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Summer GTG 2007 Approaches
by Bberke

This Saturday August 3rd the Summer Medievia get-together takes place. To the hardcore Medder getting to have a beer with the creator of their favorite game is somewhat surreal. You enter a modest middle class home and discuss a fantasy world that you have been living in for a decade or more. You arrive at some sort of mutual understand of why your alter egos take on the role they do in Medievia and you chuckle as only a true role-player can. You've all traveled to places no one else will ever know, except other Medders.

We spend hours playing this game, immersing ourselves in a world so complete that the shame you feel at failing your clan brothers or falling short of your own personal goal can force you to experience a drama, shame, or wonderous elation that might be rare in mundane life. In this place Vryce is the creator, the master of all that is fantasy.

At the get-together Vryce is just Mike, another bloke with a beer. A man with a dream of creating a world that begs to one day live and breathe with a mixture of artificial intelligence and player-driven economics that never gets boring for those who live it. This man, who with a single keystroke can erase years of effort in a place that most in real life would claim does not matter, is stripped of his godly powers as he volunteers to present himself in his mortal form.

His home is not in a rich area nor does it have the look of someone who has extra money. Instead it is a modest home renovated to fit the needs of his lifestyle. In the corner of the basement is a tiny room with a few computers that most likely are much more modest looking than any game pc or rack server. Lining the walls are ideas and coding diagrams written onto dozens of dry erase boards that circle a larger dry erase board. There all the progress of Medievia future and past is neatly laid out. All the doubts of how hard Mike is working float away as the raw precision of his methodical approach to game development are instilled by the amazing complex and beautiful organization of this room.

You chat with other Medders, you discuss why you play, why you keep playing, and how stupid all the trash talk on med is. You also decide that same talk is part of the fun, how in the end we see each other all as brothers of Medievia who should be able to take one another's friendly snipes every so often. You realize that this game truly allows you to release that primal instinct of hunter-gatherer that has been suppressed for a thousand years by the mediocre drivel our society subjects us to.

I've been everywhere. I've been to the bottom of the ocean and the top of the tallest mountain. I've been to such places in real life and in Medievia and I am always surprised when I find the real life experience to lack something Medievia has. Standing on the top of a volcano in Hawaii I wonder why there is no blob to kill me at the top and send me back home. Standing in Medievia I miss hearing the voices of my companions that I had with me at the top of that volcano or at the beach. At the get-together finally those two worlds collide and I can experience both worlds at once. It feels weird, but it's something I'll never get tired of.

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