In a rather sad tale of online dislocation, Wired tells the story of the impending shutdown of
the MMO, Asheron’s Call 2. On December 30th, the game’s owner will be pulling the plug on this
undersubscribed online community. Wired snuck into the game (via a borrowed user account) to get a glimpse at how the
remaining netizens feel about the game’s ending.The ending of the earth is a recurring theme in Hollywood, with the behaviour of people across the world generally being one of panic at their inevitable doom. The ending of Asheron’s Call 2 is instead one of emptiness. Many people fled immediately after the announcement that the world was closing, resulting in a collapsed economy and empty game environments. There’s also a strange feeling of pointlessness to the game. When one NPC begs the author to save her town, he can’t help but think “save the town? Lady, the whole damn world is about to end!
All eerie feelings aside, the ending of this MMO proves that it was more than just a load of bits and bytes put together creatively: Asheron’s Call 2 was a social network that will never exist again. As one player states “How will you connect with those people you spent every single day with? It’s as though someone suddenly took away all e-mail.”
[Via digg]
