, despite the blocky character models whose stylization, players argue defensively, is one reason the World held up better than most its touted killers, and the janky animations that accompany them, whose potential for parody was exhausted decades ago by machinima videos and that one South Park episode. Despite corporate greed cluttering the interface with microtransactions. Despite cases of real-life workplace abuse being impossible to dissociate from the company logo on the loading screen. Despite the fact that glitching through a corner sets the World flickering into a cobweb of displaced textures, its blood and guts unrendered of flesh within the span of a pixel. Space here, unlike space in the “real world”, is not infinitely divisible. Take that, Zeno.

What’s real, irrevocably so, is the World that exists as an interstitial patchwork of memories; one constituted, in part, by all players present. Some of whom played on-and-off for the past ≤30 years. Some of whom forgot the World’s existence until they heard of its impending end. Some of whom, too young to witness its peak in the mid-2000s, were introduced to the World during its post-pandemic resurgence, when scores of old players re-installed and popular streamers hopped on the hardcore playthrough train. Some of whom never played at all, who are here on fresh accounts, on Level 1 characters, just to say they were.

They are playing on tricked-out gaming PCs. They are playing on virus-addled toasters. At school. In net cafes. In their offices. They remember playing on their first-ever computers, dust-choked stuttering crash-prone bricks, and the distinct sense of wonder the first time their friends materialized on-screen, their voices on Skype finding purchase on these new bodies made of 0s and 1s, which they could shape in ways they couldn’t their own.

Fireworks. Wending across virtual space. Detonating. Particles of color filling tens of thousands of screens. Stu/stu/st/st/stuttering. Lag is ideally a communal experience but it’s stratified by CPU/RAM/GPU and therefore in part by economic circumstance. Just like fireworks. Which crackle in various -defs through computer speakers and earbuds and headphones into rooms that for the remainder of the World are relegated to the periphery. Players received the orange fireworks for the World’s 10th anniversary, the purple fireworks for its 20th. They are consumable. Once used they are gone forever. A single line of code unmakes them into reminders that here, too, time is irreversible. An admin counts down, red text breaking up the sea of gray o7s. Countless secrets are built into the World that in the end not even data miners will discover. Inside jokes, memorials, remnants of scrapped content, a secret boss that circles the World by hugging the invisible walls that bound its oceans. Only the World knows all its own secrets. The World is alive, of course. It’s impossible for the product of so many consciousnesses not to be, in one way or another. The World loves everyone. Let’s all love the World.

***

Fruitsnax is a Level 110 troll hunter. IRL his name is Jorge. IRL Jorge is sitting at a desk in a studio apartment with a canned beer and a bowl containing two sweet potatoes he perforated with a fork before microwaving for five minutes. For all intents and purposes, however, he’s not currently IRL. He’s in the World. He walks not by moving his legs but his fingers, which almost autonomously navigate his character through the city. A city he’s spent hundreds of hours in. Thousands, if you count all the time he spent AFK. He leaves the auction house, where the concentration of players is highest, and makes his way through the goblin market, into the shaman enclave, the shadows of departing zeppelins occasionally darkening his screen. Outside his IRL window lies a city less familiar to him. Looking out his window makes him think of: wildfires, pollution, movies, homelessness, burritos, golf, traffic. Also work. Which he left early today in order to log in and experience the World for the last few hours of its existence. After his escape he kept expecting an angry message from his manager on Teams, but nope. No one noticed. Fine by him. He avoids his co-workers whenever he can. Dodges their questions about traffic and weather and the underlying philosophical framework of predictive models. AirPods are effective deterrents. His only interactions happen in the mornings, and he arrives extra early to minimize them. At most he waves to a couple of people. Once his ass is planted on his ergonomic desk chair he doesn’t move for the rest of the day except to get coffee from the break area and/or hit the bathroom. Only recently did he learn that coffee loosens your bowels. His safe space is the rightmost stall of the men’s room on his floor, the 26th floor of the J.P. Morgan building, and when somebody enters the stall beside him, their polished dress shoes settling flat on the tiles, he’s possessed by a rage he’s never felt in any other circumstance.

His real safe space, of course, is the World. It’s been his safe space since third grade. Since his closest friend at the time, a snot-nosed hamster-boy named Brett E., introduced him to it. If not for the World, Jorge would’ve lost touch with Brett E. ages ago. Probably in fourth grade. Now Brett E. is messaging him. Now Brett E. is saying, dude it’s crazy. that it’s finally shutting down. Over the past thirty years there were several periods of time, during undergrad for instance, where Jorge and Brett E. lost interest in the World and let their subscriptions die, convinced they would never return to it. But they always did, and often the periods they were getting back into it overlapped, so that Jorge would log in one day and see Brett E.’s character, AChubbyNarwhal, online, and they’d message back-and-forth and catch each other up on their lives, then go run some dungeons or something. If not for the World, Jorge wouldn’t know that Brett E. graduated with a B.A. in Forestry from UF after switching out of the Engineering track. That he now works as an environmental consultant, surveying land and determining, based on the flora and fauna that inhabit it, what licenses a company would need in order to use that land. sometimes for the good guys, sometimes for the bad guys, Brett E. said. Jorge rarely thinks in terms of good and bad guys, although maybe he should; it seems trendy nowadays. As a kid he perhaps too enthusiastically absorbed the lessons baked into the World’s narratives. Morality is gray. Violence is cyclical. Victims inevitably become victimizers. One day you’re a righteous paladin and the next you’re a genocidal undead death knight. That blew his mind, in third grade.

Fruitsnax gets a party invite from AChubbyNarwhal. They follow the arrows on the minimap until they find each other in the crowd. AChubbyNarwhal is a Level 110 orc druid, fully decked-out in legendary armor, helmet and epaulets emanating a spectral glow. Jorge still remembers creating their characters, running around the starting zone in nothing but loincloths. It seems like yesterday. Crazy, the way bookends compress time, make the book between the ends feel not so much a book as a pamphlet, a life in bullet-points. They stand facing each other amid thousands of other players. They jump up and down while spinning. It occurs to Jorge that he hasn’t seen Brett E.’s face in almost twenty years. The Brett E. in his head looks like AChubbyNarwhal. Short, green-skinned, with tusks that clip through his helmet. Their relationship is so particular to the World that once the World shuts down, it wouldn’t surprise Jorge if he never talks to Brett E. again.

The admin counts down. Ten, nine, eight. Jorge lost track of time. Now he tries frantically to type, to ask Brett E. for his contact info, to tell him, stay in touch!!, but everybody is going wild and the resulting lag annihilates his FPS. He mashes his keyboard. Nothing—his character trapped in a stuttering mélange, his cursor unblinking. He’s overcome by panic, panic at the notion that Brett E. will vanish into the ether, severing one of the last remaining tethers between the zomboid Jorge of present and the boy he was at eleven, that gap-toothed little dude who could’ve never imagined a future squashing bugs and chugging coffee and squatting rageful in the rightmost stall of the men’s room on the 26th floor of the J.P. Morgan building, that wide-eyed doofus for whom the world was not a grindy rinse-repeat of work and daily quests, day in, day out, but a mysterious, topsy-turvy place, one that, okay, yes, bucked him now and again, sending him sprawling in the hallway by way of classmate’s foot, but that was nonetheless chock-full of unearthed wonder; the virtual realm not an escape from the non-virtual one, but an extension of its possibilities.

Six, three, two. The moment Jorge begins to light funeral pyres in his mind for his longest-standing friendship to date, it occurs to him that Brett E. must have socials. Of course he does. In fact, there’s a non-zero chance he and Jorge have mutuals. Jorge doesn’t remember what the E. stands for, doesn’t remember, even, if he ever knew, but that shouldn’t matter. The internet is vast. The space between people on the internet is infinitesimal. The World is what creates the illusion of distance via embodiment into digital alter-egos.

The screen becomes a still frame. A snap shot. Everybody frozen mid-animation, chucking firebombs and party streamers, mounting or dismounting in puffs of sparkles and smoke, chugging in-game alcohol and dancing, dancing, dancing. If you lassoed each character on Jorge’s screen at that precise instant and spliced them together in a video editing app, the resulting animation would resemble a beautiful spazz attack, a chimeric danse macabre. The collective energy surges into Jorge’s body, causing his legs to vibrate, his feet to twitch in their loafers; his computer gives a final heave, and dies.