I have always been more of a solitary figure. I no doubt would’ve been a total recluse if I didn’t have my sister and cousins for playmates growing up. Even still, the reclusive impulse is strong. My experience in the Army taught me how to be superficially social for survival purposes and I’ve become quite adept at appearing rather extroverted in public presentation while remaining at heart a committed introvert.

As such, when I play video games, my preferred experience is the single player one (unless we’re talking about Smash Brothers or Mario Kart; the more the merrier then). You can no doubt imagine that the MMO boom hasn’t really held much appeal to me. However, while my battle buddy was deployed to Iraq, I wound up picking up Guild Wars and later WoW to keep him company. (A small service to serve from the comfort of Fort Livingroom.)

Despite the massively multiplayer nature of either of these two games, my impulse (when said battle buddy wasn’t around) was to solo. This was less of a problem in Guild Wars (until my chara hit the level cap while the enemies continued to rise in level) than it was in WoW, because I was stuck on a PvP server. There are warmer climes each and every member of the Horde can be consigned to as far as I’m concerned. I am, of course, talking about the practice of ganking. (Random player-killing to the uninitiated.) Having some dillweed forty levels higher than you come by and kill you whilst questing in contested territory is about as fun as it sounds. It finally became too much for me and I quite the game. (Considering the conniptions my battle buddy would have years later despite being rather accomplished in the game shows that it didn’t just bother me.)

Now, of course the ganking was entirely mutual. Both factions were equally guilty of preying on the weak (though you are naturally going to see the enemy as the more evil). It’s classic predatory behavior, a lot of the crocodile brain at work, I’m sure.

The reason I’m bringing up this topic is because of a similar, albeit more benign variation I’m seeing in Fantasica, which has been occupying no small portion of my time lately. You are free to attack other players once an hour, five of your party and five of your allies versus your opponent’s monsters and vice versa should you find yourself the defender. The typical monsters get chewed up in short order even if you devote the time to maxing them out. Normally, the reward for victory is 10K Luna (the standard in-game currency). You can also target the artifacts an opponent carries to complete your set and get the monster card reward. Because the artifacts you win from the end chapter battles in the main questline are random, you pretty much have to resort to raids to reliably round out your collection. When attacked, though, there’s a report of it, which leaves the defender open to launch a revenge attack and reclaim the lost Luna. (Oh, yes, I failed to mention that the 10K Luna reward comes out of the defender’s coffers.) To prevent the cycle of revenge from going on forever, the game caps the number of attacks on a single player to three in a day.

When it comes to yours truly, I’ve found that I can be rather vindictive soul. If attacked, I will revenge myself three times over, even if the attack is itself revenge for one of my raids. I’ve already had two victims of my depredations plead with me to cease. The most recent even offered to pay me off to get me to stop, but it was never about the money. It was simple vendetta.

Those of you casting a dubious eye on my humanity may be mildly comforted to know that I’ve shown mercy to my supplicants and having reached the end of the current questline, I have no further need to go out a-viking. I’ll still wage a campaign of revenge on any who attack me, but online games have a way of bringing out your inner sociopath.

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