celestialmechanic: Since I’m sorta in a Sword Art Online mood, let’s talk about my headcanons for...

celestialmechanic:

Since I’m sorta in a Sword Art Online mood, let’s talk about my headcanons for Kayaba. A lot of people have expressed annoyance with Kayaba’s reasons for making SAO in the first place, often summarized as “I forgot.”

Here’s the thing. As a game developer, I sometimes wonder what it would be like if people really lived in my multiplayer games. If they actually experienced them the way one would the real world. Most game worlds are even a better world to live in than the real world.

But it’s really difficult to get your players to take the game that seriously, since not only do they have lives to attend to and often have as little as an hour or two to devote to gaming, but also, there’s a pervading sense of not needing to care about what happens, since what isn’t computer generated, scripted scenarios is often interaction with people who don’t care about the setting, just that they “win” the game in whatever way they can.

Kayaba Akihiko wanted a game that really felt like you were there, to the highest degree possible. To this end, he tried everything. He made the game an MMO with a huge world. He designed and manufactured an entire game system that allowed players to be fully immersed in the world. He designed and implemented ACTUAL SUPERHUMAN-LEVEL AI to create the quests and history of the world.

Then the beta tests of Sword Art Online occurred. The beta testers were all people who were really involved in gaming, particularly MMOs. They all played it according to its genre alone, gaining levels, doing quests, hunting rare items, but skipping through what was supposed to make the game amazing, this world that Kayaba constructed that was supposed to be the focal point of the game. Beta players are so focused on the meta, on how to play the game most efficiently, that it later gets them a reputation for being selfish assholes who care only about winning for themselves.

Kayaba had to conclude that everything he had done to make the game be like a second reality had failed. Everyone was still playing it like it was just the next MMO that had rolled around. Understandably, of course, but if Kayaba had gone “Oh, that makes sense” and left, he wouldn’t have made SAO in the first place.

There was really only one aspect of reality that Kayaba had yet to implement. The only way they’d consider his world something real and not a hobby in between what really matters, or worse, a way for them to feel superior to others, is if they could die there. The idea of being able to just hop in and out of the world whenever you feel like it, to respawn back at base and keep wailing on that boss, that was the thing that kept it feeling fake. So in one last act, half out of desperation, and half out of curiosity, Kayaba disabled the Log Out function and allowed players to die for real.