Page 46 of Looking for Group
Epigraph
Alexis: I think you can date the era of A Certain Popular MMO that this book was inspired by fairly accurately from the quote I chose to start it off with. I love a good villain and Kael’thas was overwhelmingly fabulous. Never did get the bastard’s phoenix mount to drop, though.
Chapter One
Alexis: Alternative guild names included Crit Happens and Too Old For This Crit.
2. Paragraph begins with: SCDD is a tight-knit raiding guild (heroic and normal difficulty), currently looking for a main tank to join our mature, dedicated, and frankly fabulous team.
Alexis: Okay, so, we’re back to the question of what to do with a book from the 2010s being re-released in the 2020s.
Even more so than with Spires, which has the odd dated reference here and there, but can mostly just be treated as generically “contemporary,” LFG exists in the highly specific context of where gaming was (and more particularly where A Certain Popular MMO was) at the point when I wrote it.
I did briefly toy with the idea of trying to modernise some of the gaming stuff, but then I realised it would require me to rip the story to shreds, since the gaming stuff and the character stuff is pretty heavily entwined.
Take Ialdir, for example, who is a Desert Storm veteran, and the games he says got him through that time.
I suppose I could make him a veteran of a different war or make him older, but doing either would change his character in ways that don’t necessarily benefit the story.
And for what ultimately feels like a superficial benefit at best. So welcome back to the past, I guess.
3. Paragraph begins with: your best damn behaviour:
Alexis: It was really weird to stumble across this specific part of SCDD’s recruitment ad here at the end of 2024, when we’re right in the middle of a fresh round of “gaming has been ruined” discourse.
A big part of which is the idea that things have “gone woke”—implying that something has changed fairly recently within gaming, and therefore, all the pushback from the kind of people who complain about that kind of thing is an understandable reaction to a new phenomenon.
But the truth is that arsehats have been complaining about presence/inclusion/existence of LGBTQ+ and other marginalised people forever.
Before it was “woke,” it was “SJWs.” Before it was “SJWs” it was, as the guild calls out here, “political correctness gone mad.” And so on back through history until we get to, I don’t know, Waldensianism or something.
4. Paragraph begins with: What was your previous guild (if relevant) and why did you leave:
Alexis: I don’t know if this is still how it works, but in my experience, you can tell a lot about a guild/clan/esports team from its name.
The ones that take themselves hyper-seriously tend to have names like Annihilation or Paragon or Exodus, as if they’re some kind of tech startup or something.
Guilds with puns for names tend to be a lot friendlier.
5. Paragraph begins with: And that was when I realised I must have stopped having fun in this game a long time ago.
Alexis: This is not quite based on personal experience because I never raided at that level, but loot drama is very real.
It’s also very embarrassing because you know, rationally, you should not give this much of a shit over a bunch of pixels.
Except, of course, it’s not about what’s rational.
It’s about emotions and what you’ve chosen to invest in and that’s as complicated in virtual spaces as it is in physical spaces.
Which makes this a very thematic pixel axe.
6. Paragraph begins with: Do you have a microphone, and are you able to connect to Mumble:
Alexis: I’m pretty sure everyone uses Discord these days. But Mumble was definitely a thing for about 5 minutes in the mid 2010s. God I’m old.
7. Paragraph begins with: [Officer][Ialdir]:
Alexis: One of the more complicated things to juggle with LFG —and, honestly, I’m still not sure I succeeded—is the deliberately chaotic inconsistency of how people are referred to between character names, RL names, and nicknames which may reference either or neither.
Like, it’s very specific that some guildies go only by their screen (or character) name, others go mostly by their RL name, and a few float between.
For example, Heurodis/Bjorn is almost always Bjorn, and Solace is nearly always Solace (or Sol).
This, to me at least, seems true to how those kinds of spaces tend to work, even if it makes things slightly more complicated for a reader.
8. Paragraph begins with: [Guild][Dave]
Alexis: I think this might be the first instance of the Ubiquitous Dave.
For whatever reason, whenever I need a certain type of background character, I always seem to end up calling them Dave, and now it’s this sort of running joke I have with myself.
It probably reaches its culmination in Paris Daillencourt is About To Crumble , where Tariq lives with four other guys, all called Dave.
9. Paragraph begins with: [Guild][Jargogle]
Alexis: One of the other things about names in this book is that I wanted the character names people had chosen to reflect something about their personality (cf. Dave calling his Dread Knight Dave).
Most of the SCDD crowd have something at least vaguely thematic, which I think sort of signals that, while it’s not a roleplaying guild, it is a guild that tries to respect the setting and other people’s immersion.
But obviously that takes people in interestingly different directions—like Solace and Ialdir are both elves but Solace has gone for something very healery and Ialdir has gone for something very Tolkienesque.
Mordant up there isn’t very talkative compared to the others but, even though I haven’t looked at this book in nearly a decade, I tell you right away he plays a diabolist (the game’s edgy caster class).
Drew, by contrast, has gone a little bit more whimsical with Orcarella—which I think suggests there’s a bit more to him than he initially lets on.
10. Paragraph begins with: Drew pulled his character back and typed /sit .
Alexis: Again, this may have changed in recent years but the relative elegance of your character’s dance animation used to depend a lot on how female and/or elvish they were.
11. Paragraph begins with: There were three bands of golems and cultists patrolling the rim.
Alexis: Once again, this isn’t exactly from life because this dungeon is fictional. But anyone who’s played a class with a knockback has tried something like this at some point.
12. Paragraph begins with: [Group][Burnzurfais]
Alexis: This guy exists. I mean, not literally. But if you play an MMO with strangers, you’ll meet this guy in many incarnations.
13. Paragraph begins with: Drew’s taunt came off cooldown, and he yanked the golem away from Ialdir just in time for the bolas to drop and the final cultist to take it personally.
Alexis: Something I tried to capture with, well, basically the whole of LFG is the way moments that happen in virtual spaces can feel as genuinely dramatic, meaningful or intimate as those taking place in the physical world.
I also think that game spaces offer unique opportunities for shared experiences and a sense of teamwork between friends and lovers.
It’s kind of why games in some form or another tend to feature in my work a lot.
I think play is a really underrated aspect of being alive in general and is pretty vital for maintaining healthy adult relationships.
14. Paragraph begins with: [Group][Solace]
Alexis: Whenever I played casters, I was always convinced A Certain Popular MMO was punishing me with the shit my character had to drink in order to fuction.
I think they might have got rid of eating and drinking in later incarnations but I, too, have virtually sipped my fair share of Fermented Cave Mould, and probably worse.
15. Paragraph begins with: Drew stared at his crumpled corpse, which was lying at a slightly awkward angle on the floor, his axe clipping through the foot of a fallen golem.
Alexis: Apparently, I had many feelings about the gameplay conventions of A Certain Popular MMO when I was writing this book.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t true any more—modern MMOs have realised it’s a good thing to allow their players access to quality of life features—but, back in my day, you could definitely raise the dead long before you could sit on an animal.
16. Paragraph begins with: Ialdir and his pet owl…
Alexis: In A Certain Popular MMO, you could tame various animals to be your companion if you played a particular class. I think it says something about Ialdir’s sense of the absurd that he’s kept the starting pet and hasn’t re-named it. Certainly that’s not the sort thing I would do, or have done.
17. Paragraph begins with: [Group][Solace]
Alexis: One of the slightly difficult things about MMO gameplay is that it involves a lot of doing the same thing over and over for marginal benefits.
I think this can go two ways within the player base, in that you can either get fixated on efficiency to the point that the game begins to feel like a chore, or you invest more in the social aspects, the scope of the world, and the shared experience.
18. Paragraph begins with: [Guild][Heurodis]
Alexis: This is another example of my general tendency to delve too greedily and too deep in the world-building sense. This isn’t meant to make direct sense to the reader but the format of it mirrors the way theorycrafters tend to talk about MMO rotations in general.