I'm done being emo for now, although I'm still quite in shock.  It's possible that I'll lose my scholarship over the incident but... we shall see.  Things've just been kinda shitty lately, I'm not one who normally gets depressed but I've experienced alot of low-blows lately.  Probation, dying cat, bad grades, sleeping through the exam, stressful schedule, not being successful with the ladies, I'm surrounded by ignorant people, and my favorite online game is getting shut down in February.  It'll get much worse before the end, I havent seen the last of it, but I'm remaining optimistic and looking up.  No use crying about these things at this point, that wont help.  When this semester ends, things will be different.  Better.  Good thing about college is that every semester is a blank slate.  Yesterday I finished up and turned in my Biology essay, which my GSI was nice enough to give me a much-needed extension on after that Spanish incident.  Right now I'm working on my Black World History final essay, which should be about 6-7 pages long.  Got 6 hours to finish it up before it's due.  So yes I'm stressed, but after that I can relax for the rest of the afternoon before I have to start studying for my Biology and Spanish finals.

God, I feel so stupid.  I thought it'd be a good idea to take a small nap before my Spanish exam because I didnt get any sleep the night before studying for it.  I ended up sleeping through all of my wake-up calls.  I feel so fucking stupid, and the teacher wont let me retake the test.  I've never felt like such a total dissapointment, I called and told my mom and she was crying.  I'm just sick with guilt and stupidity, I had a good grade in that class but now I dont know if I'll even be able to pass.  Goddammit.  I have noone to blame but myself.  I just cant save myself from this, this was such a big fuck-up.  I hate myself so much right now.

Or at least that’s what we tell ourselves.  Sure, it’s happened before.  Sure, the economy’s bad, companies are downsizing, times are tough.  But even with the evidence right before our very eyes… I just couldn’t believe it.

I’m talking about an MMORPG called “Tabula Rasa”, or Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game for the ill-knowledged.  These MMORPG’s are big business, and I’m sure that all of you know or at least have heard about one in particular, World of Warcraft.  WoW isn’t going anywhere for a while, because while WoW basically did so many things correctly right from the get-go, some of these newer MMO games aren’t exactly distributed as a complete product.  An MMORPG’s lifeline goes like this:  the game gets released, with or without hype and advertising, and 100% of the time the game is not yet finished.  There are still bugs to be fixed, and not everything has been programmed into the game yet.  That’s where the consumer comes in, buys the game, pays a monthly subscription fee of usually $15, and continues to pay that monthly fee while the developers use the profit from sales and subscriptions to keep the game afloat and fresh with new content, bug fixes, tech support, whatever it takes to keep your subscription running so that they can make your dollar.  Most of the time, when a highly anticipated MMO is released and fails to live up to everyone’s initial expectations, the population of the virtual world declines significantly and then slowly stabilizes when developers meet expectations and people start coming back, although usually the game will never have a higher population than those crucial first few weeks.  If enough people stop subscribing to a game and cash flow stops making enough to give the developers jobs to produce more content for the game, then in some cases the game is forced to shut down the servers, because the servers used to run these online games cost money to operate as well in order to host the tens of thousands of players all interacting within the same game.

And it’s happened before.  Looking back at MMORPG’s that failed to meet population requirements and were forced to shut down, games like Asheron’s Call 2, Earth & Beyond, Auto Assault, it’s kinda sad knowing that the people who enjoyed these games can no longer inhabit their virtual worlds.  Since these games exist only in an online environment where other players can inhabit the same world, when the game gets shut down it’s more than just a simple “Game Over, try again”.  The harsh truth is that you probably aren’t going to get another chance to play these games again.  Ever.

If you’re completely lost, I might be able to offer an example that you can relate to.  Imagine that your favorite television series gets cancelled.  And you’re pretty depressed about it, since the show meant a lot to you and you had taped every episode incase you were too busy to watch it or incase you wanted to watch it again later.  But then the producers of the show are somehow able to destroy every copy of that television show ever made, every tape and archive of that show ever made, and now you’ll never be able to even watch reruns.  All that’s left are the bits and pieces that you remember in your mind.  Imagine how that would make you feel.

While I’ve never been a big fan of the whole roleplaying thing, I’ve always been interested in MMORPG’s.  It’s the psychological aspect, watching the way other humans act in these games is actually quite interesting and it’s more or less a microcosm of our own world.  There are a lot of people who have an emotional bond with their virtual characters, and while some might think that’s weird I can sorta begin to understand why.  These games can be an escape from reality, giving you a chance to be who you want to be and achieve fame or spreading destruction in ways that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to achieve in real life.  And the death of an online game, much like the annihilation of mankind via global warming or a sudden alien invasion, means the death of a world, even if it is only "just a videogame."

As much as it pains me to say this, I’m staring death in the face as the inevitable occurs.  Tabula Rasa, my favorite MMORPG, is shutting down on February 28, 2009.  After that point, no longer will I be able to log in and enjoy the game that I spent countless hours investing into my virtual character in the virtual world of Foreas and Arieki.  No longer will I enjoy searching high and low for letters of the Logos alphabet, transcribing the language and soaking myself in the lore of this science fiction action game.  I’m sure that’s gibberish to most of you but… well, the people who played the game know what I mean, and to those of you who gave it a shot, I salute you.

I think it’s appropriate to give a brief background of my history with MMORPG’s and why I cant just pick up any other online rpg.  The fact of the matter is that there isn’t another online RPG I can enjoy the way I did with this particular one.  As much as I love the concept of online roleplaying games, I hate most of them.  It seems that nowadays, anyone can throw together a boring timesink of a game, make a bunch of reskinned character models for enemies, program a little dice-rolling math into the equation and you’ve got yourself a broken game ready to steal your money and time.  Just look at how business is doing in Korea, these kinds of games are a huge moneymaker.  Most of the MMO’s over there are based around this:  use your mouse to point the arrow cursor over an enemy.  Double click.  Your character, in defiance of the laws of physics, runs slooowly over to the enemy and begins hitting it with his/her sword/wand.  Enemy hits back.  Every few seconds, a number will appear above either you or your enemies head, indicating how much damage you’ve dealt to each other.  Whoever gets their enemy down to 0 health first, wins.  Now repeat this a bajillion times until you can fight a slightly stronger more powerful enemy.  If you’re a gamer, you know the drill.  If you’re not a gamer, I’ll sum things up for you:  most of these games are BORING.

That’s most MMO’s, but that's only because I’m including all of the free ones in Korea that follow the above formula to-the-bone.  But Tabula Rasa was something else.  I had heard of the game back in 2005 when it was first announced at E3.  There were some screenshots and stuff, and my initial reaction was “OMG BEST GAEM EVAR”.  Then I didn’t hear much about the game, and I lost interest and didn’t think it’d come out.  What actually happened was that there were conflicts between developers, end result being that 25% of the original team was replaced and 75% of the code had to be redone.  But whaddya know, it eventually got released in November 2007, received rave reviews by game critics, but I hardly noticed.  I was preoccupied with school and other online games.  But summer came around, I took a summer class and got a part time job, which didn’t leave a lot of time for hanging out with friends.  There was a 3 day trial that I signed up for out of boredom one night, and little did I know that my expectations were about to get blown out of the water.  The first thing that happened when I made a character in Tabula Rasa was that I was given a pair of handguns and told to go bust a cap.  After that, I picked up a shotgun and blew some alien brains out.  Hey, this game is freaking sweet!  Then I got some skill where I could electrocute my enemies.  Then I picked up a sniper rifle.  All the while, I wasn’t paying much attention to the fact that my character had just hit lvl5 and I could further define my individuality within the game.  So for the next umpteen hours, whenever I found the time between school and work, I played the game and had fun.  That was my summer, about 60 hours worth of playing Tabula Rasa.  For games like these, 60 hours during the summer isn’t much, but it was a significant chunk of the spare time that I had.

I flaunted the game to my friends, all of whom were already deeply obsessed with World of Warcraft.  It got mixed reception, some of my friends blatantly ripped on it for not being WoW, others took a more open approach and understood why I enjoyed the game, but noone paid money to play it.  I had one friend who had tried it back when the game was first released, but was put off by the numerous bugs that plagued the game as well as the steep minimum system requirements.  They had fixed these issues around the time I started playing, a couple of months after the game was launched.  Too long to save their initial batch of subscribers who jumped ship and went back to other popular online games that already had things going right, WoW and Guild Wars for example.  But for me, everything was hunky-dory.  It seemed as if every other week, the game was updated with more new content that made me love the game even more and more.  There was more than enough for me to do, and I was perfectly happy with that.

To describe the game, it’s not your typical online game like how I mentioned above.  Tabula Rasa’s backstory tells us that Earth got destroyed by aliens, so we retreated to an uncharted world through wormholes and mankind is slowly building it’s resistance with the help of ally alien races.  It’s much more action based than typical online rpg’s, you’re given direct control of where you can aim and when to shoot your weapon, you can dodge attacks and hide behind cover.  It’s a mixture of science fiction and fantasy, leaning mainly towards the sci-fi side, which was unique in a videogame genre plagued by orcs and elves.  And it never really required a lot of time, or heavy-thinking, so I could log in, kill enemies and blow up stuff for half an hour and that was considered significant progress.  The art style and voice acting really drew me into the game and got me interested in the backstory, something that’s never happened to me before in an MMORPG.  And there wasn’t a harsh death penalty, unlike a lot of online rpg’s where dying means that you’ve wasted hours upon hours of your life tediously grinding xp (for the non-gamers, this means doing the same task over and over again, because it’s the only way for you to make any progress).

In the time that I played, the population was never significantly high.  I saw plenty of other people around in the more vacated areas of the game, but I wasn’t a high enough level to group up with the end-game players (Game developers usually make content for the highest-level players very difficult in order to keep them playing as long as they can.  End-game usually requires a decent amount of group effort in order to get through.)  But what I did know was that the game was designed by Richard Garriott, the man behind the ever popular Ultima series of videogames, as well as Ultima Online which was one of the first popular MMORPG’s and still exists online to this day despite heightened competition from rival online games and low populations.  So if this guy can make a 12 year old online game survive to this day, I expected the same results. 

During my time spent playing the game, much was done to advertise the game and increase the player population.  An advertising campaign titled “Operation Immortality” was launched that collected famous influential forms of media and history and shipped them off into space by Richard Garriott himself incase Earth got annihilated, archive of humanity sort of thing.  This ties in with earth being destroyed as a key plot device in the videogame.  Those of you who watch The Colbert Report regularly might have heard of it, since Stephen Colbert was one of the people chosen to have his DNA sent into space so he touched upon Operation Immortality a little bit on his show.  During the countdown sequence to his ascension into space, General British (Richard Garriott’s in-game persona, which he refers to himself as) held up this sign in the cockpit window:

Those are Logos letters, the alphabet of the alien language within the game Tabula Rasa.  Translated, it’s a quote from Soviet Rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, “Earth is the cradle of humanity but mankind will not be in the cradle forever.”

On November 11^th of 2008, shortly after Richard Garriott returned safely from space, he addressed an open letter to the Tabula Rasa community, announcing his departure from the game

http://www.rgtr.com/news/latest_news/an_open_letter_from_general_br.html

We never saw it coming.

On November 21^st of 2008, it was unexpectedly announced that most of the development team was layed off and that Tabula Rasa would be permanently shutting down it’s game servers on February 28^th of 2009.  I guess we should’ve expected that something was up when the lead designer left… however the team behind the game had posted a teaser-video for a massive upcoming update, so in our minds there was no way that the game would die this soon…

We never saw it coming.

The game launched with a rough start.  Bugs and memory leaks turned off a majority of the initial population.  Those who stayed and finished all of the game’s content got bored and left.  The game launched without proper Player versus Player elements that would’ve been vital to the game’s success and length of playability.  Basic features such as virtual auctions and the ability to search for groups were missing at launch, so without these features the initial population of subscribers left.  By the time these things were added, it was already too late.  The spark was gone, and the game never managed to grab a large enough population.  With more and more successful MMORPG’s becoming available each and every month, titles such as Age of Conan and Warhammer Online promising to revolutionize the MMO genre as well as the impending “Wrath of the Lich King” expansion pack for WoW, Tabula Rasa wasn’t able to even stand a chance. 

Tabula Rasa will have died with only 13 months of public availability, marking it as having the shortest lifespan of any major MMORPG to date.  And after February 28^th of 2009, we will never be able to play this game again.  With the flick of a switch, the virtual world of Tabula Rasa will vanish.  The character data of everyone who played the game will remain dormant on the harddrive of the server.  On the day of closing, many people who were fans of the game will take the day off to spend what litte time they have left playing the game.  In the chatrooms, you'll read begs and pleas of many of the game's die-hard fans, as they beg the higher-ups to not close the game you can feel their emotion as the clock is ticking.  The end of a world, gone in the blink of an eye. 

Have you ever wanted to see what the end of the world would look like?  Log into an MMORPG on it's last day of operation.  Panic.  Denial.  Some people will spend their final moments getting the most out of the game.  Others will act crazy out of disbelief.  For some, it's just too painful to witness firsthand, they wont log on at all.  In fact, some people might just go ahead and end it early, virtual suicide, by deleting the characters that they spent hundreds of hours improving.  You want to see how people will react at the end of the world, how people will react when they know the exact date and time of their death?  It's not that much different than real life, so go right ahead.  All you have to do is spend 8 years developing an online game and let it run it's course... then it's as easy as the sudden, unexpected flick of a switch.

They'll never see it coming.

I ate dinner with that very nice girl and her friends again on Friday.  While we were walking back to our dorms, I got the courage to ask her out on a more formal date, to which she agreed.  I think that we're going to eat Mongolian barbecue next weekend.  I'm down for anything, I love being around this girl, she's one of the nicest people I've ever met in my life.  I just hope that I'm good enough for her, because she's better than me at everything.  Academics, athletics, manners, posture, beauty.  By pure coincidence we met at Taco Bell tonight while I was furiously scarfing down steak quesadillas as if I hadnt eaten in weeks.  I bet I looked like such a slop, I hadnt showered or changed clothes or anything since the night before.  She was just coming back from the gym, something that I of all people should be doing more frequently.

On an unrelated note I reformatted my computer and have been studying for my Biology exam on Monday.  I also have an oral exam in Spanish on Monday, which sucks because I suck at Spanish.  I've got a Biology essay to write and another one for my Black World History class, which is my final.  Those arent due anytime soon, however.

I also reorganized my room so that my computer monitor is in direct view of my bed.  I can watch movies and play games and listen to music very comfortably from there, it's very nice.

Earlier on this week, I downloaded the new Call of Duty game and beat the single player in 4 hours without pausing.  Waaaaaaaay too short!

I've been listening to this song alot lately, it's really peaceful.  I particularly like the guitar.

Everytime that I look back through my previous Xanga entries, I always tell myself "God, you were so stupid back then" only to find myself doing the same thing in the future, looking at all the posts that I had made since then.  Is this progression or regression?