9: (Dys)topia

Internet addiction? Been there. Eight or ten years ago, I walked into the library to find my friend Josh at a computer, clicking sporadically, with a look of intense concentration on his face. The screen was mostly black, with a small box filled with white text. He was playing Utopia, an online game that would soon come to dominate my life for a year.

The premise of Utopia is that you're the ruler of a tiny 200-acre plot of land, or province, in a team ("kingdom") of 20 or so provinces, in a world of thousands of kingdoms. You get to choose how to distribute your resources, what buildings to build, and more importantly how to attack and pilfer provinces from other kingdoms. Nowhere in the entire game is there a graphic--instead, you click "attack" and the next screen either tells you "you won" or "you lost." If you conquer another province in battle, you get some of their land (how this works geographically is never fully explained). Sound fun? Maybe. Addicting? Of course not. What made Utopia such a stubborn and unyielding part of my life was that my province got its new resources (from taxes, etc) every hour of every day. If I ran out of gold or magic, I could just wait an hour. If I forgot about the game for a day, though, I might return to find my province in ruin from attacks I hadn't defended against or retaliated against quickly enough. So, no day passed during my stint as a ruler in which I didn't log on to Utopia at at least three times. Before I left for school, during lunch, as soon as I got home, before dinner, after brushing my teeth: this tremendously compelling game had my 11-year-old self glued to the screen.

Utopia's draw worked in a spiral: you played to win, or at least to become one of the best provinces in your kingdom. But so did everyone else. If you were abandoning your province for days at a time, there was no way you could keep up. And in my opinion, abandoning any semblance of graphics forced players to emphasize the pure numbers that defined their provinces--how many acres, how many honor points, etc. There is no entertainment in playing Utopia every once in a while. The only satisfaction is building up your own province until it's something you can be proud of. That takes time, and I think it's the main reason Utopia led so many of its 40,000 or so players to devote so much of their waking lives to it.

Utopia is a great example of many aspects of Scott Caplan's model. Compulsive use, excessive use, withdrawal, perceived social control--for every marker or problematic internet usage, I can think of four stories from Utopia. I certainly remember my co-players being less than socially apt: it's a fantasy-based setting, which gives players the freedom to pretend to be whoever they want, and what's more, it unites strangers into a team with a goal. No matter how awkward you may be in person, if you're the best attacker in the kingdom, your teammates will listen to you and what you type into the kingdom forum. Although there was some diversity--there were players with lives and wives and jobs and kids--I always had the feeling that my teammates were people that I didn't want to know in real life. I was completely satisfied with being on the same online team as them. And I couldn't be more glad that I stopped playing--who knows how much of my life might have atrophied while I searched for the respect of 40,000 indifferent strangers?