One Year of Sky: Children of the Light

Sometime last month…

Sky recently turned one year old. As usual, I’m late to the party. But Happy Belated Birthday, Sky!

This anniversary also means I have been playing it to varying degrees for a year. It is testament to the game that it can be used as a glorified instant messenger with beautiful backgrounds when flying around with friends, while still remaining fun to fly in by oneself after a year of life. While there is less of a sense of a momentum than in pilot wings, there is nevertheless the same visceral joy in just putting around in the sky; in fact, it plays something like a simplified cross between the Pilot Wings jet pack and glider.

But what has been most interesting in my year-long experience in playing Sky has been the community that it has fostered, and the monumental change in cosmopolitan attitudes that the internet has slowly developed that it epitomises; a change in internet culture that can be easy to miss for us capital-G Gamers due to how conservative many of us are; whether we subscribe to the puritanical attitudes of reactionaries or insomniacs.

In the MMOs of yore I played there were several stages of self-segregation: firstly players would divide themselves into groups based on spoken-language (understandable!), secondly into national groups, thirdly into age groups, with varying degrees of purity. For instance, people who spoke English as a second language were usually welcome in an English language group—as long as they never uttered a word from their first language! On the other hand, the more xenophobic national groups (such as Australians) would be sure to exclude certain first-language English speakers (anyone who wasn’t Australian).

Being pathetically monolingual, I can only speak for the English group in the MMORPGs I’ve played, but the most important aspect of fostering a group dynamic was to watch the chat for any group of people speaking a “foreign language”, then mock them in public from the make-believe safety that people whose first language wasn’t English were probably as pathetically monolingual as people whose first language it was. (I dare say this was motivated primarily by an inferiority complex!)

MMOs outside of MMORPGs were not nearly as bad. Gunbound, for instance, would have regular non-English conversations during matches and the opprobrium aimed at other languages by English speakers was usually limited to languages without Latinate alphabets. To be clear, I do not mean to imply that speakers of other languages were any less xenophobic than English speakers (though most were surely less xenophobic than Australians!); indeed, given how segregated most MMOs were, it stands to reason that they self-segregated as well.

Sky, on the other hand, is a kaleidoscope of languages. Language-based segregation still occurs, of course, but secondarily and certainly not as the core aspect of group dynamics. There is no shame in asking if other people in a chat speak your language, particularly if you don’t speak their language well (or at all), but you would look like a total piece of shit if you were to type the nicest, most polite form of English Supremacy of the prior generations of internet etiquette: “English only, please.”

This is where the rest of the internet comes in. Memes are the lifeblood of cosmopolitanism, which is why they are so important to Gamer conservatives: the reactionaries must subvert them, and the insomniacs must reduce them to being tools of extremist propagandists; ignoring to their own detriment how powerful humour can be in crossing cultural boundaries. True, as they claim, it is through humour that extreme viewpoints can most easily be normalised and propagated. But this is not a bad thing: it must be remembered that it was once an extremist position in MMOs to refrain from self-segregation! Contrary to the goldilocks morality of an imagined Ancient Greece from which we believe we have descended, an extreme position is only bad if the position itself is.

But I digress…

While the cosmopolitan players of Sky have maintained much of their own culture (the Americans and the Chinese know very little about Australia, the Canadians a lot, and the Indonesians most of all—though they don’t seem to realise that while they regard Australia as an amicable neighbour, Australians regard Indonesia as an existential threat; at least the Chinese are equally paranoid about their neighbours as Australians are!), there is an established etiquette that has grown out of memes which allows banter to be safely shared with anyone you can speak with no matter where they are from, and no matter their age! Where once there was little common ground for people of different ages in MMOs to relate to one another, memes have broken down another of the biggest forms of self-segregation humans like to arbitrarily apply to themselves in the present day: it’s possible to enjoy banter with a teenager from America, young adults from China and Croatia, and the elderly from England all at once through the universal etiquette of memes.

Some of them might not even speak the language you do themselves, but use a translator to speak with you anyway. To want to use an internet translator so you can speak to people who do not speak your own language in an online game is in and of itself a monumental sign of both technological and cultural progress!

And while Sky may deserve no credit for memes or the improvement in translation technology, the scarcity of conversation absolutely encourages people to be open to one another in a way that social media, chat rooms, and most videogame-based forms of promiscuous social interaction do not.