Lineage as a Way of Life

For many, Lineage is just the name of a game, but for some the word replaces friends, love, study and, ultimately, life. This essay is the personal opinion of an author who spent three years in Lineage II; its judgments and conclusions are his own.

The gamer subculture

More and more young people around the world give almost all their free time to MMORPGs. The Lineage series appeared in 1998, by 2000 it had 100,000 users, and at the time of writing it had passed 3.5 million - the population of a big city spending more than five hours a day in the world of Lineage. Players range in age from 12 to 50, sometimes older. In Russia alone, according to the author, there are more than 300 Lineage servers, paid and free.

This is how a subculture of gamers forms who live in their own little world: they work, socialize, fall in love and break up. Apart from those for whom the game is a way to earn money by selling in-game valuables, the rest, in the author's opinion, are so immersed in the online world that it harms their real lives. Since most players are schoolchildren and students, the author asks where competent managers, economists and marketers will come from. Lines like "Should I go to school today or level up a couple more times?" and "I skipped almost all my classes today, and the NPC server is still down!" kept flashing in chat.

Gradually, the author believes, this subculture turns into a subculture of addicts. Asked why they play, people answer: "I want to achieve in the game what I can't in real life." But the author calls power and control over people in a painted world a utopia: everyone on the other side of the monitor has their own opinion, and there are no levers of influence. To the argument "All my friends are here" he suggests making friends in the real world, where you can meet them and talk about more than the game.

What the game reveals in people

According to the author, Lineage reveals a person's true nature, because the same laws apply in the painted world as in the real one. His conclusion is bleak: online games are evil - they swallow people and change their values. At the same time he stresses that he is not calling anyone to action, only sharing what should not go unnoticed by those who are stuck in the game "up to their ears".

The game has positive sides too:

• The leader of a strong alliance is always a good organizer or a natural leader who managed to gather people and convince them his goals are right.
• Only a hard-working and (to a certain degree) unselfish person who wants the best for the clan can lead a clan people want to join.
• Clans and alliances develop their own positions - diplomat, treasurer, recruiter, war commissar - and such people are impossible to overlook.
• Perseverance, diligence, determination and the wish to make life better are found in everyone who has achieved something in Lineage. Someone capable in the game can, under certain circumstances, apply those abilities in the real world.

Self-esteem and beggars

All players start on equal terms - with starting armor, a weapon and a little money. But some earn money through painstaking work, while others run from person to person asking "Give me 10K pls, I'm short for a bow". Some do it for sport, but there are also those who live off it.

The author explains this with two dominant forces of human nature: self-esteem, the central demand of the soul, and the instinct of self-preservation, the central demand of the body. For some the fear of death has the final say, for others ambition: some are ready to give up life for honor, others honor for life. In his view, beggars are driven by low self-esteem, and those who always give only reinforce their belief that this is the way to earn a living. The author worked for a whole month with a person who built his life on income from begging in Lineage, and sees it as a worrying sign: the game world is picking up phenomena people have long since accepted in reality.

Love in the game

It would seem there is no place for love in a painted world, but it gets in here too. The author knows at least three couples he can call married who came together thanks to Lineage. People used to meet at discos, parties or simply on the street, and now more and more often online (ICQ, online games). But in his observation, relationships born in the game rarely succeed: if you spend the whole day in the game, afterwards there is simply nothing to talk about with your loved one, even if you live in the same city - and it all ends in pain, resentment and disappointment.

Mammon and religion

The author suggests looking at the game from a religious point of view. Everyone knows the characters Mammon, Blacksmith of Mammon and Trader of Mammon, and he calls the Seven Signs quest, tied to summoning Mammon, one of the game's central goals. In the essay the author identifies Mammon with the biblical figure and a son of the devil, and asks what such a game teaches children who don't understand what is going on and take everything on faith, and what the developers intended by bringing this character into the game. Only the game's ideologists can answer that, he writes.

A dangerous trend

Online games are developing rapidly and strive to resemble real life as closely as possible: graphics, sound, gameplay and storylines keep improving. Guild Wars, Ultima, World of Warcraft, EVE Online, City of Heroes, Sfera, Lineage - far from a complete list of products that offer players a surrogate of the real world. Back in 1996, the author reminds us, there were no online projects apart from Ultima: you bought a game, finished it and put it on the back shelf. With the arrival of multiplayer servers, people's immersion in game worlds has, in his view, been growing steadily.

In conclusion the author links the development of the online industry to world politics. The events of recent years in Ukraine, Georgia, Yugoslavia and Russia, he writes, demand attention to the problems of survival and adapting to the real world, and in his opinion online games, together with the mass media, advertising and the media industry, are becoming a lever of control over the individual - the more time people spend in painted worlds, the less they have left for real life and for making sense of world events. His verdict: online games are dangerous for young people, and the world needs people who care about the fate of the planet.