Meet me in the dungeon

Forces at play

IMAGINE: It’s a Monday and you’re speeding down a rainy street in a stolen yellow cab, trying to rescue some fellow thugs who are under fire by the Liberty City P.D. Your tough guy rep is at stake on these crime-infested streets. Anyone who gets in your way gets run over. The next day, your squadron is attacked by a droid army. Even though the Wookiees and Jedi Master Yoda come to your aid, you lose plenty of good men. But there’s an opportunity for a comeback later in the week. Somehow, you manage to rack up 112 yards and score a couple of touchdowns -- despite a sore hamstring. Plus, your agent calls and offers you another movie role. Not bad for a week’s work.

Some might say these three experiences are examples of video gaming, but fans know they’re much more. Gaming allows us to live different lives or change history or have a sex change -- or change species altogether. It is a $25-billion industry, and that sounds like serious big business.

On the pages that follow, Calendar Weekend takes a look at the sprawling world of video games. We explore the phenomenon of massively multiplayer online role-playing games. We check in on a dream job for some -- game testing -- and let you in on a little secret: You can actually major in game design at a few colleges and universities. We’ll give you a brief history of gaming and preview some of the big titles of the holiday season. We’ll even survey art and music inspired by gaming.

Hmmm -- maybe it’s all about fun after all.

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THE first time Ben Clark met his online gaming friends in the real world, he was nervous. For months he’d been playing World of Warcraft with a group of other gamers, masquerading as a surly green “orc” to protect them from pickpocketing rogues and spell-casting warlocks in the popular medieval fantasy role-playing game. Clark knew only a handful of the gamers from real life. The rest he met and got to know by chatting on the WOW instant-messaging system between bouts with enemy players.

“I think we all had the same apprehensions,” says Clark, a Boston-based computer programmer who met the flesh-and-blood versions of virtual friends “Devries,” “Kazuuru” and “Tirzah” during a business trip to Seattle last spring. “We’re normal, but what about this [other] person?”

Having spent 12 hours each week of the last year playing with them, the 27-year-old now ranks his gaming friends “on par with all the college buddies I still see a lot,” he says. “Sometimes even more so.”

He’s even dating one of them. Today, Clark is spending Thanksgiving with his girlfriend and two other players he met online.

Clark isn’t the only gamer whose virtual life has crossed into reality. Strangers who’ve bumped into each other in make-believe realms often find themselves communicating in tangible real-world ways, coordinating playing times, instant messaging with each other and talking over free Internet voice programs.

It’s this sense of community that’s helped propel WOW in particular and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) as a whole to new plateaus in the U.S. Once a niche market for hard-core gamers, there are now as many as 2 million players in North America, up from just 10,000 when the first MMO came out in 1997. MMORPGs are played simultaneously by thousands of players worldwide and feature vast, highly stylized worlds for gamers to explore in character. They play in “persistent environments,” in which the online world continues whether or not they are logged on. Working as teams, or guilds, they accomplish various goals as they advance through the game, accumulating wealth, acquiring skills, exploring new territory and destroying whatever obstacles get in the way.

Chris Lye was minding his own business as a monarch in the popular medieval fantasy game Asheron’s Call when one of his minions approached him in the virtual town square to say hello.

“I didn’t think much of it at the time,” says Lye, a swordsman who’d worked his way up in the game.

That changed the next time Lye, 37, met up with her. She was trapped in the Dungeon of Shadow.

“Just as in real life, Sara has a terrible sense of direction, so she managed to get lost right at the bottom and she was asking for someone to lead her out. I said, ‘Yep. I’ll come down and help,’ ” says Lye, who started playing the game in 1999. “That’s when we started talking for real, like real people.”

In-game chat soon led to on-the-phone chat, then a cross-country flight to meet each other. Soon they were dating long-distance between Seattle and Philadelphia. It wasn’t too long after Lye’s dramatic, damsel-in-distress rescue that they were married.

“ONLINE worlds are really the next century’s social lubricant,” says Jeff Anderson, president and chief executive of Turbine Games, which created Asheron’s Call. “It removes barriers. It takes away embarrassments. If I meet you in the game, it’s not like walking up to you in the bar, where I have to have a lot of guts. In a game, I just walk up to you and say, ‘You want to go kill someone?’ It’s much easier to ask someone to kill a monster than it is to ask them on a date.”

Chances are there will be a lot more dungeon hook-ups early next year. That’s when Turbine will release the highly anticipated Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach. Based on the hugely popular role-playing game of the ‘80s, the MMO version has the usual assortment of humans, elves, sorcerers and wizards. What makes it unique is its privacy.

In a departure from the typical MMO setup, in which players roam public spaces online and often go on quests only to find other gamers have beat them to it, the online D&D; offers privacy. Playing off the original game’s core value of “a party adventuring together in a dungeon and feeling heroic,” as Anderson says, the online game lets clans quest in private dungeons, out of view of other players.

“The overall intensity of [MMO players] is much different from the guy who’s buying Grand Theft Auto or Madden,” says Chris George, director of advertising solutions for IGN Entertainment, a firm that operates a network of video gaming sites. “They are very serious about the community and about the game.

“These people are really defining what the game is going to be,” adds George. “It’s almost like setting up a government in a new country with millions of people and saying, ‘Where do you want to take this?’ ”

What they all have in common is game loyalty. Most MMO gamers play only one MMO at a time due to the time commitment required, the monthly fee they pay to play it and the relationships they’ve built in the game. The No. 1 reason players jump ship: boredom, according to a study of MMO players conducted in July by IGN.

More than 90% are male, according to the study, but certain titles skewer the male stereotype. Of the trolls, elves, barbarians and dwarves who began coming online in 1999 to play the Arthurian MMO EverQuest titles, one-third are female. Roughly 25% of WOW players are women, a statistic attributable, in part, to the game’s accessibility and community- and character-building aspects.

“I’ve never been a gamer until I started playing this game. It’s just drawn me in with the world, and how you can just make your character unique and be a person outside of the real world that lets you escape for a little while,” says Suzanne DeGroat, 23, a Florida zookeeper in real life and a “tauren” in the game.

As a shape-shifting, grass-dwelling beast, she can fight, cast spells and heal other characters, including her husband, Christopher -- who plays an undead warlock summoning demons from the netherworlds. The DeGroats join their guild to play for hours together each week, using dueling computers they bought specifically for the game.

“It’s like a big family,” says Suzanne. “You have your annoying cousins that drive you nuts. Then you have your really good friends who are there to back you up. If you’re in one section of the world of the game and [the enemy has] come to attack you, you can call your friend from the other side and they’ll help you out. It’s just the way that we help each other out that makes it enjoyable.”

The DeGroats started playing WOW a year ago, following friends who migrated from another popular online game, Final Fantasy XI.

Word of mouth is an incredibly powerful force in the world of MMORPGs. Half of all players are referred by a friend or family member, according to the IGN study.

In the coming year, they will have plenty to choose from to keep their boredom at bay, as an increasing number of original games and expanded versions of already-existing titles, including WOW, come to market, growing the genre with different types of worlds to explore and technologically innovative game play.

On the website MMORPG.com, several not-yet-released games are currently tied for “most anticipated,” including Dungeons & Dragons, Dark and Light and Pirates of the Burning Sea.

Dark and Light will feature the largest world of any MMORPG ever created and include innovative artificial intelligence features allowing entire villages to be born without the game developers’ involvement or knowledge. In the historical adventure game, Pirates of the Burning Sea, players will take to the Caribbean high seas during pirating’s 18th century heyday, developing their skills in ship-to-ship combat as they lob cannonballs and trade artillery fire.

“The heart of a good MMORPG lies in the community inside the game,” says MMORPG.com President Craig McGregor. “One of the neat things about [them] is that you take the role of a character that you grow very attached to. Watching and sculpting the growth of this character is the ‘hook’ that keeps most players in the game.”