Naked Gaming: What’s Your Character(s) Heart?

Naked Gaming: What’s Your Character(s) Heart?
By Neale Sourna
Copyright Neale Sourna 2008

“Who am I, MMORPGer? And Who are You, for That Matter?”

I’m curious about you, MMORPGer; and wonder who you are, deep inside.

There are a lot of faces of me, deep inside me. Wind songs and traveling songs talk to the free and footloose spirit in me, making me feel more at home, on the roads of my mind, than at my “home” home.

Does that ever happen to you?

Y’know, do you hear songs or certain word triggers and feel ancient things you’d long forgotten until triggered; about wayward winds or tumbling weeds and talking phantom spirits of dead cowboys, lost on a fantasy wide range, still herding dead herds from Hell without borders or fences.

Freedom and mobility locked in a fantasy’s context; enslaved to that context; or at least merely entirely engrossed.

When triggered, I FEEL that freedom and mobility within me; even on those days when I’m locked inside and hardwired to a thousand things keeping my feet to the taxpayer’s fire, and not at all thinking of MMORPGs.

But, in my head and heart there are cowherds, space warriors, American Civil War officers, Arabic scimitar specialist warriors, vampires with transformation powers when they reach a certain age of strength, and more. A nonending cinematic, plethora of lush detail and meaning and emotion I can never truly explain to anyone, not in just a few minutes.

That’s why there are novels, and graphic novels, and miniseries, and sequels. And MMORPGs. Free ones online and paid ones there, too.

It’s a video game in my head, and it’s always been that way, but now we have the means and ways to explain that to others. Or share with others, and that’s good, because writers usually write alone, and readers normally read alone.

“They Just Don’t Get Me.”

My past experience has always been that Space Invaders and Mario weren’t able to keep up with the wildly graphic and emotionally depth-filled things going on in my Fine Arts, Film and Video, screenwriter, novelist’s mind. This isn’t a resume, so I’ll stop my list right there.

This is me taking a step or two closer to online gaming.

And why I haven’t is that I have a LOT of juice going through my head and body, electrically, already; and contact with crowds and communications equipment, and other busy things, like a lack of sleep just jolt me up all the more.

So, offline games make me nervous, and I’ve assumed, too, that online ones would be about the same, for me; but I also imagined worse, since not only are you playing those old systems, which had glitches, like knowing you’ve hit the spot, but the game says not.

I also have always figured I have enough “real” people telling me no, without a “system” doing the same, and being just as wrong as some people I know. But I gripe, and kvetch.

That was my past experience. The past is over, although it seems to keep informing us and doing recalibration checks on us, as if trying to reset us to a past and outmoded ideal.

“A New World, a New Landscape.”

Although game playing still makes me nervous, I do find some things fascinating. Maybe like me, you used to say that maybe I’d game when the video matched closer to what I saw in my mind. And then came the Wachowski Brothers, Keanu Reeves, and “The Matrix,” and I found not only something that made online MMORPG and computer gaming more fascinating visually, but also emotional and spiritual. And cultural.

I’m not afraid to admit it. I always liked “Tron,” but, finally, online is cool Tron, on spiritual and emotional and visual steroids; girl steroids, boy steroids, elegance and power, ugly and vicious.

Here were full characters, both cryptic but with depth, in limitless variety.

That’s what I write. I take all my scimitar kings, and Polynesian healers, and all the others inside me and write them; for scripts, games, and more. I craft stories layer by layer, skill by skill, breath by breath; until I know that THIS particular character will say this and that, but not THAT stupid thing.

That this one has a limp, so running is limited.

That this one has a brilliant way with people, but a genetic flaw that makes a depth perception defect and a bright day’s reflection things that blind him.

Or, that this one has such depth that I hadn’t realized his high power for healing and talent for leaving out important details about himself, has hidden from me, his author and maker (but not creator, he did that himself), hidden the fact that he is more highly skilled and dangerous than I knew. And I REALLY KNOW my characters.

Are You Making New People, or Retooling Old Ones?

But, there it was, a surprise. I experienced that, of a character withholding from me until the nearly the end, while completing my first novel to publish; finding hidden and surprising depths, hidden and surprising connections; that my main character could come out from me, and yet withhold a major plot point, which changes in the mind the entire book from page one to that spot.

All that was kept from me.

It’s like finding out something about your sibling, whom you always shared a room with and pretty much everything else.

It’s like having kids; they’re part of you and you know them, and then one day, they surprise the H out of you. And you wonder where they got THAT from; not from you, not from your significant other, not the sitter, not anyone. It’s somehow an element of their own creation.

As making a character, an avatar can be.

Some of us keep full control, but, I’m sure, that many of us must find that our onscreen selves are expressing parts of us that seem our best, or worst; expressing a hidden part of us, or something WE always knew about ourselves, but no one else did, because some things are so secret or so much a part of our being, like our cells, that we can’t share, or just never ever considered it.

Or just assumed no one else would want to stare through a microscope and see a tiny us waving back from a glass slide.

“You Want to Show Me … What?”

“I’ll show you my avatar, if you’ll show me yours.”

And that is why I’ve taken another step closer to stepping through the looking glass into the world of pixels and distant strangers meeting on an electronic plain, so like what goes on, in the wild, infinite prairies and deep black of space, and horror-filled, primal forests, and endless days of lockers and mislaid class nightmares, and other bits in my mind, making us all like dreamers wide awake in dreamland, the oh so many dreamlands, dreaming together, where we are more ourselves than here.