Why do I play City of Heroes:
There are a few interlocking reasons here. First, I've been playing games since childhood, and the games I favor are the ones that let you explore and - when video games started having that option - make your own character, and customize your experience, and are not focused on competing with other players. First-person shooters and arcade-style fighting games leave me cold. I devoured the Pokemon series, with its ample flexibility in party combinations and playstyle options, in my early teens. When I discovered BioWare, I latched right onto Knights of the Old Republic, especially the second one with its even greater depth of dialogue trees, individual character stories, and character build customization options, and held on well into other BioWare titles (I'm halfway through the first Dragon Age and loved the first and second Mass Effect games; still need to get my hands on Jade Empire). However, aside from City of Heroes, my great love in video games is, and remains, the Elder Scrolls, in particular Morrowind: while it looked interesting to me even on its own, once I discovered that it came with its own Construction Set and there was a whole community of people online who dedicated even more of their spare time to allowing the player to be exactly the character they wanted to be
than they did to actually playing the game, I did nothing else for years. I'm still a part of that community, though I've become a little more scarce over the past couple of years, for one reason and one reason only:
City of Heroes is better. Morrowind (and Skyrim, and I suppose even Oblivion) are all fantastic worlds to explore, in which you play exactly what you want to play - an aside; I played WoW for about twenty minutes before I got tired of being Orc Shaman #3,428, I mean, sure, I got to pick my own hair color and style and skin tone but any game that changes your avatar's outward appearance based on what equipment you're wearing only goes so far in terms of visual distinction if you can't add new equipment yourself - but The Elder Scrolls series comprises single-player games, which means that there is no ingame, real-time roleplay as the character you've dreamed up. The next best thing is tabletop RPGs; I've played a lot of D&D, Star Wars D20, and even tabletop Dragonball (which was far more amazing than I could have ever expected), but tabletop also lacks - there is a limited pool of players, sessions have to be set up and agreed upon ahead of time, meeting in person is inconvenient, rolling dice slows things down, etc., and there are also no visuals. To imagine is one thing, but to be shown is another thing entirely. This is the crux of what makes City of Heroes my most beloved video game title: My character, that I play with hundreds of other people, in real time, feels like
my creation as I watch him fight evil using the powers that I have chosen for him.
The second reason, that I believe depends heavily on the first - I have Asperger's syndrome and it gives me severe social anxiety, and if not for this game, I would not have friends. It's much, much easier for me to understand the minds and motives of fictional characters than real people, so I gain relief from this anxiety when there's a safe curtain of fiction between me and whoever's on the other end, that I can pass through at my own pace. This
works. Case in point: I just got back from a vacation in Mexico, on the Mayan Riviera, arranged by the co-leader of my SG. This kind of real friendship is not something that comes easily to me, and it only happened because of our RP together and later, our joint efforts to keep our SG running. The only other place that I can encounter this safety curtain is at conventions, and even then, it's neither as effective (conventions end, and people go home to unreachable places) nor anywhere near as affordable, not to mention a much greater expenditure of time and energy, which I can't sustain for long.
Lastly, Ms. Lackey has already said exactly what I feel, though I don't write professionally:
As a writer, I am deeply invested in my characters and their stories. Some of them have made it on to professional prose, but writing is very hard work, and nothing like as immersive as the experience of playing their stories and reactions. NCSoft is going to do something no one else ever has: completely destroy almost a hundred of my characters and stories. Legally, that is not a criminal action. But by all that is holy, it should be.