Gameplay Journal Entry #5
What is a glitch? As a game developer and enthusiast, I primarily encounter this concept as an unplanned alteration of a game’s environment or behaviors. These occurrences can manifest in different forms (visually, mechanically, etc.) and have potential for both benefit and risk. The risk is their unpredictability: “The glitch has no solid form or state through time; it is often perceived as an unexpected and abnormal modus operandi, a break from (one of) the many flows (of expectations) within a technological system (Menkman 340).” I believe this is the fundamental process of a glitch. This week, we are looking at this idea through the lens of an old glitch from Lord of the Rings Online. The glitch allowed players to travel around the world while sitting on fast-moving chairs, and it looks as ridiculous/funny as it sounds.
“A glitch reminds us of our cultural experience at the same time as developing it by suggesting new aesthetic forms.” (Goriunova, Shulgin 115). The LOTRO Chair Train Glitch disrupted the mostly traditional fantasy aesthetics of the game by providing players with a comical social feature that didn’t involve banding together for an objective or otherwise interacting through common MMO methods of multiplayer play. While this certainly isn’t the only instance of such a phenomenon (finding ways to perform obnoxious actions in MMO’s to harmlessly bother other players may have been a favorite after-school activity for my childhood friends and I… sorry, Runescape of 2007.), this glitch appears to be remembered fondly even many years after its removal (“Thread: Sitting in Chairs”). I think many long-time online multiplayer gamers can recall at least one similar experience of being in the right time and place to witness an unusually weird game event with other people. I also think these experiences tend to stick with us for so long because they go beyond the expected goal/reward gameplay experience; we are shown something so unexpectedly engaging we have no choice but to abandon the task at hand and investigate the commotion. We separate from the standard routine and are given room to enjoy the game in a lesser common way. I see the LOTR chair glitch as a disruption to videogame play and perception not just because it has no place in the designed aesthetics of the game, but because it widened the spectrum of what players could get out of the game. While the glitch was active, a player had the opportunity to follow along the desired game path designed by the developers or hang out with others in what was essentially a chair-roaming simulator. Those engaging with the latter stumbled across an unintentional comedic element that provided at least enough of an entertainment value to motivate hordes of players to travel the game’s lands with their trailing rocket chair people.
References
Goriunova, Olga, and Alexei Shulgin. Software Studies: a Lexicon, MIT, 2008, pp. 110–118.
Menkman, Rosa. Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images beyond YouTube, by Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers Miles, Institute of Network Cultures, 2011, pp. 336–346.
Thread: Sitting in Chairs. 2017, www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?654148-Sitting-in-Chairs.
