People say to "write what you know." Well, for about 20ish years of my life, I tried writing novels about just about everything - things I knew, and things I didn't know. I never got more than about 50 pages in. I guess that's still a minor accomplishment - plenty of people don't even get that far - but it frustrated me.
Then, I tried writing for a tabletop game I like. I've got one small book that'll be released once whoever is doing the layout finally gets to it, and a contract for another to be published next year.
I guess "what you know" is kind of subjective. I was never able to finish a book about a kid in school when I was a kid in school, but I can get paid to write a book about necromancy after spending years playing games about smacking skeletons and zombies.
It's a strange world.
Anyway, I've had an idea in my head for about seven, eight years now about a guy, his girlfriend, and her friends playing an MMO together - inspired by a time in my life in which myself, my girlfriend, and my friends played MMOs together. A lot of it was going to be about a new expansion launching - the protagonist has never played the game before, but his girlfriend is near the top of the global leaderboards. The guy and his friends have to catch up with years of backlog before he can get to the point where he can actually continue to discover new material with his girlfriend.
Anyway, it has some fun ideas in it, but I had an urge to write about it again in light of the release of The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth. The Binding of Isaac vaguely follows the biblical story of Isaac (his mother hears a voice from "heaven" telling her to kill her son Isaac). Most of the enemies are twisted babies, undead babies, sentient poops, and demonic entities. Most of the upgrades have some kind of reference to the occult (you can permanently reduce your maximum health to make deals with the devil) or semi-veiled references to child abuse (the belt, the wooden spoon, a carton of rotten milk labelled "breakfast"). It's very cartoony and adorable. It's a rogue-like, meaning the game is heavily randomized, full of unlockable content, and incredibly replayable. It's a ton of fun.
Anyway, so the last time an expansion-ish thing dropped for BoI (The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth), the game's creator, Edmund Mcmillen, included an extremely difficult to unlock secret character. You had to purposefully die multiple times with multiple characters in highly specific ways. There were only the vaguest of hints that the character existed or how to unlock them. A few weeks after launch, the community started to piece everything together, when a dataminer showed up and explained the exact sequence of how to unlock the character.
Ed was pissed. He put a lot of time into creating a cryptic mystery, the fan base was just starting to get serious about working together to find it, and then someone showed up and spoiled everything.
Ed was pissed. When BoI: Afterbirth was announced, he said it wouldn't contain something similar. A strong movement started on the subreddit to ban datamining for at least a few months to everyone could discover the new secrets naturally.
Well, Afterbirth launched on the 30th of October. After the initial roaring gush of enthusiasm and sheer joy, people started to ask questions. Ed and the team specifically and repeatedly promised 120 new items and ~500 pickups, but there were less than 80, even after finding several secrets and killing all the hardest bosses with the most underpowered characters. Pitchforks were raised and then lowered in quick succession - there are still achievements in the game that nobody has unlocked. There are still strange quirks - why can you only put 109 coins in the donation machine in the new game mode, when you could put 999 coins in the old one? What do these seeming useless items do? Did the trailer contain secrets about unlocking it all?
Ed and his team have already announced that there's going to be a patch, so it seems likely that at least some of the pieces of the puzzle aren't there yet to find.
However, on another subreddit, there's a group working feverishly to hack the game and discover the secrets, driven by all kinds of motivations - fame, the competitive spirit, displays of skill - trying to be "the guy" who found the secret. Some are probably driven by the primal human instinct to know - there's something hidden, and they can't rest until they unearth it. Some are driven by simple enjoyment of the game; even if its creator disapproves of their actions, they still want to enjoy the fullness of its experience that's just out of their reach. Some are killjoys who enjoy the fact that the secreted was outed last time and can't wait to do the same.
Edmund just waits. He knows what is and isn't there. He knows the theories of the "good" players who want to solve everything fair and square. He knows the actions of the "bad" players and whether or not their designs even have a chance of succeeding. He has the answers that both sides want out of them, and if he's prepared enough, they'll both know when he wishes.
The power struggle is energizing to me.
Maybe I'll work it into the MMO story someday.
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