Player Vs Nature

I must be a masochist to be enjoying Wurm Online this much.  I must be insane, to scavenge desperately by the fading twilight for some sad berry to cram in my mouth with nothing more than a chuckle and a sigh.  As a role-playing game, Wurm is utterly plain at first glance; perform arbitrary tasks to fill up arbitrary bars and increase pointless numbers to get better at the rinse and repeat.  It’s Microsoft Excel, with worse graphics.  But once ensconced within the game, that dwindling orange bar is my grumbling stomach.  That blue one is my parched throat.  And the green one—stamina, the most valuable resource in the game—is my ability to pick up the blacksmithing hammer and try one last time to make a butchering knife so that I can get some meat into my diet.  It is my own virtual Nietzschean will to power, my ability to change the world around me to soften its harshness.  That green bar calls upon me to change the entire world irrevocably, and it is impossible not to hear it.

There is no way to circumvent nature in Wurm.  Players, as the creative beings dropped into the foray, exist in contrast to nature; they seek to unmake nature, take its resources and reforge the world in their own image.  They cut down trees to build houses and tunnel through mountains to get at precious ores.  But they rely upon nature to provide those raw resources in the first place, and their food and water as well.  This is the natural way of things in an environment where very little is pre-made and the greatest opportunities lie the furthest into the wilderness.  Nature seeks to unmake the players in kind, culling the clumsy, the slow, the dumb.

The first thing I did with my newly forged butchering knife was march out of my hovel on a search for an abandoned carcass to scavenge.  Imagine my pleasure when I came across a fat cow, freshly killed—too freshly, it turns out, as it wasn’t abandoned at all and I found myself stumbling down a hill away from an indignant mountain lion.  Nature works tirelessly to unravel player progress, reclaiming houses and paths left untended through steady decay.  But nature also requires the players to act as another one of its culling instruments, cutting down old and shrivelled trees for firewood so that new sprouts may grow.  We are integrated into the ecosystem; it is a position we must accept if we are to make anything of ourselves.

What it means to truly struggle to survive in a world that looks to take everything away from you is to make Wurm’s endgame seem ages away.  I confess that as much as I like MMORPGs, I have never cared much for the endgame.  While to some people it is the whole point, it is more of a looming spectre of boredom to me—the excitement is the journey, not the destination and all that.  The feeling is created or at least compounded by the fact that, for all their AAA studio budgets and imported writing talent, few games manage to eke out good endings, no matter how good the writing was throughout the rest of the game.  Mass Effect 2 is my current chief example in the AAA arena (and the original Modern Warfare, much to my own surprise, is its current counterpoint), but let’s not get into that here.

I naturally dread endgame content when the gaming medium hasn’t quite figured out how to actually end a simple story to my satisfaction.  It also irks me when a disproportionate amount of development resources go to stringing along those who have already done everything, especially when you look at the average player level in World of Warcraft and realize that the real profit is a few rungs down the ladder.  Worse still is how players arrive at the endgame content.  I took one look at WoW’s linear one-to-60 (or 70, or 80) crawl—required for both the PvP and PvE endgames—and knew it wasn’t for me.  EVE Online’s PvP endgame—making people on the other side of the internet as unhappy as possible by blowing them/their base/their family up as many times as possible—is equally accessible to everyone from the get-go, but internet spaceship neonates are likely to get jettisoned out the wrong side of the airlock just as fast as they stroll in.  Low-level PvP then becomes a bunch of experienced players masquerading as newbies hoping to get some fun kills outside of their Vindicator battleship, only to find that everybody else had the same idea.  EVE’s low-level endgame PvE means accompanying a much tougher player into a similarly tough gaggle of NPCs, which feels a lot like getting twinked in WoW until you get pulverized into so much space dust by an unlucky broadside.

In Wurm there are vague notions of Realm vs. Realm combat, but nature is always going to be working towards your dissolution no matter how powerful you are or whose side you’re on.  Every small act made in Wurm then feels like it connects to a grander, abstract endgame: the struggle to maintain oneself.  Player vs. Nature.  It is impossible to win; you cannot help but feel it from the moment you first enter the game.  This is not a story that has been purposefully over-dramatized into irreconcilability, but a deep-seated knowledge that each of us carries—we will return to dust.  Wurm simply gives us a place to act it out at 8x speed.  Every step we take closer to self-sufficiency distances us from nature’s capricious whims, but also brings us closer to the inevitable end of that independence—the day when something dark and terrible descends from the mountains and chases us out of our homestead back into the mud.  Then again will we be crafting bowls out of clay just to have something to eat out of.  I relish in that poverty, that instability, that uncertainty.  It makes for a truly infinite game.  This is Wurm, where Gaia always wins, and I don’t mind.