Note: This essay originally appeared in Take Shape Magazine in 2021. This magazine has since folded.

Return (and Return, and Return) to Vana’diel

by Julianne Aguilar

It still rains.

On a server somewhere, a signal is sent. A zero becomes a one. An event is triggered, like clockwork, like always. Everything is as it's always been for the past 18 years. Even though there's no one there to see it. Even though there's no one there to hear it. Somewhere in the sprawling world of Vana'diel, it rains.

As I, or, not I, the character of I, watch the rain, I think, Maybe I am addicted to loneliness. Yes. That's how I can finally explain my continued obsession with Vana'diel, the big, empty world of the 2002 online video game Final Fantasy XI. Maybe 2020 has fully destroyed me, I think. That's why I've come back. That's why I keep deactivating and reactivating my account, why I've been stuck in the "bargaining" part of the grieving cycle since I first deactivated my account on Halloween of 2007, after four years of frustration and heartbreak and burnout. It's why I can't hit delete.

In 2020 I have grieved and thus I have paid a $12 monthly fee to see Laancer again, my Final Fantasy XI character that I created in 2003.

Final Fantasy XI, though its name would imply otherwise, is a stand-alone type of game known as a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG. It’s designed to be played by thousands, and when I logged on for the first time, I was overwhelmed by those thousands. They surrounded me, they lagged my computer. But I was determined to fit in, and to play this game well and fully, even though MMORPGs are infamous for demanding inordinate amounts of their players’ time and emotional energy, and I was a full-time student trying to balance grades and an underwhelming social life and then, on top of that, this game. But I was quickly taken with the world within, called Vana’diel. I was overwhelmed by its scale and beauty. The game doesn’t restrict your movement, even from your very first minutes. As long as you can evade the wandering monsters, you can walk in any direction for whatever reason you like, and I spent four years walking through cities and forests, over mountains and glaciers, on beaches and city streets. This virtual world was teeming with life. Thousands of players on every server. Communities and cliques. Someone to talk to at every turn. And all of it wrapped within lovely Vana’diel.

Four years. And then, when I couldn’t take any more, after all my online friends had quit and disappeared, and all my new friends existed in the real world, I deactivated my character, careful to avoid the option of deleting her entirely.

Vana'diel is a beautiful place, but beauty alone can't keep players around forever. This world has been slowly dying for years, and everytime I return I am crushed by its emptiness because I remember when it was full. At its height, Final Fantasy XI had 32 servers that hosted 15,000 to 20,000 players each. Today the number of servers has fallen to 16, and most rarely see more than 1,000 players at any one time. Perhaps 1,000 players in a server seems like a healthy population, but when you consider how enormous Vana’diel is—when you consider that it takes 20-40 minutes to run across any one area, like a valley or a beach or a city neighborhood, and Vana’diel is made up of hundreds of these areas—you begin to realize that this is a ghost world. Running into another player takes my breath away. I am shaken by this emptiness.

But what also shakes me is that, in 2020, when I look around and see a world post-people, my mind creeps toward dark thoughts. There are no histories in Vana’diel; no one to guide the meta-narrative of this game, no virtual historian to greet you and say, “There used to be so many people here, but now they’re gone, their human lives got in the way.” And so I look around this empty world and think, “Is this how a pandemic ends?” And maybe I see what could be, the way people leave a world one way or another and it drops out of memory, even as the servers stay on, even as the rain falls.

My problem is that this game is seared into my memory. My problem is that I know it too well. My problem is that I spent four formative years in Vana’diel, beginning in high school and ending in college, four years exploring and learning and memorizing a massive virtual world full of magic and mystery, a world where everyone is beautiful, every wilderness is pristine, every ocean and river is clean and clear, a world where the laws of physics don’t have to exist if it means the world is more fantastical, and more phenomenal. Every login was an act of devotion to this world. Logging out for the final time, or what I thought might be the final time, back in 2007, felt like the end of a relationship. In the years that followed, I talked about this game like I would an ex-lover. It is a part of my history. I knew it too well for it to ever really fade away.

This is why, in the midst of a global pandemic, at my own lowest point, I thought again of Vana’diel. My problem, and maybe everyone’s problem, is that in times of stress, great difficulty and pandemics, my instinct is to shroud myself in familiarity. I want to run away, but I can’t, I want to escape reality, but I can’t, I want to show my face and wear my heart on my sleeve but I can’t, because faces and hearts and bodies are fragile, and so I pull out my credit card and log back into this place where I’ve now spent so much time, so many years.

The nature of nostalgia is such that when faced with an uncertain future, the most comforting place to be is the past, and virtual worlds offer pristine pasts. After I log in for the first time in three years, I’m struck both by what has changed, and what hasn’t. The rules and gameplay have evolved: so few people play this game now that the game’s original premise of teamwork between players has evolved to become a one-player experience. Instead of other players, now you collaborate with non-playable characters, or NPCs, summoned by magic spells when needed, and sent away when not. But the world itself, every tree, every stone, every blade of grass is exactly as I remember it. Growth doesn’t exist here, but neither does death, or decay. A 2013 New York Times article explains how nostalgia makes a lonely present more tolerable, how it gives meaning to the past, how it makes the future feel more optimistic and how it dulls the fear of death. But in this model, one doesn’t actually physically visit the past; the past is built of memories. But a virtual world is built of virtual objects, and as long as the servers are running, they are constant. You can’t go home again, unless you can. The MMORPG pioneer and theorist Richard Bartle refers to MMORPGs as “persistent worlds,” virtual worlds that “continue to exist and develop internally even when there are no people interacting with it," and that’s exactly what this game has done. It has persisted. Programmers and engineers continue to develop the internal game, to maintain the servers and change the rules when there’s no longer anyone there to play by them, to protect the code that makes the rain, but the world that presents itself to me when I login is emptier than it used to be. Nonetheless, it’s exactly how I remember it, and it’s this sameness, this predictability, that comforts me. Same as it ever was.

Thousands of players have stood on these beaches, plateaus, mountains and valleys before me and yet none has left their mark, not a footprint or a name scratched into the bark of a tree. Not a single person has left their mark on this world, and that’s scary, and sad, because a world that does not and in fact cannot be changed by the people living in it is unnatural, it’s hard to fathom. And yet here is a world where rain falls because it was told to, a world where the climate doesn’t change, a world with no pollution or wildfires and definitely, decisively, no pandemics; it’s a world of constants. No change. Persistence.

But despite this persistence, a virtual space is ultimately tenuous and fragile. Earthquakes and hurricanes and wildfires can rock the physical world, but when the clouds and the smoke clear here is still here, though it has changed and will continue to change. A virtual space is subject to whims, the economy, and user engagement. A massive, complex virtual world can disappear in an instant, and this is a fate that is all but guaranteed. Final Fantasy XI is eighteen years old. The longest running virtual world dates from 1978, and the longest running modern MMORPGs date from the mid-90’s, but dozens if not hundreds of others have sprung up and withered away in that time, taking with them histories and economies and the alter-egos of thousands of players. These disappeared worlds don’t leave ruins or ghosts behind. They are gone, truly gone. Maybe that’s why playing this old, empty game feels so special and so vital. I need to see it again before it’s gone. I need to hear it and traverse it before it disappears, as it inevitably will.

I returned to this world because I was looking for familiarity, and I find that both in the world itself, and in my character, Laancer, the virtual version of me. It feels as though, at last, this world belongs to me alone, and that it’s a sort of safe space to be this version of myself, this avatar of a younger me, high school me. I want to protect her from what’s to come. I want her to be a hero, to wear the shiniest armor, to swing the sharpest sword. I want her to thrive. I want her to be everything that I wasn’t then, and that I’m not now. If she were real, my character would be old enough to drive a car. She would be in high school. She would be falling in love for the first time, perhaps. But what is “real” in a virtual world? I can see Laancer, I can control her actions, I can make her wave hello and goodbye to me; is she not real? After all this time she has become a person in my life, like any other I’d see or hug in the physical world. Is it possible that what makes her so precious to me, her connection to me, is what makes her real?

I imagine what it’s like for her to see and feel and live in this world in a way that I can’t, because I’m real and she and Vana’diel aren’t. What she sees isn’t a virtual world, or a designed world, or a “fake” world; it’s simply the world. She has no sense of calamity or instability. She knows nothing about servers and code and pandemics. All she knows is Vana’diel and its mountains and valleys and clouds and waves. She began her existence in a perfect world and though she doesn’t know it, she will end her existence there, too. She is blessed to not know time. She is blessed to not know death.

But I know death. Virtual spaces are tombs, locked spaces with bodies inside that we can’t see unless we crack the door and look. Vana’diel is a tomb. Laancer’s body is buried there, my avatar that doesn’t age, that goes where I tell her to go, who submits to my stubbornness and thus has lived in this world for seventeen years, far longer than the real me has lived in any one place since childhood. I move from state to state, city to city, house to house, and she remains, right where I left her, waiting for me. Our world is churning and in flux, but Vana’diel is frozen; the servers are awake, the data fire. The rhythms of the world are steady, and nothing churns here except the deep virtual oceans, devoid of life, exempt from death. Laancer will never die, and she is ever patient. After every logout she will wait for me for as long as it takes.

In the course of spending hundreds of hours playing Final Fantasy XI through my avatar of Laancer, a unique relationship is developed between the two of us. She isn’t merely a virtual self; rather, she is a distinct version of me who, through her own history and actions and experiences within the role-playing context of a virtual world, has grown away from me into her own distinct self. This game wouldn’t have the hold on me that it does if it weren’t for her, because she makes the relationship between player and game personal, intimate, and emotionally resonant. She is the constant upon all constants. Unlike anything else in this game, I gave her a name and she is the one who interprets moves through the world, because she is part of it. I, the player, have no control over any other aspect of this world; it is only her that I control, it is she that has taken on the burden of representing my physical self in this virtual space.

Richard Bartle says of our virtual world alter egos, “By selecting an avatar, you're choosing how others will see you superficially. By playing a character using that avatar, you're experimenting with aspects of your personality. By emphasizing and de-emphasizing facets of the character's personality and your own personality, eventually the two lock together and you have a persona." But I’m not sure this is what has happened with the two of us. It seems the opposite has occurred: Laancer and I have separated like twins in a womb, whether due to time or distance or some other phenomenon of neglect. I imagine that over time, she has become her own person, with her own experiences of this virtual world. The relationships she had with other players was more genuine than the relationship I had with them. I knew something she didn’t, that behind those characters, somewhere in the physical world, a person, a human was controlling them, and I didn’t know that human, I couldn’t see them or hear their voice, I knew nothing of them except for what they chose to tell me, and how they chose to shape their virtual bodies. Laancer, however, didn’t know that. Those relationships were real. There was no one else there but for the virtual bodies that she could see. Their disappearances hurt, but they were rote. First they were there, then they weren’t. But I knew that the players behind them were still in my world, somewhere.

It’s no wonder that in the midst of dysphoria for the real world, the allure of the virtual world’s persistence, its population of sterile avatars, and its accessibility offers a tempting redefining experience of nostalgia, even if that virtual world has aged and lost its lustre. As more and more people are spending their time in quarantine reconnecting with old friends, it makes sense that I or any other gamer would seek out the virtual selves with whom we’ve lost touch. Perhaps sinking back into a video game that I’ve begun and quit and begun again isn’t the most radical act of self care, but it’s a way to once again see a version of myself that I designed and named nearly twenty years ago, when I was still a child and had the rest of my life to design my own self, my physical self. Now when I see this avatar I see not only Laancer, but also myself as I was then, and I feel a distinct nostalgia for who I was when I was seventeen, and who I thought I would be at thirty-four. The chasm between those ideas seems not so vast when I look at Laancer.

But despite how shaky the ground might feel, for now it’s solid as I, as Laancer, traverses this world. I depend on muscle memory to guide my hands on the keyboard, to find the right paths, to move from one virtual city to the next, and my memory doesn’t fail me. Everything I need to live in this world is still there within me, as though I’ve been there, as though my own feet have touched this ground. It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by sadness, and sometimes that feeling is so overpowering that I have to logout, I have to return to the real world and all its turbulence, because I can’t stand the sight of this world so empty when it used to be so full, so lively and so inhabited, and I can’t help but think, Any world can die, even my own.

I watch digital trees shake in an invented wind, and I think that this fear for the persistence of a virtual world can be attributed at least in part by a similar fear for the physical world, under assault from so many different angles. It isn’t simply that I’m afraid Vana’diel will one day disappear, but that the same thing could happen to Earth: as humans’ fingers hover over Vana’diel’s nuke buttons, so do humans have control over the destruction of the physical world. Indeed, Earth is falling apart all around us, and as the rain falls in Vana’diel, I think, Not you, too. You were supposed to be perfect.

I last reactivated my account in 2016, when I was in graduate school and thinking again about beauty. I had barely realized how much I’d missed Vana’diel, and how much I’d missed Laancer, but when I saw her and the world again for the first time since 2007, I nearly drowned in the nostalgia and the grief. I saw the world, documented the most beautiful bits of it for my graduate thesis, and then deactivated my account again. I didn’t dare actually play the game. I quit that long ago. The sword remained in its scabbard.

That time, the grief was dull, a faraway ache, detached from me and floating in some non-space between me and this game. But the grief now is more about the real world than this virtual world, and it’s overpowering, it’s a world quarantined and catching fire, and now there’s a drive not to merely see Vana’diel, to run across it and feel sorrow and then logout for another four years, but to feel a part of this world again, to inhabit it and feel again like I belong, the way I did more than ten years ago, when I played this game for hours a day. It’s as though the front door of my house has been loose on its hinges for a very long time, and I’ve finally noticed, and I’m picking out a screwdriver to fix it. I belong in this world. It is a part of me. There are ghosts here, but they’re not the ghosts of avatars, they’re the ghosts of my own past. They’re the ex-boyfriend and friend I used to play this game with, the first I broke up with, the second killed by a truck that ran a red light. They’re the house I was living in when I first created Laancer, rented by my mom for the two of us after my parents’ divorce. They’re my lonely dorm room. They’re my most vulnerable moments. Since reactivating Laancer, all these people and places have appeared in my dreams. Nostalgia is mixing itself with trauma. The digital rain falls mainly on the pain.

But that’s how it is when you have a decades-long relationship with a virtual world, and a global pandemic has chased you back into it. That’s the nature of grief, and of nostalgia. If nostalgia can protect me from pain, and ease my anxiety about death, even though the place I feel nostalgic for is itself slowly dying, then I will go there, I will embed myself in it and find in there who I was, who I am, and who I might be when this is all over. I will find the persistence that will keep me safe.

It’s raining again. This time though, I’m not alone. There’s someone else here, a stranger, another avatar with a human behind her. That human could be anywhere else in the world, their life could be exactly like mine or completely different, they could be my age or older or younger, they could be sick or healthy, they could be happy or sad, but they are here, in Vana’diel, and for just a moment we make some sort of trans-world eye contact: our digital eyes meet, and I imagine what the human the eyes behind them might be like, blue or brown, expressive or meek, open or closed. I wave. They wave back. And then they’re gone, off toward somewhere else, somewhere where it’s not raining, where the sun is shining and everything is as it’s always been, and maybe always will be, forever.