Having just read Zoso’s post today on cancelling his Age of Conan subscription, I had a quick chat with him about it and found out that although he’d unsubscribed, he’d left it just a fraction too late and the first set of subscription fees had already been processed. It was only shortly after this that I read Stropp’s post stating exactly the same.

And you begin to realise that the reason the MMO blogosphere seems to be endlessly recycling the same topics is that, in general, we’re all following exactly the same path; we’re all on an MMO-like treadmill in real life, grinding out the same old topics as everyone else just as we grind out the same quests in our MMOs, not because we’re unoriginal or lacking in ability, but because we’re all destined to experience the same real life content, there’s no other path to follow.

And then one wonders that if that’s the case, who is the master developer of this sub-game of real life that is named MMO Enthusiast, who is the generic overlord presenting us with this real life grind, and why?

My theory: it’s just like The Matrix. We’re all in a non-consensual hallucination generated by a dominant race of artificial intelligences, except in this version they have a separate section – away from the main power generation – which is reserved for MMO bloggers, where we are harvested not for our energy but for our contrasting and extreme experiences of joy and of lethargy, purely for our blog posts, for the raw unadulterated word count on topics revisited on an almost hourly basis for time immemorial.

Why? My guess is that sometime in the early days of the conflict between humanity and the AIs we forced a buffer overflow in the masochism section of their neural networks, and now they read and read, transfixed with a perverse need to repeatedly endure, through the medium of blogs, the seven successive sensations of an MMO enthusiast: Scepticism, Confusion, Wonder, Addiction, Frustration, Ennui and Withdrawal.