MMORPG: How a Computer Game Becomes Deadly Serious (4 page)

Michael, an American of about his own age, was sprawled on one of the sofas. He was assigned to this house during his sojourn at Webster University, an international business school. Although Michael was only in his second year, he’d adopted the role of ‘nestor’. This exalted status granted all kinds of privileges, one of which was exemption from the duty roster.

He was reading a newspaper and greeted him with a wave and a grunt. “If you pass the coffee machine, could you get some for me?”

“Sure. I need some myself.”

The kitchen was dominated by three enormous American refrigerators. One was completely dedicated to Heineken beer. Next to it was a whiteboard with the names of all residents on it. When taking a beer, all you had to do was to put a scratch behind your name. At the end of the week, it was pay-time for personal consumption. Judging from the list, there were some heavy drinkers around. Michael was one of them.

The other two refrigerators were filled with everyone’s food. The rules were simple: everything with your name on it was yours. If it didn’t have a name on it, it was free booty.

Robert retrieved his milk and, leaning against the sink, he finished the entire pack. Finally, he began to feel a little better. He turned to the coffee machine and poured two coffees. Also taking his bread, butter, and
hagelslag
, some delicious kind of tiny crisp chocolate crumbs the Dutch put on their bread, he returned to the living room.

“Here you are,” he said, handing a cup to Michael. He noticed the American was reading the
Herald Tribune
. “Could I have a piece of your paper?”

“Sure. Take the front section, I just finished it. It’s about yesterday’s bombing.”

Robert spread the paper on the table and started to scan the front page while he prepared a sandwich. Finished, he turned to the full article on the bombing, eating at the same time.

Halfway through, he suddenly froze. His brain came to a full stop for a second, then started to run on full speed. He almost felt a physical click when several things came together in his mind. Not bothering to clean up, he moved to the door.

“Hey, where the hell are you going?” Michael had half risen from the couch and was staring at him curiously. “Are you all right?”

Robert gave him a wave to indicate that he was fine and ran upstairs, taking two steps at a time. At the top floor he nearly collided with Khalid, who was about to go downstairs. Robert stared at him. For a moment he hesitated, inclined to say something about what was bothering him. Instead, he simply said “Hi!” and moved on.

In his room, he grabbed his mobile phone. Last night, Rebecca had given him her cell phone number. Before calling her, he opened the diary function and looked up some dates. Satisfied, he called her number. She answered on the first ring.

“Rebecca, it’s Robert. I need to talk to you. Now. Where can we meet?”

She came to his place wearing jeans and her black Barrera polo shirt, since she had to be at work an hour later anyway. When she arrived, Robert waved her to one of the tiny chairs. He’d searched his memory several times and put his findings to paper.

“I’m so glad you could come, I must talk to someone about this. It may mean nothing, but there are too many coincidences. I need your opinion.”

She looked around and folded herself carefully on the indicated seat. A smile was on her lips, but she also looked serious. Robert was glad she seemed to take his sudden summoning so well.

“Is this about what you told me yesterday? About that guy and World of Warcraft?”

He nodded, holding a finger in the air. “Yes, but yesterday I didn’t remember everything. And I hadn’t read today’s paper.”

She held his gaze. “So what did you remember exactly? And what’s in the paper?”

“Yesterday, you told me that the bombing was supposedly done by some terrorist group that called itself the Hammer of Righteous Justice, right? And that they had written their name on a painting?”

“Yes. At least, that’s what I heard on the news.”

“Okay, but that’s not all!” He held up the front page of the
Herald Tribune
. “An hour ago, I was reading this newspaper. And in this paper is one thing that wasn’t on the news, at least you didn’t hear it. Or maybe it wasn’t released yesterday. Listen to what the paper says, I’ll only read the important part:

The attack is claimed by an unknown organization called The Hammer of Righteous Justice. The official spokeswoman of the Department of Justice confirmed that they are certain that the painting was meant to claim responsibility for the attack. She also confirmed that it was signed with the text ‘The world will tremble for the Hammer of Righteous Justice’
.

Rebecca shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I still don’t see what you’re getting at.”

“That’s because I haven’t told you the rest yet.” Robert started to pace the room, not saying anything for a few seconds. Rebecca started to open her mouth, but he motioned her to silence. “I’m just trying to explain this to you in the clearest way possible. Look, I told you that I saw the name Hammer of Righteous Justice on the computer screen of Khalid, who lives right across from my room, by the way. What I didn’t remember until I read the paper this morning, is that there was more. I don’t know why it took me so long to remember, because it was all in capitals! Now listen to me, I wrote it down.”

He stopped his pacing and turned to face her. Standing right in the middle of the room, he read directly from his notebook:

We meet again in ten days and then we strike! The world will tremble for the Hammer of Righteous Justice!

She stared at him. “So what you’re saying is-”

“Exactly!” he interrupted. “It’s not just the name; it’s the entire sentence. The world will tremble for the Hammer of Righteous Justice. Exactly the same words as in the terrorist painting. Coincidence? Who knows. But that’s not all. Listen again:

We meet together in ten days and then we strike!”

“When was this? When did you see this?”

“Aha!” He looked at her in triumph. “Today.” He held up the paper as proof, pointing at the date. “Is September twenty-one. So yesterday, the day of the attack, it was the twentieth. The day I first met Khalid, and saw what I saw, was on my first day here. And I arrived on Friday September ten. In other words, exactly ten days before the attack took place.”

Rebecca was listening intently, doing the math in her head. Now she also stood and walked to the tiny window. She answered with her back to him. “You read the text ‘We meet again in ten days and then we strike! The world will tremble for the Hammer of Righteous Justice!’ ten days before a terrorist attack occurs which is claimed by a painting on the scene that bears exactly the same message.”

She shivered. “This is serious. I mean, we don’t know anything for sure, but it’s strange. At least it’s a lot of coincidence. What do you think we should do? Should we go to the police?”

“I don’t know. I was thinking the same thing. But is it proof? And are they going to arrest the guy who lives next to me?”

“Maybe we should confront him with it.”

Robert laughed. “I ran into him earlier today. For a second I wanted to do that, but I chickened out.”

Suddenly, Rebecca leaned forward, an intent look in her eyes. “Can you tell me what you saw? On the screen, in World of Warcraft? All of it. Try to remember and tell me.”

“All right.” He sat on his desk, closing his eyes. “I saw a man in weird clothing. He was flying. Not by himself; he was sitting on the back of some flying animal that looked like some kind of dragon. They weren’t moving. They were just stationary in the air. The dragon was flapping its wings to keep aloft.”

“Good,” she said encouragingly. “What else can you remember?”

“Well, they were floating over something that looked like a mountain ridge. Really high. And there were all kinds of buttons to the side of the screen.”

“Okay. Now we go back to the flying animal. What color was it? And would you describe it as a huge bird or as a flying dragon? A lion with wings perhaps?”

He flicked his fingers. “It was brownish. And I’d say it wasn’t a bird, but a dragon. It might have been a lion with wings, but not a bird. Why is that important?”

“Never mind. I’ll tell you later. Now, what exactly can you remember of the text you saw? Were there any names?”

Robert concentrated hard, going back in his mind to that afternoon. After a few seconds it came to him. “I think someone was calling him, waiting for a response. Repeating his name, several times. It was Drimm, or Grimm, or something similar.”

“You mean ‘Grimm’ like the author of the fairy tales?”

“Yes, exactly. It was with a double m at the end, I’m sure about that. And I think it was Drimm, not Grimm.”

“That gives us something to work with. Do you have a computer with Internet here?”

“Of course!” He jumped off the desk and turned around to open his laptop. It was on standby, so it quickly whirred to life. He logged on and pushed it over to her. She seated herself in his desk chair and opened the Internet browser.

“We’re going to see if we can find him.” She typed in a web address and whistled as a website came up immediately. “This is impressive. You have a fast Internet connection. At my place, the Armory is always slow.”

Robert was studying the page. It was rather dark, with a World of Warcraft logo on top. “What is this?” he asked curiously.

“This is the European section of The Armory. It’s an online database with all the characters that exist in WoW. If you reckon that over twelve million people play the game, this is a gigantic database. Most people have several characters, so it probably contains over fifty million profiles. Look, I’ll show you.”

She typed in ‘Drimm’ and hit enter. After a second, a list about thirty long came up. Robert surmised that these were all the characters with the name Drimm.

“It looks like this is a fairly common name in WoW. Myself, I’ve never heard of it. Now let’s have a look at what we’ve got.”

She studied the list for a few seconds and smiled. “This is easy,” she said.

Robert didn’t understand a thing of what she was looking for. “Could you please explain what you’re doing? What does it mean?”

“Right, I’ll try to explain it. First of all, you told me the character you saw was flying. That means that it has to be at least level sixty.”

“Why?”

Because only at level sixty can a character obtain the flying skill. You said that the character you saw was riding a dragon. Well, those can only be acquired by characters who are at the maximum level of eighty. Ergo: the Drimm we’re looking for is level eighty.”

This was easy. Robert nodded his understanding. She continued, as if she was educating him. “Now, you can see that only four characters on the list are level eighty, so our target is one of them. Two are Alliance and two are Horde.”

Seeing his incomprehension, she explained, “Every character in WoW is a member of either one of two different factions. They’re called the Alliance and the Horde. They’re opposed to each other.

She suddenly pointed at the screen. “We don’t need to guess anymore. The giveaway is in the guild name. Look at that!”

Robert bent over to see what she was pointing at. “The Hammer of Grimstone,” he read aloud. “That’s different!”

“Sure, but it’s a hammer. Don’t forget, out of a possible fifty million characters, we’ve pinpointed it to only four remaining possibilities. I put my money on the one with the hammer in the guild name.”

“You may be right. Besides, I know nothing about this game!”

Absentmindedly, she patted his hand. “No worries, I know enough. Now let’s see if we can find out a bit more.”

She typed a new web address and another website came up. “This is Wowhead,” she explained. “It’s one of the few Internet sites that contains all the information on WoW you might ever need. It’s my personal favorite, I use it all the time. You can look up anything you can think of.”

“And what are we looking for?”

“We’re checking the significance of the word Grimstone,” she answered, typing the word in a box at the same time and hitting Enter. After a few seconds, a new page came up in response to her query. There was only one result. Robert sucked in his breath when he read it.

“My God,” he stammered, “No more coincidence!”

Rebecca clicked on the search result and a new window sprang open. “High Justice Grimstone,” she read out loud.

“What does it mean? What is it?”

“High Justice Grimstone is a NPC. In other words: a Non Playing Character. That means that it’s one of the computer controlled characters in the world. I think it’s Grimstone’s title that’s the issue here.”

“The Hammer of Grimstone, The Hammer of High Justice,” Robert said aloud.

“Right. I think we’ve just found the character of your neighbour. With that guild name, there can be no doubt about it.”

He was getting so much information that he suddenly felt overloaded. “What’s a guild name? I mean, I’m a history student, and I certainly know what a guild is, but what is it in WoW?”

“A guild is like a club of people. You have to be invited to become a member of one. Every guild has a leader and there are different ranks. From officers down to initiates. The purpose of a guild is to create a kind of family within the virtual world. The world is big, and you need a lot of help to be successful. Or even to survive. You need advice, all kinds of stuff, and often also simply some strong friends to defeat your enemies. That’s where your guild kicks in. Guild members are supposed to help each other.”

“And what do we know about this guild?”

She gave him a broad smile. “That’s what we’re going to find out now!” She hit the Back button twice, and they were back at the page with all the Drimms. She clicked on their target, and the screen was filled with a colorful diagram. There were several bars and a lot of boxes. Rebecca studied some additional information. Robert deduced it was about the gear that Drimm was wearing.