Living and Leaving the MMO Life
I'm just a girl, standing in front of MMOs, asking them to let me Fucking Live.

By the time you read this, World of Warcraft: The War Within will be live. Simultaneously, Final Fantasy XIV‘s Dawntrail expansion will have been so thoroughly conquered that most of the player base will be bored and back in Limsa Lominsa cheering on the busking dragon boys and hypersexualized rabbit girls. This has been a big summer for MMOs. While Blizzard’s World of Warcraft is by far the much older of the two, this latest release kicks off its latest planned trilogy of expansions. And likewise, the younger (but still a decade old at this point) Final Fantasy XIV is beginning what will likely be its next decade-long meta-narrative romp of precursor races and pan-dimensional doom. And somehow, inside all of this, the ancient and semi-slumbering Final Fantasy XI rouses like a tremendous dragon in its horde to hoover up an entirely new generation of players in its colossal, creaking maw.
And here I am doing none of it.
When Dawntrail launched, I thought I had checked out completely. Three years earlier, as the credits rolled on the previous expansion, I thought that Naoki Yoshida and I had made a kind of peace. Endwalker came out in 2021 and concluded a decade-long narrative that spanned multiple continents, worlds, and even versions of the game. It was good enough that I forgave him for crashing an entire celestial body into the original codebase that I genuinely loved for its all too brief and thoroughly messy lifespan. I got closure. He got a glowing review out of me. I thought I was done.
I deleted my billing information from Square-Enix’s ever dubiously designed MogStation. I uninstalled and let my subscription lapse. I was out. I was no longer playing an MMO. My character would join my partner’s in a deep cryosleep, along with our retainers, and all the items we had up for auction now pulled and interred with us like some digital Viking funeral in a peat bog of 1s and 0s.
It was honestly a really weird feeling for someone who has spent the better part of her time on-line and in gaming hooked up to MMOs and the progenitors that gave rise to them like they were life-support. And as the days crept on and Dawntrail talk peaked and faded, as more friends began subscribing to Final Fantasy XI to see if PlayOnline truly was a better way of life, and my friend and colleague Jackson began writing about WoW in conjunction with The War Within’s release, I felt a gnawing ache. The call of the MMO Life.
There are some people who can only play games that are under 25 hours. Others are even stricter. I know people who grew up exclusively on arcades and measure their game attention time in minutes. But for the MMO Lifer, we are the videogame adherents of the Long Now.
When it all started, time was precious. Phone calls cost money. Subscription services cost money. The world was measured in dollars per minute. Every MMO lifer begins somewhere with their parent’s credit card and a modem screaming out to another computer at the end of a 1-800-number.
For me, it started on CompuServe with Island of Kesmai and a beast of a Hayes external modem.
Kesmai began its life as Dungeons of Kesmai, a six-player D&D-like Rogue-like created by UVA students Kelton Flinn and John Taylor in 1980. By 1985 they’d expanded the game into Island of Kesmai, added quest progression, expanded the game to 62,000 locations over five regions, and the limit of six players was ramped up to 100 simultaneous players all remotely connected over the CompuServe network. I typed with my index fingers, still believed in Santa, and occasionally left tiny teeth under my pillow. But the seeds of the MMO life had been planted. This was the first time I even remotely cooperated with anyone in a videogame. It was enthralling.
As Kelton Flinn is quoted in Developing Online Games: An Insider’s Guide, “The price was actually $6 an hour for 300 baud, $12 for 1200 baud. Serious players paid the bucks.” I’ll never forget the day my stepfather got the more than $400 bill after I first got hooked on Island of Kesmai. I had unknowingly become a Serious Player.
Technology moved faster and in big leaps in those days. The colossal (and outrageously expensive) Hayes modem that perched on our desktop and screeched horrifically was replaced with a sleek and quieter U.S. Robotics Sportster that slid gracefully inside the tower next to the desk for only a few hundred dollars. Baud went from 1200 to 14,400 in a handful of years and the price of online services plummeted. Before we even hit the middle of the ‘90s, we’d gone from billing hourly to monthly. CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie leaped over one another to find their places as America On-Line began the era of its undisputed reign. Entire platforms dedicated to social gaming emerged out of the now primitive-seeming private BBSes (though many of us still couldn’t give up TradeWars 2002. And while, sure, GEnie offered BattleTech for $6 an hour, Sierra On-Line would let you dogfight for dozens of hours in The Red Baron for a fraction of that.
The Shadow of Yserbius was, if you believe the ad on page 89 of the May 1993 issue of CGW, only 57 cents an hour. Yserbius was a fixture on The Sierra Network. Part of MedievaLand, it was a party-based graphical dungeon crawler—part Eye of the Beholder, part Wizardry. Here roleplaying (and often aggressively adult flirting) came to the forefront of multiplayer gaming. Freed of the constraints of Island of Kesmai, chat flowed much more freely and the game moved at a brisk pace. A 30-hour “Nights and Weekends” subscription was only $12.95 a month, a bargain compared to CompuServe. But it was never enough. As a pixelated blonde barbarian babe slashing her way through the dungeons below a volcano with strangers from places I’d only ever heard of, like Minnesota, I’d burn through hours in record time. I had to beg for more, offering chores, better grades, and a countless procession of firstborn I’d never have, to unmovable and heartless parents.
Didn’t they know I didn’t choose the MMO life? It chose me! And they were ruining it.
Sure, we’re all miserable now because we are constantly connected and always online. But you have no idea what a hell it was before, to know what treasures lived online and only be able to access them sparingly. Thank God when the Internet stopped being limited.
That’s when I could start living my truth. From my teenage grimdark flaneur years to finding my forever home in Final Fantasy XI, I was an MMO person. Sure, I took time out to play other games—it was the era of the PlayStation 2 after all, the last PlayStation to have games. But those were exceptions. My waking moments were largely spent immersing myself in Vana’Diel.
At some point, I followed my friends over to World of Warcraft (while still trying to maintain a foothold in XI). It wasn’t the same, but that’s where my friends were. We had a guild, after all. We were besties, and someone needed to make potions, enchantments, and gear. Having become an expert gatherer and crafter in XI, where everything was much more involved, I fell in naturally with guild support. I never much took to the Warcraft method of high level combat the way I did in Final Fantasy. But I could put on a DVD boxed set and pick flowers and make ink with the best of them. Eventually I couldn’t divide my time (or paycheck) between so many virtual worlds, and Blizzard won out.
And then college ended. Our mid-twenties happened. The guild broke up. Friends moved away and started real lives that took them away from games. I moved away and started a real life that took me away from games. And I wouldn’t come back until a friend told me that Final Fantasy XIV was in open beta. That it was just as weird and wonderful as XI had been. And just like that I was back in. The MMO Life, like Jaws, will find you and sink its many rows of teeth into the soft animal of your body.
That lasted the better part of a decade. And then, with Endwalker, I felt like it was finally time to say farewell.
This Christmas it’ll be three years since I’ve stepped back into Eorzea, a decade since I’ve touched World of Warcraft, and (barring a brief attempt at a Let’s Play) almost 20 years since I’ve played Final Fantasy XI in earnest.
There’s a part of me that isn’t sure what returning to an MMO means. As much as I joke about the MMO Life, and even with Final Fantasy and World of Warcraft taking great pains to streamline and tone down their most intensive habits, these are still Lifestyle Games for Lifestyle People. They demand time and attention and focus. I once spent three hours just organizing one inventory menu in Final Fantasy XIV, so that I could make room to auction the overflow rings that my partner had crafted in tremendous numbers. If you want to be a homeowner in Eorzea, you have to dominate the marketboard. And together, we laid siege to our server’s needy level 20-40 accessory slots. But you have to be smart, you have to think about the server economy, you have to think about the Long Now.
And then there’s the dailies. Every MMO has dailies. People say, “don’t you have a job, why would you make a game a job.” But they don’t understand the deep, deep brain scratch that doing your daily quests in an MMO brings. Or the way ruthlessly going through every item in your auction list and deciding when to undercut the market to sell out quickly, or when to hold. There are items that need to be collected and turned in for in-game tokens and in-brain neurotransmitters.
This is to say nothing of all the time spent hanging out in major hubs, or on a hill waiting for a world boss to spawn with 50 other players all discussing whether or not Taylor Swift will endorse Kamala Harris while other players shout unfiltered obscenities and inanities to no one and everyone in particular.
I knew a girl who once burst into tears when one of those strange metal octopus head massagers made contact with her scalp by a head massager kiosk vendor at the mall—if you have the MMO Life in you, you probably joined me in getting that same feeling just thinking about the last two paragraphs. You know why this summer of Dawntrail and The War Within has been so hard.
Every time I check Discord and see someone new talking about how they have a new favorite jazzy Noriko Matsueda background track in the PlayOnline Launcher, I feel those teeth sink in a little more. When the story behind Castle Zvahl Baileys is exasperatingly told by another friend having just discovered it two decades after I did, I can only nod enthusiastically and grin like a woman possessed, my eyes growing wider as I can but simply say, “RIGHT?” The tug grows stronger. As my DMs explode with screenshots of my friend’s luxuriously appointed Free Company home in XIV or stories of how another friend is learning Spanish via immersion in a Latinx raiding guild they accidentally fell in with upon their return to Wrath of the Lich King, I can’t help but wonder why I’m not letting myself be pulled back in. Aren’t I Lifestyle People, too?
But god, if nearly all of my friends are to be believed, every MMO is great right now. How do you even choose?
Dia Lacina is a queer indigenous writer and photographer. She tweets too much at @dialacina.