The Only Moonglow

The first time I played Ultima Online, I attacked a deer and died. Before that, there was the start button: a big red button in the middle of a 1990s picture of a chest. Then Moonglow. A thriving community, people standing together outside the city gates, practising our skills on water elementals.

How long would I need in a generated world to miss it the way I miss Moonglow? Or will we immediately generate another version of whatever we miss? I think we will have more Moonglows than we have time to miss. A generated place might be gone before we’ve finished discovering it. An experience can be brief and still leave a universe behind.

Abundance is not new. There were always more games to play, and still we missed the worlds of games we’d already played. What’s different this time is how quickly we can make more. We can generate another fictional place almost as soon as we know what we want from it. If we can identify what made us miss the last place, we could build the next one around that feeling. I have already tested how little it takes. Forty-five seconds of a generated spring were enough to plant a seed of nostalgia. The next experiments could test how little of a generated world it takes to make us miss it, again and again.

But wanting more is not the same as missing. When a movie ends, you want a sequel so you can find out what happens next in its world. That is appetite. Nostalgia begins when you recognize that something you experienced is no longer available to you in the same way. You might have grown older or left a place. You might realize, before a movie has even ended, that you can never see it for the first time again.

The obvious objection is that I’m only missing my own youth, and Moonglow is where I happened to be when I had it. I’m not nostalgic about being young. I miss how young the experience was, how much of it was still possible. Returning to Ultima Online might let me explore more of the possibilities I missed.

But how much of Moonglow would have to return with it? I played UO Outlands, an almost completely different game using the same interface and engine as Ultima Online. Playing Outlands did not diminish my longing for that red button. The expanded world made the absence of the old community clearer. I could explore new places in the familiar interface, but I couldn’t have another evening outside Moonglow’s gates. The game streamlined progress and rearranged the face of Sosaria, and the community was smaller. Even with the old community and the old game restored, I would be returning with memories of having been there before. I could come to miss the return itself, alongside what I still missed of Moonglow.

Those attachments don’t have to encompass an entire experience. I missed a game because of a secret bedroom, or a market where I searched every corner for a way past the barrels. What lay beyond them stayed mysterious. If all that searching had finally led me through the barrels, I think I would have missed the market even more. One possibility becoming a place I could actually enter. Meanwhile, other parts of those games have disappeared from my memory entirely.

A generated world could keep adding rooms beyond the barrels. Until I return, the market in my memory still ends at the barrels. But soon I could return to that market and generate a way past the barrels. Would exploring beyond them deepen my longing for the market I remembered? Or does it only grow while I’m away? Suppose we remove the barrels and add an upscale Roman neighborhood beyond them. Then we spend the rest of our lives extending the neighborhood and we never find our way back to the original game. When we finally stop playing, would we miss the game and its growing neighborhood more than either alone?

We can design how much of a world like Moonglow we recognize when we return, and how much remains undiscovered. We can decide what lies beyond the barrels and when a way opens through them. We could also close the way behind us. Loss we can manufacture. Attachment is something we don’t have much control over. With the generated spring, what I miss is the moment I found it, and that moment is the one thing I didn’t design.

Even if we learn to generate that attachment, I wonder how much room we have in our minds for it. Remembering Moonglow over and over may make me miss it more. If I have a new world to remember every day, how often will I return to any one of them in my mind? I could spend a lifetime discovering places without missing any as much as I miss Moonglow. There were always more games to play, but I returned in memory to one market, one Moonglow, for decades because I couldn’t return to them as they had been. Could I come to miss that need to remember a place because I couldn’t go back? A time when a place could not be made again on demand, when Moonglow was the only Moonglow.

If we could make Moonglow again on demand, we could test how returning affects our attachment to it. Another generated spring would begin with a brief attachment; a return to Moonglow would meet decades of memories. Would playing it again satisfy that longing or strengthen it? I expected each return to add to the old feeling, leaving the original memories intact. But if going back was replacing the memories I missed, would I stop?

I didn’t stop. I played a server, I think it was called Second Age, that used patch notes and player accounts to recreate Ultima Online as it was in 1998 or 1999. Where Outlands offered a different world in the old engine, Second Age tried to restore the world I remembered. Hearing the music again diluted its nostalgic effect on me. But I still have memories I couldn’t recreate or get close to, because of the people involved or the circumstances around them.

My nostalgia for that world had changed, but it was still strong. Some memories stayed beyond reach; others changed as I played. Part of what I missed belonged to the original experience, and part now belonged to the return. The music had become part of both, so hearing it no longer took me straight back to the first. Sometimes I hear Moonglow’s music and remember the constant sound of characters rushing to and from the bank in 1998. Other times I hear it and recall slaying wyverns alone in the desert in 2015, not seeing another player for hours.