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 20th 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.

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.Age of Conan is fun, beautifully detailed and, as of this writing, it suffers from the launch pains that any cutting edge game is likely to experience. It is also the first MMORPG aimed at a huge audience that has proclaimed itself as mature entertainment.

Second Life, one of the best known online "worlds," has gone a good deal further with its adult elements, but Second Life is not really a game, more like a massively creative group sandbox. There are other "games" on the Internet that involve open sexuality, but these are either amateurish or  just chat rooms with triple X graphics.



AoC is the first game to incorporate sexuality into its actual game play, albeit in a limited way. The game is also far more violent than World of Warcraft or the other commercial giants in the field. Blood splashes extravagantly when you hit an enemy, sometimes even splotching your screen in a fourth wall-breaking gush of crimson. Some of the quests involve mature themes, such as recovering the narcotic stash of an addicted pleasure girl (think Grand Theft Auto: Cimmerian Rampage) or collecting the testicles of a foe. Bare breasts are rendered in graphic detail, though the programmers stopped short of male or female genitalia, and they have not, as yet, added animated "emotes" for sexual situations. 

Apart from graphic graphics, AoC has taken an even bolder step toward replicating Howard's universe. Since their inception, MMORPGs have struggled with the issue of player-killing (PKing). Millions of words have been written in debate over how to deal with the fact that some players bitterly resent having their in-game character, or avatar, targeted and killed by another player.  It?s a huge issue for people who play these games and the two "playstyles," pro and anti-Player Vs. Player (PVP) often do not mix well.

AoC has accommodated players who do not like PKing by creating a version of the game where PKing is severely limited -- essentially to cases where players voluntarily enter into fights where they can be killed -- but the game's core design, where the product is making its mark, is on its PVP servers, where there are very few rules or restrictions to prevent one player from savaging another. This type of unrestricted PVP is unique among the current MMOs and FunCom is taking a chance with its approach, essentially a brutal free-for-all where only the strong and cunning will survive. I think if Bob Howard were alive today, he would probably approve of this design, at least in theory. In Howard?s view, the natural state of mankind was barbarism and the further society ventured from its dark Eden, the more decadent and ineffectual the outcome.

Sadly, similar past game design experiments have not ended well. The world of online gaming is plagued with smart and ruthless youngsters, quick to cheat for advantage and to exploit any design "feature" that offers a chance to advance their own status or, sometimes, simply to bedevil other players. "Griefers" are players who play for the fun of ruining other players' games. Generally, the more opportunity a player has to affect another player's online experience, the greater the chances of rampant griefing. To be fair, the majority of players who want a wide-open PVP environment will not cheat and are certainly not griefers, but the environment attracts some of the more anti-social elements of the online world.

So, I have to wonder what Howard would think of his universe as it has been created in cyberspace and as it is likely to evolve. If the hackers, scripters, and ruthless killer kiddies prevail here, will it prove his philosophy? Or disprove it? Are these hyperactive outlaws on the digital frontier the new barbarians? Or are they the product of the effete civilization that Conan and his creator scorned, kids with too much leisure time and a scarcity of real threats in their lives?

As for me, a player without a lot of time to play and attain the superiority needed to compete with red-taloned PKs, I'm taking no chances and I'll be finding my virtual destiny mostly on the non-PVP servers. But I'll definitely be keeping an eye on the savage land, because that's where the more interesting stories are likely to be told.