Tuesday, October 05, 2004

 

FFXI: The Night The World Broke

Few people are going to confuse a MMORPG with a good book. The suspension of disbelief, though, is very important for the enjoyment of both.

Case in point: last night I was playing Gryffyn, my tarutaru black mage, in Final Fantasy XI. I had just joined an adventuring party in an underground complex known as Crawler's Nest. The Crawler's Nest is this eerie, greenish, somewhat icky maze, with giant silk webs hanging from the ceiling in most places. These are apparently left behind by the hordes of giant caterpillars called crawlers. Running through the place with the other five people in my group, dodging the crawlers while we looked for a safe place to camp, was pretty exciting. It was like being in a movie, really.

After a few minutes, the movie kind of...stopped.

Gryffyn stopped responding promptly to my commands. Words I typed in the chat channel took a good long while to appear on the screen. Reality became choppy; time fractured, hiccuped, and finally...stopped.

The world of Vana'diel disappeared, replaced by a lovely black screen with a window saying that my connection was lost. My disbelief was lost as well. Grumbling, I went through the steps to reconnect, which took a few minutes.

Apparently the massive server farm in Japan, where the game actually runs, lost its link to the Internet. Most of the 3,000 players on the Phoenix world (where I play) had been disconnected. Indeed, most of the people on all the 33 worlds had been kicked off!

My party was lucky. When the world fell apart, we were just standing around. We weren't fighting anything. You see, if you lose your connection, the server keeps running the game without you. Your character stays in the game for a few minutes, until the servers realize you're disconnected. Then they log you off. If you get disconnected during a battle, your character keeps fighting, even though you're not there. You just don't fight very well. Since it can take a few minutes to reconnect, your character can get killed pretty easily while you're disconnected.

When I got back on, the reports started filtering in: everyone in the Yhoator Jungle was dead. Many deaths in the Dunes of Valkurm. The casualty lists just went on and on. Of course, "death" in this game is temporary, and within a minute or two everyone was back on their feet. Only a loss of experience points showed they'd suffered any harm. Nonetheless, it felt as if a great natural disaster had befallen the world.

Seeing all this, my disbelief was once again fully suspended. If the film on a movie breaks, the movie itself carries on once the projectionist fixes it. However, the players in the movie don't know that the film has broken. But on this rare occasion when the "film" of the world of Vana'diel broke, it changed everything. It was a part of the game as much as the Crawler's Nest was. We all feared that it would happen again (which it did, two hours later), and we altered our battle plans accordingly.

I don't think the game was designed this way on purpose, so that even when it breaks it still seems real. It's a happily brilliant coincidence, and part of what makes these games so addictive.

Jefferson 1:59 PM

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