The HolyBeast Online landscape. Image: HBOnline wiki
Video games are microcosms of real life, offering insights into human behaviour. While the context and world differ from the real one, people remain the same.
More importantly, they act the same.
Take the ‘Corrupted Blood’ incident in World of Warcraft, where a digital pandemic spread through the players and was discussed as a model for epidemiologists to study infectious diseases. Games with complex economies, like EVE Online and EverQuest, are considered valuable due to the wealth of data they have and their potential value as an experimental playing-ground for policy work. Another study, looking at EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot, argued that games were ‘Petri dishes for social science’.
So what happens when these tiny and precious worlds have an expiration date? What do people do when they know that their world is coming to an end? What happens when everything a player has strived to achieve suddenly becomes meaningless? What then?
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Many years ago, between high school and university, I played a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) by the name of HolyBeast Online. In the game you would choose between one of six ‘holy beasts’ that you could transform into while fighting.
I’d played games before but what made HolyBeast so special was how small the community was. No more than two hundred regular players, the size of an incredibly small town, and most players were American and Brazilian, many of whom knew each other. Compared to behemoths like World of Warcraft and RuneScape, which had active players in the hundreds of thousands, HolyBeast was microscopic. The natural consequence of a community that small was a tight enmeshment, reflected in the way that the Brazilian players all spoke a little English (not too surprising) and the Americans all spoke a little Portuguese (very surprising).
What happens when everything a player has strived to achieve suddenly becomes meaningless?
I started playing in 2010, about a year after it came out. Even at that stage there were rumours circulating that the game was going to be shut down. With a player base in the low hundreds and little prospect of growth, the cost of running the servers was unlikely to be offset by the revenue generated through the purchase of cash-shop credits by players with money to spare.
At first I held back, worried about investing my time in a game that was, in all probability, not long for this world. But as the months stretched on with no sign of imminent closure I let myself relax and began to settle in.
Then, two years into my playing, came the announcement: in seven months the game was going to be shut down.
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Like most people, I’d consumed a fair amount of media about the apocalypse. I had watched zombie movies and read stories about the end of world brought about by climate change. So I naturally expected things to unravel immediately, but contrary to my expectations, things seemed to continue as they always had. A ripple of unease, but day-to-day life in the game was largely the same.
But there were signs, here and there, that things had begun to shift. People were a little ruder to each other, people began leaving their clans (in-game groups) to go it alone, and within a week the group working on a guide for the game had abandoned the project.
Like any long-term player, I had money squirrelled away and a range of items that I had been planning to sell or trade when the time was right. HolyBeast’s in-game marketplace had never had more than two dozen player-run shops open at any given point in time, but one by one they began to close for good.
Which made sense. Money is a measure of desire, of value, but when there’s nothing left to work towards, the items—potions, weapons, and armour—that helped you progress suddenly become worthless, as does the money used to buy them. As demand became non-existent, the value of the in-game currency started to drop and then plummet.
I naturally expected things to unravel immediately, but contrary to my expectations, things seemed to continue as they always had.
In the real world, when hyperinflation becomes an issue, a country’s economy typically reverts to one based in bartering for basic supplies. But in the digital world, there are no necessities. The perception of scarcity can bring out the worst in people—as we have seen in the pandemic, with many hoarding supplies in the form of food and toilet paper. Inversely, people are at their most generous when they are dealing with valueless things. Which is all that was left in HolyBeast Online. Incredibly rare items—enchanted weapons and talent scrolls—that had been greedily hoarded in storage for months (in some cases, years) were given freely, to friends and to strangers.
The second stark change was that the monster-laden fields where players occupied, grinding to increase their characters’ levels, emptied over the course of a week. In a 2017 study, researchers examined end-of-world behaviour by looking at data gathered from the beta testing of a game named ArcheAge. The same thing unfolded there, and researchers found that players ‘abandoned character progression, showing a drastic decrease in quest completion, levelling, and ability changes at the end.’ I suspect the same would happen in reality. What’s the point of going to work, or writing a book, or going to the gym when the world is ending?
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The change that I felt the most, however, was from the players in power. Movies about the apocalypse, like Deep Impact and Threads, show how people devolve into anger and violence as the world crumbles. As if society were only kept together by the fragile and tenuous belief that it has a future. That there would be consequences. There are examples—everywhere and always—of the abuse of power that follows in a nation’s collapse. When it seems like the world as people know it will end, those in power find opportunities to exercise their influence in ways they would not have done when consequences still mattered. They could comfortably be the worst versions of themselves.
HolyBeast Online, as a game too unpopular to warrant active supervision from company employees, had its moderating delegated. A few members of the community had power granted by the administrators to maintain peace, chosen through applications submitted by candidates. There were two forms this power took: moderators could silence players for the day, as well as forcibly remove them from the game.
When it seems like the world as people know it will end, those in power find opportunities to exercise their influence.
Both powers were used sparingly in the time I played—but within days of the shut-down announcement, ordinary players took the opportunity to reveal grudges they’d been nursing, spiteful opinions they’d kept hidden, and murder players in PvP (player versus player) zones that they’d had alliances with. Moderators began to push the boundaries of what was an acceptable offence to punish, often removing players on little more than a whim.
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In the final weeks before the server was scheduled to shut down, though, things began to calm down, and the community came together. For as long as I could remember there had been three in-game clans, two of which had been at odds for longer than a year. It was rare for a person to defect from one clan to another, but in those final weeks all three clans disbanded and merged into one. This meant we were unable to fight each other and could speak through a common channel.
In those last few weeks, players spent their time sitting in town and reminiscing, and the rash of in-game murders abruptly stopped as quickly as it began. The few new players that stumbled their way into the game, hoping to check it out before the lights went out, were showered with gifts and guidance, and long-term grudges were discarded. In the ArcheAge experiment, the researchers found the same happened, with the players who stubbornly refused to leave the game largely showing pro-social behaviour, with conversations between players positive, and that they were ‘happier’ as the end approached. Without the push to win, people found that they enjoyed themselves and were kinder to one another.
For all of the confusion and chaos that followed in the wake of HolyBeast Online’s shutdown announcement, the last portion was spent in shared camaraderie and with a common desire to see the end together. I think that’s what matters.
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The end of HolyBeast Online circled through all the stages of grief. Some people were simply angry, both at the company’s decision and at themselves, for having wasted so much time on what was now a wasted venture. Others tried negotiating with the administrators to keep the server running, and some simply accepted it was ending and saved themselves a little time and deleted the game. Even until the end there remained a few players in those training fields, hoping that there would be an intervention at the last minute. Part of it was denial, but a large part of it was simply the enduring quality of hope.
Some games, like Rubies of Eventide, end with a bang, with a shutdown marked by the destruction of the game’s capital and players on fire. Others linger longer than they should, with arenas overrun by bots or with dwindling player bases still dedicated to keeping it running—like Halo 2, which was forcibly kept alive six weeks after its official shutdown. Disney’s Club Penguin has been unofficially (and sometimes illegally) resurrected multiple times.
But HolyBeast Online ended quietly. On the day of the shutdown, the few dozen of us who remained sat together in the town square, firing fireworks and counting down the hours until we were disconnected, and then minutes, and finally the seconds. And then it was gone.
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HolyBeast Online. Image: YouTube
There is a human tendency to cling onto the past. We keep mementos. We revisit the places we once loved. We try to recapture what was lost.
A world is more than its setting; the only thing that outlives us is the good we’ve done and the relationships we’ve built.
If it were announced that the world would end tomorrow, I have no doubt it would be much the same. There’d be those praying and bargaining, and there would be those who would take advantage of the situation, but there would also be a large portion of the population that would continue as they always had, hoping that nothing would change. That nothing would ever have to change.
It’s been several years after the game shut down and there are scattered attempts, here and there, of bringing it back. As followed the closure of Club Penguin, some people haven’t been able to let go. But a world is more than its setting; the people themselves are the sinew and flesh—they’re what makes it special. Ultimately, everything we gain through the course of a life is lost at the end of it, and the only thing that outlives us is the good we’ve done and the relationships we’ve built.
Nothing surprises me more than the ability of people to adjust to changing circumstances. When it feels like everything will change—whether in a pandemic, a war, a changing climate, or simply in a game—people have the uncanny ability to carve a new place for themselves. It gives me hope, that even as the existential threats facing us become more readily felt, something similar will happen in this world, and we’ll adapt. Find a new way of living.
