tuesday's child

Fantage and the Lost Art of Virtual Worlds.

MMORPGs, or massively multiplayer online role-playing games, were peak back in the early 2010s. Everyone I knew played at least one of these insanely fun games. MMORPGs usually consisted of amazing character customization, weird culture and language, and questionable relationships between players.

You've probably heard about 3 or 4 of those above. There were many, many more, but these are just one ones I played.

Fantage, though, was special.

Fantage World Map

Created in 2008, Fantage was the most addicting out of all of these games because it felt very close to real life. I was introduced to it through my sister, who played under a username under an iteration of "Jazmine_Blue", after Corbin Blue, from High School Musical. My name was "sam246821" not even close to my real name, but it was a name I was obsessed with at the time. My avatar looked...somewhat like me:

The Fantage Login Page

I found a collection of very short videos I'd recorded of myself playing Fantage in 2013, which is the source the screenshots.

I owned hundreds of clothes, something normal for an extremely active player. However, I did not have a premium membership, which could unlock more clothing and furniture options, as well as more housing and pet options. My House was super cute though:

My house

Fantage felt like a big city. While playing, I felt like I was in New York (crazy, i know). But there were fashion shows, games, a beach, a carnival, even a secret mission, similar to Club Penguin.

I had an in-game "boyfriend" whom I rarely saw because he was from Australia. His name was "Beck549". Sometimes I feel like searching for him on the Fantage subreddit, but it seems to be mostly women/female character players on there. Plus, our relationship just consisted of me taking him to the photo booth.

a snippet of my in-game photo album

In modern times, the popularity of games like Roblox and VRchat prove that people still love MMORPGs. the difference with modern games is that they are much less contained and rely on players for content and, at times, moderation. With VRchat and Roblox, these worlds are created by players, which spreads the population across many different servers with different goals, purposes, and audiences. This is part of the reason more predators are able to get away with grooming children on these platforms; they can create their own servers or games with subtle signs that attract younger players.

Fantage would not let new accounts chat freely at first. If they suspected you were extremely young, or if you tried to talk about topics a child should not be discussing, your account would be restricted. In that case, you could only use pre-determined words and phrases created by the game, also known as “Safe Chat.” Fantage.com, Inc was soo good in fact, they won awards for their safety.

You don't hear of people getting groomed on Fantage because the creators knew their audience and prioritized child safety, something Roblox fails to do despite having a user base with the exact same age range as Fantage did. Many of us older gen Z are on there too for nostalgia reasons. Because of that, Roblox must pay more attention to their moderation.

Fantage marked the end of an era that worked towards child safety on the vast internet. Nowadays, all MMORPG games that have young audiences don't seem to care much about anything besides money.

#thoughts