…is a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game, and it’s literally the first one that ever actually made me consider signing up for it. Largely because it’s not Yet Another Dungeons And Dragons Knockoff. Between Everquest and World of Warcraft, it’s tough to find any sort of RPG that isn’t caught up in the same old swords and sorcery and Tolkein-knockoff. But The Secret World is set in the present day. Yes there’s magic and such, but there’s also international conspiracy and H.P. Lovecraft and a Hollow Earth and…well, imagine equal parts of Raiders of the Lost Ark and At The Mountains of Madness and you’ll get there. It doesn’t hurt that two of the factions are Templars and Illuminati (and based on the way the game operates, I can say without hesitation or fear of contradiction that I am all Templar.)
Part of the appeal is just that it’s different. And part of the appeal is that it apparently doesn’t rely on the endless level-grinding or guild-based dungeon-raiding that other games do; you don’t have to book hours to go clomping along with a bunch of other people in order to play. The asocial element is kind of appealing, actually. I think that’s a bit of what drew me to Ingress however briefly – while it’s a huge game of massive factions locked in combat, you actually do all the work by yourself. I just couldn’t bring it up quickly enough to make it worthwhile, especially with a dodgy side-loaded client.
I guess that’s the genre I’m into now: somewhere between urban fantasy and magical realism. Kentucky Route Zero might be the best example, with its weird and surreal things simmering under the surface of the ordinary world – and that’s as simple a game as you could ask for. It’s more interactive novel than game, to be honest. And then, there’s the TV show I’ve unearthed on Netflix and started watching again after twenty years…but that’s a whole post of its own, of which etc etc you know the drill.
It’s time for something new. Well, new-ish. Vampires are played all the way out, the endless Star Trek and Star Wars knockoffs are running out of steam, the superhero genre is starting to feel long in the tooth for everyone that isn’t Marvel Studios, why not break out the magical realism? Skip the Hogwarts stuff and just go for that creeping strangeness that we call magic because we don’t have another explanation for it…after all, isn’t that what the entire genre of magical realism was created for? To work out those things in print that we can’t talk about in polite society?
Or maybe there are just days when you need a demon clawing its way out of the Earth, and a shotgun full of silver pellets, because you just need to be able to shoot something dead with a clear conscience.