Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2004 Popular Press

A seasoned warrior, you enter the Rogue Encampment, only to hear news of strange disturbances and monstrous uprisings in the surrounding countryside. You gather your group of fellow fighters and trek into the dangerous landscape, working together to vanquish evil. After a series of stunning victories, you gain even greater battle prowess, able to face the grimmest odds. Then, the next Monday night, you meet your comrades in the chat channel to organize another game and do it all over again. Welcome to the world of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction.

The gaming world has been largely exempt from the serious analysis devoted to other contemporary media. In this article, however, I plan to use Diablo II as a case study for an analysis of the larger cultural implications of multiplayer gaming. What is the appeal of such games? How do such games transform contemporary conceptions of both self and community? Online role-playing games (RPGs) like Diablo II, I argue, offer an alternative social framework that provides the player with an escape from modernity (and an exciting gaming experience). First I consider Diablo II's pseudomedieval landscape; how and why do RPGs strive to elicit nostalgia for a seemingly lost era of epic? In answering this question, I suggest that Diablo II allows people to connect in a new way that paradoxically hearkens back to medieval and early modern social constructs.

Second, I consider how this new cultural paradigm changes our contemporary definitions of community and self. Unlike face-to-face gaming, online players only know as much about each other as each person chooses to share. In his analysis of pen-and-paper RPGs, Gary Alan Fine wrote, "For the game to work as an aesthetic experience players must be willing to 'bracket' their 'natural' selves and enact a fantasy self. They must lose themselves to the game. This engrossment is not total or continuous, but it is what provides for the 'fun' within the game" (4). Fine calls this form of self-fashioning the "framed self" (4), an appropriate term because it gets at the nested selves inherent in online gaming. At least three distinct "selves" overlap within the context of the Diablo II gaming environment:

1. The "real life" self (henceforth called RL self).

2. The online identity (that is, how one is known on gaming bulletin boards, within guilds, and on the main http://www.battle.net network).

3. The character within the game. In addition, Diablo II players often develop and control many characters; each account can hold up to eight characters, and each player can have multiple accounts.

For example, when I play Diablo II, I am negotiating several plastic identities: my real life identity, Thelestis (my moniker on the Amazon Basin, a gaming community and forum); my account name on http://www.battle.net; and Duessa (a level eighty-six Frozen Orb/Hydra sorceress). The RL self controls these alternative identities, but the alternative identities are not merely circumscribed within the borders of the RL self. As Miroslaw Filiciak, one video game theorist, characterized it, "We are existing in a state of continuous construction and reconstruction" (98). Finally, I consider how these uniquely nested, self-fashioned personae interact in the form of gaming guilds and forums.

Diablo II is a hack-and-slash role-playing game, originally released in June 2000, that allows for both single-player and multiplayer gaming. Blizzard Entertainment runs a free online system, http://www.battle.net, to which gamers can connect and play with people from around the world. When I checked on a random weekday afternoon, 74,570 players were engaged in 46,196 games on the USEast realm alone. (1) Blizzard has since released an Expansion Pack, Lord of Destruction, which adds an extra "act" to the four acts already present in the game, and has added two new character classes. In addition, Blizzard has released numerous "patches" to the http://www.battle.net environment, most recently Patch 1.10 in October 2003, which added new items, monsters, and "world events" to the fictional world of Diablo II.

In the game, the player selects a certain character class from a group of seven--Amazon, Barbarian, Paladin, Necromancer, Sorceress, Druid, and Assassin--and accomplishes numerous "quests" that involve killing an endless procession of monsters, demons, and undead creatures. In the fictional framework of the game, the character is attempting to save the world from three "Prime Evils": the demons Mephisto, Diablo, and Baal. This simple fictional structure, however, belies the complexity of character development. Characters have 505 stat points and 110 skill points to distribute, and thousands of items with which to equip their characters, making endless permutations of character builds possible. (2) In addition, online players may form parties of up to eight, working cooperatively to defeat monsters and complete quests. Characters may also duel with each other by "going hostile."

Like many RPGs, Diablo II takes place in a pseudomedieval environment; in fact, many of the elements of the Diablo II world have been drawn from actual facets of medieval literature and culture. For example, players may hire mercenaries to help in each of the five acts, ranging from Act I rogues (Amazon archers) to Act V barbarians (sword-wielding warriors). The Act V barbarians are clearly modeled after ancient Germanic tribes, and many of their names are either drawn from minor characters in Beowulf or made to sound like Anglo-Saxon names (for example, Wiglaf, Ecgtheow, and Hygelac).

Diablo also appropriates the symbolic framework of medieval culture, in which items have meaning beyond their physical appearance and nature. For example, characters find many gems and jewels during questing, each of which has different properties and uses beyond mere decoration. An emerald protects against poison when socketed in a shield, or inflicts poison upon the enemy when socketed in a weapon. Likewise, a ruby protects against fire damage when used defensively, inflicts fire damage when used offensively, and, adds vitality (life) points to the character when used in armor or helmets--an appropriate use of elemental symbolism (fire as the spark of life).

From classical antiquity into medieval Europe, popular and scholarly culture ascribed medicinal and magical powers to gems and jewels. As the editor of one Middle English lapidary noted, many manuscripts of medieval lapidaries are extant today, which indicates "a considerable interest in the significances and virtues of precious stones" (Keiser VII). Ancient traditions of pagan symbolic magic merged with both Christian tropes and newly emerging science in the medieval lapidary.

One famous example is Isidore of Seville's sixth-century Etymologiae, a comprehensive encyclopedia of the natural world that classifies and enumerates the properties of many gems and stones. As Joan Evans, author of Magical Jewels of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, noted, Isidore's taxonomy groups gems by color. For example, emerald (smaragdus) falls into the category of green gems, and "transfuses the surrounding air with green" (31).

Like Isidore's Etymologiae, gem classification in Diablo follows color; unlike Isidore, gem properties are based on correspondences to natural phenomena or elements: rubies for fire, topaz for lightning, sapphire for cold, and so on. The Diablo cosmology ascribes symbolic value to everyday objects. Diablo is embedded in the premodern theory of correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, in which heavenly objects have counterparts in earthly objects, and earthly objects have counterparts within the human body itself. Numerous medieval and Renaissance cosmologies assert the interdependence of humanity and universe.

Figures as diverse as Paracelsus, Marsilio Ficino, and John Donne made references to such cosmic correspondences. For example, the fifteenth-century alchemist and physician Paracelsus studied "cosmology, theology, natural philosophy and medicine in the light of analogies and correspondences between macrocosm and microcosm" (Pagel, qtd. in Debus 52-53). Marsilio Ficino, an Italian Neoplatonist philosopher, wrote in a letter to Lorenzo de' Medici, "For these celestial bodies are not to be sought by us outside in some other place; for the heavens in their entirety are within us, in whom the light of life and the origin of heaven dwell" (62). Donne, contemplating the looming face of universal decay, described the structure of the universe thus: "This is nature's nest of boxes: the heavens contain the earth; the earth, cities; cities, men. And all these are concentric." Although it may seem simplistic to lump together these varied men from different time periods, they share one thing in common: the a priori assumption of a providential, hierarchical cosmos.

Such a worldview allows for an integration of magic, religion, and science--a semiotic natural philosophy in which objects represent other objects and the natural world is full of signs pointing to a higher meaning. One biographer of Paracelsus used the example of orchids, which "she [Nature] has made ... in the shape of testicles, thus hinting that their juice will 'restitute his lewdness to a man'" (Pachter 74). The flower's appearance mimics its medicinal or magical use, just as the fiery color of a ruby in Diablo II hints that it will inflict elemental damage on the enemy. Within the structure of the game, a providential authority imbues the world with symbolic meaning and order. The "Archangel" Tyreal directs the character to fulfill certain quests (although is not able to intervene in physical world), and the supernatural wisdom of sages, like Deckard Cain, and arcane manuscripts, like the Scroll of Inifuss, guide the player through the game. Thus, the game's symbolism and structure attempt to capture a pre-Cartesian networking of self and world that is not possible in contemporary society--reminiscent of a time before mind, body, and world were separated.

Modernity, as some literary theorists have argued, can be characterized by nostalgia for a vanished time before the detached, subjective self emerged, a time when the values and meaning of life were more clearly and universally defined. In Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukacs wrote, "... the outside world to which we now devote ourselves in our desire to learn its ways and dominate it will never speak to us in a voice that will clearly tell us our way and determine our goal" (203). Inner certainty is no longer possible in a world of psychological ambiguities, and outer certainty is no longer possible in a world of relativism. As Luckacs put it, "... the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem" (186). The individual mind has become separated from the welcoming certainty of premodern cosmology and community.

What does this scathing indictment of modernity have to do with computer games?

Within their fictional worlds, Diablo and other similar computer games do "speak to us in a voice that will clearly tell us our way and determine our goal." Within the frame of the game, each item has a meaning and purpose, and although each character has nearly limitless options for development and growth, the character's purpose is narrowly circumscribed. It is commonly accepted that escapism is one motivation behind gaming. I argue that the medieval setting provides the game with a moral and symbolic frame that allows the player to experience a specific type of escapism: escapism from the ambiguity of real life to the absolutism of the virtual world.

In responses to a query I posted on a popular Diablo bulletin board community, many players commented on the epic quality of the game. (3) One player wrote,

"The Middle Earth feeling brings to me the poetry of great warriors. Killing Diablo or Mephisto with a bazooka would not be that much fun would it? They must fall on the weight of your arrows and swords, your finesse or brutal force" (Vlad).

Another commented, "Oh and I quite like medieval games.

They seem much more evil and dangerous" (VVoody). The "danger" in Diablo is clear-cut: three evil demons intend to destroy the world, therefore a hero must save it; at the same time, the danger and evil is manageable. Players face obstacles that challenge them, yet they experience complete and unambiguous victory. The monsters die, the characters acquire more powerful items and skills.

As one player commented, "So, why computer games in general? Escapism. From the real world where your control is limited to a world where it's virtually unlimited" (Blondwithtude).

One player, Brillig, even obliquely mentioned the sort of epic nostalgia that characterizes the sort of "antimodernity" of medieval RPGs. He wrote,

You asked what we think about the game's medieval setting. The thing that strikes me about it is that it succeeds in suspending reality for such a diverse audience. The first time I watched my kids playing, it reminded me of some lines from a Wordsworth poem: For this, for everything, we are out of tune, It moves us not.-- Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. From "The World Is Too Much With Us; Late and Soon"

In the surprising connection he draws between Wordsworth and Diablo II, Brillig effectively characterized the aura or atmosphere of the game. For Brillig, like Lukacs, the contemporary world seems devoid of meaning somehow: "It moves us not." The game environment allows an opportunity too connect with something seemingly ancient, mythical, or epic--as Wordsworth put it, the chance to see mighty, long-lost Gods rising from the sea, or the power of a worldview in which magic, religion, self, and community are ineffably interwoven.

Although the medieval setting is crucial to the atmosphere of the game, it also functions as a sort of familiar environment for those who are interested in RPGs, and as a facilitator for the item collection, character development, and teamwork that form the real meat of the game. As one player commented, "While it [the medieval setting] does lend a certain level of immediate familiarity, the game is essentially (and by design) ahistorical and fictional" (kylhwch).

In "A Clash Between Game and Narrative," Jesper Juul argued that narrative and replayability are incompatible: "the more story you attempt to add to a game, the fewer times the player will play it." This certainly holds true for Diablo. Although the game does have a plot, and it even has cinematic episodes as interludes between the acts, the plot quickly becomes irrelevant. The upper two difficulty levels, Nightmare and Hell, merely recapitulate the quests and landscapes of Normal difficulty. So why do tens of thousands of people keep returning to Diablo, conquering the same monsters again and again, traversing the same landscapes countless times?

The real challenge in Diablo is one of self-fashioning in an online community. In this community, the correspondences of the medieval world have been recreated and reworked, transforming and erasing modern conceptions of a detached self. Strangely enough, the Cartesian mind/body split seems to have evolved to a state, at least online, where physicality completely falls away; http://www.battle.net is minds or personalities directly interacting. Miroslaw Filiciak has characterized this plasticity of identity as a development sprung from postmodernism: "The postmodern identity is a self-aware identity ... We do not have to talk about the individual as a monolithic self anymore" (97).

The integration and conscious manipulation of self and community, however, need not be construed as a completely unique postmodern phenomenon. Diablo II, like many RPGs, cobbles together a melange of allusions, images, names, legends, and myths from numerous cultures and eras. The "tower shield" and "gladius" look like the weaponry of a Roman centurion. The golden-domed palace in Lut Gholein is festooned with vaguely Islamic patterning and scrollwork. The stepped temples of Kurast, surrounded by a forbidding jungle, call to mind the cultures of ancient Mesoamerica. One large, beastly denizen of a dangerous ice cave is named "Frozenstein." What should we make of this seemingly random collection of imagery and cultural allusion? Are these just the random choices of game creators who lack the imagination to design their own unique worlds?

All of these images, locales, items, and characters have one effect: to create an ambience of the legendary, the exotic, and the epic. Although medievalism, as I have discussed, is by far the predominant cultural benefactor of Diablo II's imaginary world, the whole strange cultural melange taps into a shared conception (at least for Western culture) of hyperreality--that which is larger-than-life, extraordinary, beyond the mundane. Many RPGs, including titles such as the Baldur's Gate series, EverQuest, and others, use the same familiar fantasy settings and imagery because players desire a locale that feels at once familiar and exciting. The real-life self desires to be comfortable and at ease in the online environment, but the virtual self seeks stimulus and engagement beyond that offered by ordinary life. This collection of recognizable cultural references and allusions functions reaches into a common cultural databank, employing imagery that has resonance beyond its practical purpose. A gem no longer merely adorns the wearer; with it comes an entire web of legend and allusion that helps to further distance the virtual self from the banality and ambiguity of everyday life. This paradoxically familiar and exotic environment functions as a playground for the virtual self-fashioning of the sort that results in the "nested selves" discussed earlier.

Pen-and-paper RPGs, one might argue, offer a similar opportunity for self-fashioning. After all, the Dungeons and Dragons enthusiast also develops a complex alternative identity for his or her character. So what makes online gaming significant? For one thing, online games allow much greater flexibility, ease, and accessibility. Diablo II players do not have to imagine their characters from scratch; instead, they choose from preset characters with predetermined potential skills and abilities. The aspect of community formation and definition takes on an entirely new level in online RPGs, especially evident in the formation of online guilds--"groups of players (in theory, sometimes characters, but in practice players) who share a similar ethos, at least in the game" (Rydzewski). Each time you sign onto http://www.battle.net, you are not just sitting down with a few friends in your kitchen; you are claiming citizenship in a massive international community. Guilds exemplify this kind of nation-fashioning; you're a part of the larger http://www.battle.net community, but you can identify yourself with a smaller subset of your choosing. In RL, group membership can be determined in many ways. For example, I could be labeled a woman, a Southerner, a teacher--but in online games, geography and occupation do not determine destiny.

Moreover, games are different from other forms of Internet communities because they take the interaction one step further. Players don't just chat, they work collaboratively. Of those who responded to my informal questionnaire, a large majority cited both community interaction and character development as two primary appeals of Diablo II. In the Amazon Basin, one particularly large and well-organized guild, (4) games and forum communications are governed by a set of social conventions spelled out in the online Frequently Asked Questions Web page: What are the Amazon Basin games rules?

Here are the Amazon Basin Games Rules. We like to think of them as commonsense guidelines for providing a friendly, cooperative gaming experience.

1. Be Friendly. Do not directly or indirectly attack other players.

2. Play Fair. The use of hacks, cheats, or illegal items is forbidden.

3. Share Drops. All item drops belong to the entire group, to be distributed fairly.

4. Be Courteous. Refrain from inappropriate language, insults, and harassment.

5. Come to Play. Basin games are primarily for team play--not trading, muling, or rushing. ("Amazon Basin FAQ")

These clearly delineated rules form a social framework for this particular online community. The FAQs make it clear that those who participate in guild-sponsored games and forums must conform to a certain ethos; moreover, participation in such an online community is entirely voluntary. The rules are determined by mutual consent, not by imposition from a higher authority, and those players who choose to join such a community generally seek the companionship of like-minded people. Guilds such as these are composed of online identities (as opposed to RL selves) interacting with one another, engaged simultaneously in self-fashioning and community-fashioning.

In the emerging field of video game theory, one tendency has been to analyze the game as a text like a film or novel, primarily focusing on the game's narrative or fictive qualities. Barry Atkins, author of More than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form, wrote, "... my provisional answer to the question of whether the computer game is 'more than a game' is a qualified 'yes'--it can also be a form of fiction making, and in the cases I isolate presents a fictional text that rewards close critical scrutiny" (9-10). On the other end of the continuum of video game criticism, one character in Tad Williams's seminal virtual reality novel Otherland reductively criticizes RPGs: "Boring ... Kill monster. Find jewel. Get bonus points. Wibble-wobble-wubble" (634). Atkins's argument and Williams's character represent two extremes on a spectrum of "reading" video games --from complex, fictional texts to dull, meaningless repetition. In the case of Diablo II, narrative analysis does not yield much fruit; the medieval milieu and its emergent social and communal implications far over-shadow the importance of the plot. Neither, however, is Diablo II a simple or childish game. The game benefits more, as I hope to have shown in this article, from an analytical framework that finds value not in the quality of the story it tells but in the cultural implications of the game-play itself.

As interactive characters in a shared landscape, players can engage in both self-fashioning and community-fashioning. The medieval setting appeals to a mythic nostalgia that is inherent in modern society; the self is felt to be plugged into a larger whole, both technologically and more mystically (with regard to the way players have material-immaterial connections to other players). Diablo II is participatory escapism; the social framework allows the player a great deal of freedom, but at the same time circumscribes his or her actions within the rules and setting of the game. At the risk of hyperbolic speculation, the cultural implications of these things may be enormous, perhaps as large as the rise of the novel. Online gaming represents a renaissance of an older, more integrated worldview. Just as the historical Renaissance did not merely recapitulate classical ideas, artwork, or philosophy, this online Renaissance promises to transform our conceptions of community and self.

Notes

1. http://www.battle.net consists of four "Realms": USEast, US-West, Europe, and Asia, the largest and most populous of which are the two US realms. The number I have cited would typically be higher in the evenings, when more people return from work and participate in online games.

2. "Stat points" may be added to four basic attributes: Energy, Vitality, Dexterity, and Strength. Energy increases "mana" (that is, magic-wielding capability), Vitality increases life, Dexterity increases the chance that attacks with connect with an opponent or that opponent's attacks may be blocked, and Strength allows the character to equip heavier items and increases the power of his or her attack. "Skill points" may be allotted to various character-specific abilities. Each character has three pages of abilities, each of which contains three separate trees. For example, a Necromancer may choose from ten Summoning Spells, ten Poison and Bone Spells, or ten Curses. Because stat and skill points may be distributed in numerous ways, a multitude of character builds are available; much is left up to the strategy and imagination of the player.

3. All quotations from Diablo II players are from replies posted to the following thread on the Amazon Basin forums: "Why do you play D2? An open-ended question" Online posting, begun 12 Mar. 2004. The Amazon Basin: Diablo II Forums: General Diablo II Discussion. 13 Apr. 2004. <http://www.theamazonbasin.com/d2/forums/index.php?showtopic=40626&hl=>. Forum members are identified only by their self-chosen handles, which is the citation method I have used within my text.

4. As of June 28, 2004, the Amazon Basin (http://www.theamazonbasin.com/d2/forums) had 8,090 registered members.

Works Cited

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Katherine McBirney is a graduate student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, specializing in literature of the English Renaissance. Recent projects include a study of imagination and monstrosity in Spenser's Faerie Queene, and an ongoing interest in online culture.