Sunday 24 November 2002

Pic of the day: So it will all be over, but deep down I still believe that someone will remember. Screenshot from Dark Age of Camelot.

Enjoying futility

What’s King James got to do with Dark Age of Camelot, apart from them both being part of Great Britains great but obscure past? More specifically, what has the King James translation of the Bible got to do with Gaheris, the cooperative DAoC server I have written about two days ago?

It all started near the end, as is good and proper. I was about to sum up my playing experience using the catchy phrase from the Bible, when I realized that it did not make sense in King James language. For some reason, many of the famous quotes from the Bible are known in English in the King James translation; but in some cases, the language has moved on and left the quotes meaningless or misleading. So also with the famous cry of despair from Ecclesiastes: "Vanity of vanities!"

Vanity, these days, is about buying expensive clothes to compensate for a lack of brains. It may with some imagination be stretched to include cars. But I’ve read a number of different Bible translations (because I have been interested in what the book was actually saying, as I thought it might be relevant for me). And so I have an internal representation of the text based on several different languages and a few centuries of language drift. And the most exact translation seems to be: "Futility! Utter, complete futility!" (A literal translation is not even possible between two different language families.)

***

Utter and complete futility is indeed the perfect description of my activity on the cooperative server. And possibly life in general. But let us take the server first. It will be "wiped" after a week of play. That is to say, all the characters will be deleted, all their property, all effects on the game world. Then the world will be launched anew, and everybody will start from scratch, no imports from earlier characters, only your memories remain. And the world improvements, if any, based on experiences during the test phase.

Even though I knew this from the outset, I have still created two new characters, one in Albion and one in Hibernia. I have played them up to levels 8 and 7 respectively. And I had great fun, even though I know their maximum life span is a week. (I also saw some of the new races from the Shrouded Isles expansion, and they were weird and way cool. I want it and I want it now! But it's not out even in America yet. End of parenthesis, back to topic.)

And then I reflected on how I enjoyed something that would be wiped and be gone forever, and I thought about life. Sure, it lasts for more than a week, for most of us. But on the cosmic time scales where my mind wanders, the difference is negligible. The valley where I was born was carved out in its present form during the latest ice age, but no doubt followed patterns from the previous ice ages, each of them in excess of 100 000 years long. Each time the glacier ground the valley a bit deeper, then left for a brief while (ca 10 000 years) and came back to continue the work, as they will probably do again. But the mountains themselves were heaved up when dinosaurs still roamed the earth. And the planet is about 4.5 billion years old, from what I've heard (I wasn't there). The sun is only slightly older, but then again it is a third generation star.

The universe had a beginning, and it will have an end of sorts. Even though it probably won't implode back to a point again, it will eventually be utterly cold and dark. Nothing will move, except that the black matter that was the galaxies will continue to race outward. There will be no life, and no energy differential which life might live off. There will be no one to visit the place where we lived, apart from the fact that Earth will be burnt to a cinder long before (ca 5 billion years from now) as the Sun briefly becomes a red giant.

***

Character wipe, indeed. No matter how we turn it, the material universe is doomed. The spiritual universe is so far largely a matter of faith. We can experience it, but we cannot say for sure whether it exists independently or is a product of the material brain. Perhaps the memories will linger on, perhaps not. But the world will be gone. All our brief enjoyment will be like those hectic newbie characters on the test server. All running around, then gone forever.

And I still enjoy every day of it. But then again, I guess I still believe deep down that there will be someone or something outside the game that will remember.