The Day Without Crime

On December 1, a few moments past midnight, the new day dawning, 2012, City of Heroes shut down.

For some of us, it was the middle of the night. For some of us, it’d been the afternoon. Fox and I had climbed to the top of a Kings Row skyscraper, as Backbeat and Harlem, who stood there waiting for the moment the server shut down. We didn’t know what to expect. Didn’t know what it’d be like. Would chunks of the sky corrupt? Would the game client continue on dumbly, unaware of what happened? Would the world end with a bang, or a whimper?

The last words I saw in that game, in that space where I had spent six years of my life, was the shouting of Backbeat, towering and fierce fist-fighting woman who had raged in the name of love, was

THIS

IS

MY

CITY

It was three years ago, today. We stood, numb, in the wreckage. A gang of roleplayers, who had connections outside the game, tangling up on Formspring, in chat programs, in private communiques and emails, a interconnected patchwork quilt of people who didn’t know they knew each other or what they meant to one another, but able to trace threads of red and blue to one another.

And the story went on.

It had to. Did we just shut down what we’d created when the game was gone? Some of us did. Some of us just straight up shuttered the accounts the second the game ended. Others, like me, didn’t want to surrender. We’d been melancholy since the announcement, since we’d learned our time was limited. People had been going out and patrolling less. There were fewer people touting their achievements. Everything had the pallor of a doomed world.

I had written a book-of-sorts as the game closed. The denouments of over forty heroes, the incidents that came after the game ended, as their stories continued. Some happily-ever-afters. Some new chapters. A eulogy for something I’d loved. I always saw myself as caring about the world and wanting to make it feel real. For my actions to have an impact in a shared, communal playspace, and for other people to find it easier to believe those things happened. It was a work, and I loved doing it. People did patrols, and they did things, and we spoke about it as if it was a task that needed doing. When someone played a lot one day, I spoke of it as if there had been a spike in activity, that they were responding to a problem. Double XP weekends were ‘black weekends’ – times when there were multiple culminating plans and plots, ruining so many things all at once.

What did it mean, then, that on December 1, nobody logged on?

That’s when I, in our little magic circle of shared storytelling, used the characters I had to share one more story. That after years – in some cases decades – of patrolling and pushing and fighting against the forces of evil in Paragon City, there had been finally, one day – one day – without a single reported incident of a crime to the police. That villainy had been beaten back enough, that there was some respite. We had done some good. We had made things, at least a bit, better for our little world.

The group fragmented, splintered, and dissolved after that. I moved on, as I had to. My friends moved on to other things. We tried other superhero RP venues, but to my eye, they all fell apart. They just didn’t work. I don’t know why, per se. They just didn’t click. Maybe I’m too fussy, maybe other people just do their own thing and I’m not in it.

But December 1 is a day when something that mattered to me, enormously, died. And it began the not-that-slow death of a community that followed after it.

1 Comment

  1. Never Forget.

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