There are games that break from the typical player versus player nature of online multiplayer by offering virtual worlds for people to live in, and one YouTuber has found a spot in an otherwise 'dead' game owned by a 78-year-old woman.
When you ask most people what they first think of when asked about multiplayer gaming they'd typically refer to the shootouts of Call of Duty or virtual sports showdowns in EA FC or NBA 2K, but there exists bustling communities in the online world who log on simply to exist.
Perhaps not far from the 'Metaverse' dream that Mark Zuckerberg has spent billions failing to achieve, games like Second Life and VR Chat give people a space to play out their digital lives with an avatar, often creating virtual worlds where they can visit their friends and hold events.
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One YouTuber took it upon themselves to explore these worlds - many of which exist in games that are considered 'dead' due to their lower player counts - and found a fascinating discovery that has now drawn the attention of social media.
What did the YouTuber find in a dead game?
Gaming content creator Redlyne is known for his 'Exploring Dead Games' series, and in its fifth edition he ventured into Sinespace, a free-to-play MMO where users can buy and sell 3D content, avatars, and land.
The game was released in 2016 and is still supported by its developer, yet it's not exactly super popular when you look at the available servers. This makes it easy for someone like Redlyne to jump into a random zone that likely won't be populated, but in doing so he stumbled onto something incredible.
He performed a 'Hail Mary' of sorts by teleporting to a random user called ArcticRose in the hope that they would be somewhere interesting, but found himself in a strange and barren location called 'Club USA'.
This world featured a replace of the White House, seemingly complete with a recreation of an assassination outside, and a white picket fence suburb in the neighboring area.
At the time at which he had teleported there was just a single player in the world, the aforementioned ArcticRose, and they appeared to be the creator and owner, so he got speaking to them.
ArcticRose soon revealed that she was a 78-year-old woman, who had owned the server for around 6 years at this point and keeps it alive with her small but close-knit group of online friends she equates to a family.
"This place was flat grass when I bought it from the shop," she explained, "and everything that's here, I put here because I like to build."
She added Redlyne as a friend and said she hoped to see him again in the future, and he asked the question that everyone was waiting for: How many people actually visited this world?
"The events can have anywhere from five people to 12," ArcticRose revealed. "We haven't grown that much in 6 years. We're kind of a small community."
While that might seem strange from a gaming sense, it's technically not that far removed from having a group chat of your friends either from the online world or in real life, only instead of chatting on WhatsApp you meet in a world curated by each other.
More people then began to join the world, presumably ArcticRose's friends, so Redlyne decided that this was the right time to head out and let them catch up with each other, but he urged his viewers to remain kind and respectful if they decided to head into Club USA themselves.