my name is mwd

There’s something charming when video games respond to real world cultural events. Mostly you use video games to escape the real world briefly, so it is perhaps counter-intuitive, but these events make the virtual game worlds feel a little less fixed and a bit more human. Pictured above is Los Santos, home to Grand Theft Auto Online, covered in snow this holiday season, as it was last xmas too. It’s not just the snow, you also get wonderfully horrible holiday sweaters and firework grande launchers. Such changes aren’t just a GTA thing either; I remember many years ago being in Stormwind, the main human city in World or Warcraft, during the bells of new year, and watching the fireworks go up and revealing in the party atmosphere with the hundreds of other players online on that server at the time.

These sort of seasonal changes are rare. Video games are typically finely crafted environments that present the illusion of freedom within a strict set of confines, and changing something even as seemingly trivial as whether there’s snow on the ground will mess that up and potentially break the game. It’s notable for instance that Los Santos only gets snow in the narrative free online game modes, not in the tightly plotted single player game. Indeed, the snow and ice do wreck havoc with some of the online games, but that is part of the charm – I know it’ll be gone in a few days, so I don’t mind the frustration of a ruined mission or two in exchange for swapping grenades for snow balls briefly.

Both GTA Online and WoW are both games that invite hoards of players in to experience a world together, and I suspect that also is part of the charm – it’s not just seeing the snow on the ground or the fireworks in the sky, it’s experiencing that brief stepping out of the regular game world with others and sharing that which adds a sense of place and community that whilst you wouldn’t normally notice it isn’t there, adds a wonderful extra layer of depth when it is.

I’m not sure what the point of this musing is, other than to encourage you to take advantage of these brief moments of otherworldliness that grip our favourite online worlds whilst you can; they may be a distraction from the main event, but they make the virtual worlds all the more richer for allowing that distraction to exist.