Losing The Bet: A Maplestory Story

maplestory 2 darkness looms

Every year around the holidays I place a bet. Every year around the holidays I lose a bet. What I lose is time. What I gain is 200 levels in MapleStory.

My 3080ti groans.

The bets are always inane, stupid, trivial. One year I said that NBC would run sympathetic headlines about Incels by New Years. I played Adele. This year I bet that New World's player base wouldn't swan dive, turning the game into a flavor of the month by January. Looks like I'm playing Kanna, it's supposed to be one of the fastest classes to level.

The first 100 levels or so aren't bad—not anymore—even charming so long as you collect your login-rewarded hyper teleport rock—otherwise, you have to run from one location to another; if I want to run I'll play Death Stranding. (I would rather be playing Death Stranding.)

The characters, the world, the enemies are all cute and cuddly, ranging from bouncy slimes to the surreal and inanimate: yakuza with machine guns, smoking tree stumps with fangs, murderous bright red telephones. These monsters are the playthings of Satan’s doodling daughter. But no matter how cute or abstract, all will be killed for that great gamer God named Experience.

MapleStory reeks of charm.

A cartoony art style and simple gameplay is forever. That's why I tolerate MapleStory's visuals—why people don't complain about World of Warcraft's graphics after a decade and a half. Realism has a shelf life: the more realistic something is, the more prone to aging. Looney Tunes and Disney movies will be remixed ad nauseum until long after I die, whereas Tomb Raider’s (PSX) polygons can’t help but be seen as polygons. Should’ve made it a cartoon like Maplestory: a bright bubbly game for masochists.

Part of the deal is that we play during the burning event. Burning means for every single level up you gain three levels. So you don’t just ding, you ding-ding-ding. We don't hate each other. We do this for fun—for fun and a bit of pain because even during burning the grind is real and each year I tell myself once again that I'm too old to grind in Maplestory but a year passes and I'm confident once more that my whim for some bet will prove right.
Always bet against the odds. That's what makes betting fun. I’m not allowed in casinos.

MapleStory was Korean hard core, spicy barbecue gaming: make sure to have paper towels, wet wipes, and a sink nearby to keep your keyboard clean. It was a game that knew the essence of the mid-aughts MMO was grinding and didn't try to hide behind quests and story—though they've inevitably added these elements to the game’s detriment. To play a game like MapleStory wasn't to work the 9 to 5 but the 996: constant grind for small gains. YouTube entrepreneurs, for all their talk of hustle and work, can’t handle a real grind like old school MapleStory.

Korean MMOs created a generation of players. Today that generation is bitter and nostalgic because the golden years are over. In the mid-2000s a new MMO was released every week. Ragnarok Online. ROSE. Exteel. Lineage II. DFO. Granado Espada. We were spoiled. The development studios never let the whip and hammer drop. Bang, bang, bang; game, game, game.
And all those games were free, free triumphs, which was prescient back then but seems obvious today. My parents wouldn't buy me Everquest, let alone pay for a subscription, so I turned to private servers.

My first MMORPG was Ragnarok Online (RO), when the installation made you feel like a mad genius: the kRO and sakray installers were in Korean, got to click and guess to win. I broke my first computer trying to install RO because I didn't know what a hard drive was and mine was only 4 GB with 256 MB free. RO was a 1 GB game. Sometimes ignorance is rewarded. Got a new Dell for being dumb.

There are a few hallmarks of great Korean MMOs: obtuse systems, over-scaled user interfaces, colorful skills that make it impossible to tell what's happening on the screen, gigantic numbers for damage, cash shops, and a story by either a schizophrenic or a toddler.

What's amazing is that over 15 years later some of these same games are still popping. Some of the same Ragnarok Online private servers I played in Middle School still have a Prontera littered with player vendors and wings. Maplestory has 2,200 players on Steam, and who knows how many players launch from the Nexon client. It's not nostalgia entirely but sentiment. You never fall completely out of love with the one that popped your cherry.

Back then MapleStory was fun for a week tops, but it was too hard-core for my kind of grind. I knew I was mortal when I met a friend's brother. We were in high school, he was in middle school, his eyes never left the XP bar even when we stumbled through the house to watch Oldboy in my friends room. He grinded out max level with original Maplestory XP rates. Those were the years when gods still walked the earth. Think he's an engineer now.
I preferred to hack MapleStory. Go to some unused map, gravity pull every mob into a corner, and wack away with a macro. Come back two hours later and your character was one tenth of the way to being worth selling on eBay. I got banned every time. Now I level au naturale. Today, it's easier to level to 200 than it is to hack.

To keep my brain from sliding out the back of my skull, for every level after 130 I read a chapter from War & Peace (they're short). This is probably the first and only time Tolstoy and Maplestory will share space. Both are a long journey that starts out quick and then slows and meanders and takes you across its world and by the end of the journey you feel like you've lived there. Yes I've lived in MapleStory, and now I'm typing this while laying on the floor because my spine is killing me from living.

What I appreciate about MapleStory is that there's no deceit. You're not playing for the end game—none of the "end game is the real game" BS. The end game looks like the beginning: eye popping everything on your screen until you ding. A gameplay loop for salt of the earth honest folk. What changes is for how long you kill the same monsters. By the end, its hours. And you better not kill the flow by getting killed.

What is it about grinding? A repetitive behavior for small gains. Attention is tunnel visioned and nothing exists beyond the screen, except for annoyances that disturb the rhythm. You don't kill time, you murder it with each jellied slime.

What grinding promises is progress, slow, incremental, yes, but progress: what life beyond the screen pretends to promise. A game like MapleStory gives progress for the simple sacrifice of time. You may not rise to the top in a skill based PVP game but you will reach max level given enough sacrifice—and sitting at the top is its own reward. As life fails to live up to the expectations promised by blue ribbons and motivational quotes from your aunt on Facebook, the MMO seduces. Turn off your brain and grind and you'll make something of yourself within a new world. No wonder during the height of COVID I went back to WoW and then ruined my back playing Valheim. The grind is its own reward.
My friend jokes that jails should remove the basketball courts and the bench presses and replace them with computer labs and high fructose corn syrup diets, force the murderers to grind MapleStory as part of rehabilitation. They'll get fat and docile and replace heroin with leveling—which one is worse? The warden could sell the gold on the black market. Finally, America will have Justice.

The crime I'm guilty of is forgetting what leveling becomes.
Right about 175 the pain sets in. This is the last stretch. I know because my abilities are so flashy I lose track of where my character is on the screen. But I'm a simple man. I don't follow my character, I follow the pattern. I kill tree stumps for four hours, like it's a triathlon or a mud run.

Are older games better? Who knows. Everybody fetishizes their past so a value judgment is impossible for anyone but yourself: the past always seems better because at least it has the dignity of being over. The game may or may not be better but the memories are, they seeming to take on more reality despite each MMO breaking down to the same generic formula of grinding and leveling. The experience was richer because it was still capable of mystery, play wasn't min/maxed on steroids and friends were still resources for how to do X or Y. Discovery is always memorable; mapping is a footnote.

Can't make a new MMO, can you? I know people playing World of Warcraft Classic as you read this. Their RBG fans and their RBG keyboards and their RBG mouses lighting up the same loop they ran at 3am in the 9th grade. Twice as old, twice the same. Nothing changes—not really.

The whole mainstream gaming industry seems to be a C-team effort. The creative risk takers got bored or were told to shut up: "Papa Bobby CEO needs a new yacht." So all the smart people left the industry not for new worlds but new ideas: AR and VR and smart cars, NFTs—God, now's your chance to blow the horn and intervene. The group project that's run by the kid with a C gets a C—and Cs get degrees.

You can always bet on MapleStory being around in a year. Can't say the same for New World.

And that's it. That's the bet, I've hit 200. There are 100 more levels to go but I'm not crazy. I'm free. Another year comes to an end: next year's bet is that I won't have to play Maplestory—I'll try whatever new class comes out. But for now, I can finally flex my new graphics card with a ray tracing racing game, ultra settings, HDR, DLSS—all the fixings I've seen GTAV modders gush about. Maybe I'll start a career as a GTAV mod YouTuber.

But then again, this Ragnarok Online private server is pretty popular. I'll just take a peak, grind out a few levels—I forgot how good the music is.

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From Mega Man II to Ape Escape, I've been playing games for as long as I can remember. I've spent months killing porings in Ragnarok Online and more recently lived a second life in Eve Online. I usually play as gUMBY, gUMBLEoni, or gUMBLes in-game.