Enliel of Aetolia

It all started almost exactly one year ago, at some now forgotten point in August 2006. School was over, the days were long, the weather was crap, and I found myself reaching a point where I was quite literally bored to tears. Playing random, pointless games on the Internet for yet another dog day afternoon, my attention was suddenly grabbed by an advertising banner that had started to throw words in my face.

Bards? Cabalists? Vampires?! That sounded better than shooting dull robots to defend my equally dull castle! I followed the link, and ended up at Iron Realms Entertainment’s website. “Well,” I thought, “better than a kick in the head with a frozen muck-luck,” and after some thought I clicked the button labeled ‘Aetolia, the Midnight Age’. Much typing and a few hours later, I found myself to be the proud new player of Enliel, a remarkably furry servant of a vampiric House (big shout-out to Nebre’seir… you know I love you, right?).

And funnily enough, this House was actually run by other real, living, breathing people, all sitting behind their computers somewhere. Other real people giving my character assignments to advance within his House. Other real people that had shaped this world, and its history, for the two centuries of its fictional existence. Other real people that took me to the tavern for a flagon of mead, that randomly started talking to me on the street, that caused conflicts and plot twists that artificial intelligence, or even a single group of developers, could never have dreamt up.

And all these other real people had committed themselves to playing a role to populate this strange new world. I don’t know about you, but I don’t generally go around killing random passers-by and sacrificing their corpses to gods of Death; while I don’t really feel that makes my life less livable, it’s nice to be able to try it once every so often. In Aetolia, it fit in perfectly with my character. This was a world inhabited by hyper-intelligent frogs who were always muttering about numbers without ever using a calculator, martial-arts masters who all happened to be pyromaniacs, Greenpeace activists whose only contribution to saving the environment seemed to be cuddling one another to death… And it all made sense, in the way that only the best-thought up constructed worlds can. Soon, I found myself discussing the teachings of fictional gods in more depth than most people could explain their own real-life religion. And I loved it. Aetolia was a completely different world, and getting to know its unwritten rules, the things that make it all so coherent, is still one of the biggest reasons why I keep coming back to it.

But oddly enough, the more I delved into this parallel universe, the more familiar it became. Everything in Aetolia was somehow linked to something in the real world, from the religious Orders trying to spread the Word in the best fundamentalist tradition, to the profiteering businessmen who are driving the credit market up even as we speak. Similarly. whenever I encountered something new in the real world, its Aetolian equivalent would immediately present itself. Was signing up for university really that different from joining a guild? Is it just a coincidence that politicians always seem to do whatever they want once they’re elected, whether they’re in charge of Bloodloch or Brussels? Playing Aetolia gave me fresh insights into the world I had come to take for granted. And playing Enliel, to my complete surprise, gave me fresh insights into myself. By spending time acting out the behaviors of someone with a different personality, I also gained a sense of objectivity when looking at myself. After all, you can’t examine something without having something else to compare it to. Aetolia is my source of comparison.

I love Aetolia. I love Aetolia because over the course of a year, it’s given me dozens of friends from all over the world, whom I now know better than some of my former classmates. I love Aetolia because it gives me another world to explore when this one gets a bit too boring. I love Aetolia because it’s a beautiful, twisted mirror, that shows me parts of my world I had never seen before. But most of all, I love Aetolia because it’s affected my life in every aspect. And I like to think it’s for the better.