Trends never reach me in their prime. By the time I got a Furby for Christmas, it was so ridiculously on sale that the decaying glue of the REDUCED sticker had alloyed with chunks of pink fur.
So while most people would have discovered MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) around the advent of the Internet, they’re still a novelty for me.
Prodded by encouragement from my roommate Heather, I downloaded the MMORPG Furcadia. In Furcadia, thousands of users walk around as awkward bipedal animals on tile-based worlds, also known as “dreams.” At the bottom of the screen is a streaming chat interface similar to IRC (internet relay chat).
“IRC on mescaline,” my friend calls Furcadia. While the primary function of Furcadia is to socialize, the graphic accompaniment makes it more than a chat room. There are bars, hospitals, hotels, castles, night clubs, and schools to walk through.
Being highly adaptable, Furcadia gives users a lot of elbowroom for development. You can design and create your own dreams, develop new items, tiles, character interfaces, actions, and simple games, and upload them to Furcadia for other characters to explore.
So my entrance into the world of Furcadia is met immediately with a challenge: creating a character. Being fairly new to the whole design of role-play, I have no standard for creating an alter ego. Do I want to be rodent, equine, canine, feline, musteline, or lapine? Do I want to be male, female, or that curiously illustrated third category, unspecified? Do I want pink fur with blue markings? Green with red? What the hell is a musteline? These questions I ponder.
Finally, I choose a horse, female with blue hair, white markings, green pants, and black boots. I call this beast of a homunculus Reereth, my name in Scooby Doo talk.
The next task is to create a description for Reereth visible to other Furcadians when they click on her character. I want something compelling, something authentic for my first impression. I want to pass as a pedigreed Furcadian, not a crackpot My Little Pony.
I try method acting.
I am a horse.
With blue hair.
“Heather, give me horse adjectives. Pronto.”
“Cloppy?”
With such feeble assistance, I request that she pull up descriptions of other Furcadians so I can mimic the style, which has strangely erotic overtones. I settle on this for Reereth’s profile: “Her slick blue hair matches her insatiable mounting style. Solemn gray eyes betray her inner darkness, but the light violet markings show her core to be that of a true filly.”
“What is an `insatiable mounting style’?” says Heather. I wonder this as well but do not question my inspiration.
With my character created, Heather and Reereth venture into Furcadia. Once inside, the biggest trial at hand is maneuvering around the screen as well as trying to keep track of which character belongs to me.
Heather shows me how to walk around. Suddenly her character collapses to the ground. Then it kneels, gets up, and collapses again. I giggle and engage Reereth in an orgiastic frenzy of standing up, falling over, standing back up, and falling over again. These are the different positions available for your character.
Then Heather gives me the guided tour. We venture into the different sections, most of them pastoral scenes with small animals frolicking in the distance. Heather asks me if I want to see the other side of town. We go to Furrabian Nights, the 18 and older section of Furcadia.
While downloading the dream, a message appears in the chat frame:
A menacing looking wolf dressed in a leather playtoy outfit looks at you smiling, showing his sparkling white fangs. ‘Welcome to the Gay Yiffy Club, please proceed inside to the club or relax out here in the gardens. Hope you’ll be finding some fun!’ He winks.
The dream finally downloads. Reereth appears.
I am a horse.
With a gigantic blue unit.
After giggling like a virgin in a porn store, I am left to explore the rest of Furcadia on my own. I venture into a crowded area. Because I have a massive inability to differentiate between left and right and up and down, I can’t get around very well. A message scrolls through the chat window:
Fe’lin’irf*: will someone MOVE!!!???
Because I have no idea where I am, it seems farfetched to have this directed at me. I locate my character by following the stream of traffic around her immobile body.
The person in question is me.
Fe’lin’irf: other way, dumbass!
Since I’m stuck between several objects, I cannot navigate my way out of this mess. I prod up and down on the keyboard while being subjected to the unbridled hostility of a stranger.
I mutter obscenities at Fe’lin’irf. To annoy her even more, I engage in my patented orgiastic frenzy I learned with Heather.
Fe’lin’irf kick’s Reereth’s belly with a heavy, steel-toed boot. “Move it!”
Reereth rips off Fe’lin’irf’s head and throws it into the Acropolis.
Reereth tires of Fe’lin’irf’s bleeding body and moves graciously out of her way.
Despite the shaky beginning, the story between Reereth and Fe’lin’irf ends well.
Later, Reereth summons Fe’lin’irf to a vampire-themed dream. Fe’lin’irf offers Reereth a drink from her canteen of blood while Reereth impresses Fe’lin’irf with the details of death by crucifixion.
One might wonder why I chose to share a canteen of blood with someone who kicked my prostrate body with a steel-toed boot. The reason is, quite frankly, no one else would talk to me.
Most of my time on Furcadia was spent exploring, trying to look cool and engaging people in conversation. No one is having it. I try taking advantage of the feature that allows you to summon characters to join you wherever you are. I wantonly type in the beginning of more obvious names–like “silver” and “wolf” and “darkhorse”– and summon the strangers, hoping someone might bite my hook.
Most people would talk to me, only because they were working under the assumption there was a purpose to my summons, that I was someone they knew under a different name. I can only keep up the charade for so long before they tire of me and go away.
By and large, after overcoming the idea of being an inch-long horse walking upright on a disco floor while a MIDI file of The Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up” plays in the background, I’ve grown to like Furcadia. The graphics have started to look pretty good, the whole clique thing feels just like high school, and the cute little ribbity noises are the only things that have been able to curtail my addiction to the Howard Jones mp3s I’ve been downloading all month.
*Names have been changed.
Elizabeth Baish can be contacted at [email protected]