Erfworld

"When he came home with the skeleton of the marlin as his proof
Everyone was screamin' out: this is grandpa's groove!"

 

Parov Stelar - Grandpa's Groove

 

 

Don't go meta.

Just, as a general rule, don't. It was cutting edge in the '70s, it was mass entertainment in 2000 but since then an entire generation has grown up and paid off its mortgages, and trying to deconstruct the observation that stories have conventions or fairytales are unrealistic now merely sounds like grandma's home-baked gangsta rap. But if you'd like one of the most interesting examples done right, try a webcomic from 2006, Erfworld. A big fat dungeon master stereotype gets teleported into a turn-based strategy game. Hilarity ensues and rapidly gets its teeth knocked out by the macabre reality of living under such rules. "Battle. Again, and still, as ever and always."

 

On one hand Erfworld addressed a very niche audience, the obsessive internet junkies of the mid-2000s. Most of its early humor comes from quotes and parodies of then-popular catchphrases, viral memes and other flashes in various pans and storms in various teacups. Topical humor's dicey enough. Topical fad humor, more so. But even more lasting references (like Michael Jackson, Charlie's Angels and The Godfather) are beginning to fall by the wayside. An entire world made of pop culture only lasts as long as that culture stays pop. Or does it? Can Gaiman's new gods gain life in their own right?

 

That other hand comes in a velvet glove. Had the comic resigned itself to in-jokes it would not have stood out from a culture which, let's face it, was rather fixated on the meta-humor fad. The characters themselves are far more interesting than your average web serial fare. Big players and small, cannon fodder and opportunists, they rapidly grow into and surpass their roles. Bad guys gain dignity, good guys resent their compromises. Even if you miss the references, you need only to suss from the start whether a character or strategem should be considered paltry or pathetic, conceited or evil, to see it play on those expectations. After all, the comic as a whole plays on dramatic reversals.

 

Plays a bit too much, in fact. Though it ended prematurely due not to internal conflicts but trouble in the author's personal life, it had been obvious for years that its constant impetus to trump itself could not hold together. Explanations and character arcs became more and more convoluted, could not fit within panel formats and were relegated to text updates. Worse, the first installment had made a big deal of the hero's ability to exploit game mechanics or outright cheat. Instead of settling down after that and fleshing out the world's coherent workings, the author tended to double down with every new action sequence. As one player after another finds new ways to break the rules for yet another and another dramatic turnabout, the rules of the game, the rules of the world, become inconsequential. Everything gets resolved by yet another deus ex machina, another rabbit out of another hat. Except... when everyone cheats, you simply no longer have a game, and the plot did not move quickly enough to a grand finale to compensate for losing so much of the charm of unit stacks and hex movement and combat turns.

 

The meta comic got bogged down, appropriately enough, in its own metagaming.

 

So I honestly don't know whether it remains palatable over a decade after its heyday. My gut and logic both tell me that, sadly, Erfworld will not stand the test of time. It's a butter sculpture, a sand mandala. Still, as such, its ripple effect through its rather devoted audience at a time when the internet itself was still growing likely stretches significantly farther than its overt obscurity might indicate. How much reconsideration of sacrifice, cheating and personality did it fuel?