In the scrubby wilderness of the Texas hill country in the late 1920s, a new genre of fiction was invented by a moody young man who must have been as out of place in his time and culture as any human being in history. In a God-fearing community that had been a wild west frontier within living memory, Robert Ervin Howard wove the skeins of old Anglo Saxon legend into a 20^th Century fable of defiance, where the cunning of native wisdom and brute strength always triumphs over the decadent wiles of civilization.

Stories in the genre he invented are postmodern hero sagas, nihilistic myths. The common name for them is Sword and Sorcery. Along with JRR Tolkien’s work, Howard’s fiction has become a staple of modern popular entertainment, especially in the fields of roleplaying and computer games. He has influenced generations of writers.

Howard's stories are brutal, the women barely dressed (yet often as powerful as the men), and the heroes insanely violent but true to their own codes of barbaric nobility. His best known creation is Conan the Barbarian, whose adventures have seduced generations of readers since the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales pulp magazine where he first appeared. Conan was an instant success with pulp readers and Howard joined H.P. Lovecraft at the top of the dark fantasy pantheon.

Howard's stories are brutal, the women barely dressed (yet often as powerful as the men), and the heroes insanely violent but true to their own codes of barbaric nobility. His best known creation is Conan the Barbarian, whose adventures have seduced generations of readers since the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales pulp magazine where he first appeared. Conan was an instant success with pulp readers and Howard joined H.P. Lovecraft at the top of the dark fantasy pantheon

Conan enjoyed popularity aftershocks in the 1950s and 1960s, when paperback editions with covers by Frank Frazetta made an icon of the character and established an art style for Heavy Metal bands worldwide. The Marvel comic book series that began in 1970, most memorably drawn by Barry Windsor Smith, made Conan a hit with college-age baby boomers and led in time to the John Milius cinematic epic starring future governator Arnold Schwarzenegger. A later, more interesting film, by Michael Scott Myers, The Whole Wide World, from 1996, is based on a memoir of the author by Howard's girlfriend, Novalyne Price and tells the story of a few seasons in the young writer’s brief life.

Conan's latest incarnation is a game, a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG to the cognoscenti), called Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures (AoC to lazy reviewers).  Developed in Europe and released in America by Funcom, AoC is aiming to claim some portion of the multi-million person subscriber base of World of Warcraft (WoW to LR), the online fantasy world that reshaped computer gaming a couple of years back.

In AoC, the player takes the role of a man or woman shipwrecked on a hostile island ruled by a tyrant. After a short series of tutorial experiences, the player finds him or herself in a world populated by hundreds of other players with whom they interact, peacefully or otherwise, to fight monsters or each other, to make cities, and to create virtual societies.

If you have never played an MMORPG, some of what follows in part 2 of this article may seem a little alien to you. These games are little microcosms of behavioral psychology and a growing body of analytical literature is being written about them. They are fun, addictive, and sometimes maddening.

In part 2, I’ll take a look at how AoC is different from WoW and other games and how that difference is directly related to Robert E. Howard’s Nietzschean - Darwinian philosophy.