The Open and Shut Secret World: Human Interest

Part of a series on the death of a bad game with excellent atmosphere. Presume spoilers.

__________________________________________________

 

"There was no color in the room; neither of the two sisters added any color to it.”

Ray Bradbury - The Cistern

__________________________________________________

 

"Contact. I read you."

 

While many video games have provided immersive atmosphere, characterization tends toward pastiche when present at all. The Secret World earned its somewhat damning reputation as "the best-written MMO" not least for concisely and incisively fitting into its apocalyptic scenario a host of characters which even players above fifteen years of age could (for once) give a shit about.

 

While many are indeed comical, like the Colonel Kilgore copycat army officer or Scrapyard Edgar the grease monkey hick and quantum physics savant, even the goofballs you'd only visit for one or two quests were often permitted some unexpected undercurrent of integrity. From the detective in the fur suit to the half-drunk layabout 'injun' brothers to the socialite turned cat hoarder and ghost-sitter to the trigger-happy explosives expert and action movie buff and the goth clubber waiting for her personalized beautiful death (("he will be taller, with eyes flashing like winter ice") oh, lord...) they all display, on some level of consciousness, a frame of reference for their behavior. They own their insanity.

As for the more central cast, well, here's one I never heard appreciated enough while the game was still active.

"Mr Noble, Mr Right, Mr 'Quote Some Ancient Knight'"

Richard Sonnac serves as your main contact for the Templar faction. His dignified erudition more or less singlehandedly convinced me to opt for Templars over Dragon despite my fundamentally chaotic leanings, but the factions deserve their own post. Suffice to say Dickie's the guy you want watching your backside. As a minority he successfully emphasizes personal qualities over identity politics (something TSW failed at about half the time.) As a personification of Lawful alignment, he successfully moves beyond blind obedience to the pragmatic or aesthetic underpinnings of his allegiance. One of his introductory lines of dialogue even reads: "You must be singleminded but I want you to arrive at that singlemindedness yourself. To a refined palate, propaganda leaves such a bad taste."

But most of those you meet in the secret world lack the benefit of Sonnac's luxurious nigh-impregnable fortress. Their attitudes tend to be defined more by struggling to keep their footing in a shifting physical/metaphysical landscape or come to terms with their conscription in the game's various conflicts. Despite their colorful quirks their writing and voicing reveal just how wrung they are of vitality in the face of doom. They shuffle about, they sulk, they sneer, they grit their teeth in anticipation of their last stand, they pluckily, timidly, desperately or fatalistically point you in the direction of some slim hope.

Harumi's lines in All Alone Together certainly gain gravitas in the post-COVID19 age of social distancing (her brother even wears a face mask) as she struggles to stay connected to her online friends from behind her apartment door and maze of Home Alone boobytraps protecting the building.

 

In fact, though it provided plety of bigger and badder and ever-biggerer and badderer monsters to pummel into submission, TSW's storytelling success depended on forcing players into an awareness of adult fears: not only is there a fanged monstrosity thundering through the corridors after you, but it already got your parents. Your enemy cannot kill you - so she will leave you crippled. You can save the world! - by being ritually sacrificed and becoming an immobile statue for millennia. You staved off the zombie apocalypse, but all the people you've struggled beside have breathed too deep, and now it's only a matter of time...

Helplessness, isolation, futility, alienation.

A siren song luring you to the abyss.

Children enrolled at the activity center to boost their confidence, for the sake of personal empowerment, regimented, shamed into obedience, inculcated, castrated, blanked slates, hollow vectors for abhuman apotheosis. Your existence has been given purpose, acceptance superfluous.

In keeping with TSW's meta-textual, alternate reality incipience, the Stephen King parody early in your adventures, a memory quickly lost amidst the gear-farming grind, even brings this existential despair home to the gamers, the lotophagi themselves.

 

Rain gathering trickle by torrent into a cistern, dragging you with it by your abandoned hopes, by the cowardice which drained the color from your life, by your own longing for a door into neverwhere.

 

You are the sum of your fears. Fear nothing.

 

"Leave, Chuck. I can make you leave."