Long before always-online games and mass multiplayer became the norm, MMOs were seedbeds of sociologically fascinating interactions among players. The base game was always a digital sandbox; empty cities, towns, and fields built from the ground up around the assumption that the players would fill them with requisite life. In the process, elegant spider webs of informal community became the norm, a glittering metagame linking the digital assets of the formal game itself.
But until Nina Freeman’s soon-to-be released Cibele (pronounced SIB-ul), we haven’t really had a ludic love letter to this shared reality of many MMO gamers. The game tells a semi-autobiographical story of its creator, Nina, about a months-long romance she carried on when she was 19 through an online game, fictionalised here as Valtameri, which seems like a WoW/FFXIII hybrid.