At my Secondary School, for a few months at least, our teenaged politics was defined by who was kissing whom, who had insulted whom, and who was sending spaceships to defend or attack whom. My friends and I were all playing Planetarion, a browser-based massively multiplayer game of long-term space domination. Each player was given control of a planet and would strive to gain the most points by mining their asteroids, building ships and capturing enemy planets.

What allowed the game to consume us was the glacial pace it moved at. The world would update once every ‘tick’, where a tick was a single hour. When you did anything, you would be given an ETA: it will take this number of ticks for your ships to be constructed, it will take this number ticks for your ships to reach their target.

The delayed response between performing an action and seeing its conseqeunces meant there was room in between for nail-biting obsession. More importantly, it meant we could log on to the game in the school library, make a few discrete moves and log off again before any disapproving teacher could catch us.

Unfortunately, my friends and I were all young teenagers. It wasn’t like we needed an excuse for bickering or Machiavellian backstabbing, and Planetarion simply provided a platform for our worst compulsions. Plus, disclaimer: I was kind of a dick.

While I’d long forgotten the specifics of my old Planetarion games, a quick check of my hard drive revealed an MSN chatlog from the time.

Oh boy.

It seems my friends and I had just been sent a general message from the Minister of War (of, I guess, our coalition/group), saying that defences should always be provided to attacked comrades. However, after committing 500 ships to defending one friend, and sending a 1500 ship counter-attack against his enemy, two other friends needed defending. They were angry I wasn’t sending ships to help them, too. I’ve obscured the names that could be in any way identifiable, except for my own:

Graham says:

im defending [Friend] with 500 ships and attacking the guy thats attacking him with 1500 in the hope he’ll racall. this is what i was asked to do, wga

Graham says:

what more could i do??

Officially Well Known Again! says:

currently there is no orders in the gal

Graham says:

[Friend] asked me on icq to attack the guy and see if he recalls, and asked me to defend. so thats what im doing

Officially Well Known Again! says:

[Friend] says “Jump under the bus Smitz!”

Bye Smitz ure dead now!

That’s some real nice typing skills you’ve got there, “Smitz”. And does anyone know what “wga” means?

Graham says:

im not defending [Friend #2] or you because im worried about being attacked my self

Graham says:

my points went from 300 thousand to 1.1 million

Graham says:

i have the most roids in the galaxy and am second in points

Officially Well Known Again! says:

smitz thats is mince

I had forgotten that “mince” used to mean bad! Now it means I’m having delicious Bolognese for dinner. Conversely, I remember that the concern for my planet at the time was genuine, but trying to explain my tactics by bragging about how great I was probably wasn’t a great idea.

When bragging didn’t work, I tried name-calling, branding those complaining as “little shites.” The use of plural prompted requests for who the other shites were, but I refused to name names. There aren’t timestamps in the log, but I can only imagine this went on for hours. Until!

[Friend #2] has been added to the conversation.

[Friend #2] says:

why the fuck are u saying we’re all shite smitz?

My log ends here, but these choice extracts are meant to illustrate the type of conversations we’d have, where my friends and I would re-enact scenes of palace intrigue over badly spelt MSN chats.

I’ve been thinking about Planetarion recently because I’ve been playing Neptune’s Pride, a similar multiplayer game of space domination. Unlike Planetarion’s three-month long rounds featuring hundreds or thousands of players, the Neptune’s Pride match I’m playing has only eight.

I’m friends with almost all of those players, and since the match began, I’ve betrayed four of them. Similar to my Planetarion experience, our actions and plans within the game have been discussed at length via IM conversations. Many messages have also been sent through the in-game mail system, forming inevitably broken alliances.

But when we talk about the match online or in person, we do so unemotionally. Equally, when we each come to write about the match, in PC Gamer or on Rock Paper Shotgun or on our personal blogs, we’ll write with the understanding that it is a game, and we were role-playing, or simply playing, and that our actions weren’t personal.

But this wasn’t the case when I was a teenager, and it isn’t how a lot of people experience gaming. The experiences I had in Planetarion would spill over into school the next day, and there would be further arguments, accusations, name-calling and eventual fuming silence. We’d fall out with one another regularly. The game wasn’t just play. It mattered to us in a real and powerful way.

I think this is something that’s mostly forgotten about in games writing: for a lot of the people who play games, there’s not much separation. The games get mixed up with the same insecurities and pettiness that exist in real life and the experience is emotionally heightened as a result. Planetarion is forever imprinted in my memory entirely because of these arguments, and despite the immaturity of fighting, it’s heartening to think of gaming as such a direct extension of real world relationships and emotions.

My school friendships ultimately survived Planetarion, but they were changed by the experience.