The server was called Eldoria. It wasn't a good name. It wasn't a bad name either. It was just a name, the kind of name you get when you ask three marketing people in a San Francisco office to come up with something that sounds fantasy-adjacent without being too fantasy-adjacent. Michael Rafferty didn't think about the name much. He thought about the character he'd made, a level three mercenary named Mick who wore chainmail that looked like it had been made by someone who'd seen a picture of chainmail but never actually touched any.

It was a Tuesday in March and Michael was thirty-nine years old and had been unemployed for eleven months and his wife had left him four months before that and he was sitting in his mother's basement in Dayton, Ohio, playing a video game because the alternative was sitting in his mother's basement not playing a video game and doing nothing at all.

The game world loaded with that particular blend of mediocre graphics and optimistic sound design that characterized every MMORPG in the mid-2000s. Michael's character, Mick, appeared in the starting town, a generic medieval village with cobblestone streets and NPCs selling potions and quest scrolls. Michael stood there for a moment, looking around, and then walked toward the quest board.

He was not alone in this. Across the screen, other players walked past his character in various states of digital armor—some clad in ornate plate mail that shimmered with particle effects, some in leather armor that seemed designed primarily to cover as little as possible, most in a kind of utilitarian grey tunic that was the visual equivalent of a parking lot.

The others had been waiting for him. Or rather, they had been waiting in the town square, which in game terms meant they were standing in the same coordinate space and their names appeared above their heads in colored text.

Jerry's character was a wizard named Jareth the Wise, though he looked about as wise as a man who spent more time crafting leather armor than studying spellbooks. Dave's character was a warrior called Battlecrag, which was exactly the sort of name a man named Dave would give his character when he was forty-two and working in insurance and had not aged well. And Kevin's character was a rogue called Shadowstep, which was the sort of name a man gave his character when he was twenty-three and still believed in the romantic potential of nighttime burglary.

"You here," Dave said through the voice chat, and Michael could hear his mother's television in the background—the same television, probably, that Michael had heard every day for the eleven months he'd been living in his mother's basement.

"Yeah," Michael said. "I'm here."

"Finally. We've been waiting twenty minutes."

"I told you I'd be here. I said seven."

"It's seven-oh-three."

"Close enough."

They were all close enough. That was the thing about this group. None of them were exact. Jerry had been fired from his job at the car dealership six months ago and was now selling used cars part-time for commission that never came. Dave had been passed over for a promotion he'd wanted for twelve years and had responded by quitting his job and spending three weeks applying for jobs he was overqualified for and underqualified for in equal measure. Kevin was still living with his parents in Dublin, Ohio, which was a different Dublin from the one in Ireland but not by much, and he played this game every Tuesday and Thursday night because it was the only thing in his life that he was good at.

And Michael. Michael had been a project manager at a logistics company for sixteen years, which was a fancy way of saying he spent his days making sure things that belonged to other people arrived at the right time, and then one day the company had decided that sixteen years of loyalty was worth four weeks of severance pay, and Michael had walked out of his office with a cardboard box containing a stapler and a picture of his family that he no longer had because his family had decided, collectively and without consultation, that he was no longer part of it.

"Quest board," Jerry said. "Let's see what we got."

Michael navigated Mick toward the quest board, a wooden post with paper notices pinned to it. He scrolled through them with the practiced indifference of a man who had read these same quests forty times or more. Kill rats in the cellar. Deliver the letter. Find my cat. Kill fifty wolves—the wolves, specifically, not just any monsters, wolves.

"Nothing good," Michael said.

"Nothing's ever good," Dave said. "That's the thing about this game. It's not World of Warcraft. It's not even Runescape. It's something you download from a website called GameVault dot com and it runs on a computer that's ten years old and the developers stopped updating it eighteen months ago."

"But it's free," Kevin said. And it was. That was the entire point. It was free, and it was there, and it was something to do on a Tuesday night when the alternative was watching the same reruns of the same shows on the same channels that had been running the same shows for the last twenty years.

They took a quest. It involved traveling from the starting town to a nearby village called Oakhaven, which was three clicks away in game time and required passing through a forest that was populated by low-level wolves and one or two bears that would kill a level three mercenary in approximately two seconds. Michael had learned this lesson in his first week and had developed a healthy respect for bears ever since.

The journey through the forest was silent except for the ambient sound design—birds chirping, wind rustling leaves, the occasional wolf howl that was sampled from the same recording used in every forest scene in every game ever made. Michael's character walked behind Battlecrag, who walked behind Jareth, who walked behind Shadowstep, and Michael thought about whether this was what his life looked like from the outside: four men walking in a line through a digital forest, each one following the one in front, none of them leading, all of them going nowhere fast.

"Hey," Jerry said. "Did you know there's a hidden area past the wolf den? I found it by accident. You fall through the map and there's this little cave with a chest in it."

"Really?" Michael said, and he meant it. Hidden areas were the only thing in this game that felt like discovery, like something real happening in a world that was fundamentally unreal.

"Yeah. But it's nothing special. Just some gold and a sword that's slightly better than the one you have."

"Sounds amazing," Dave said, and Michael could hear the sarcasm but also the longing. Somewhere beneath the sarcasm was a man who wanted to find hidden areas and discover secret treasures and feel the small, electric thrill of finding something that other people didn't know about.

They reached Oakhaven. The village was a collection of five buildings and twelve NPCs and a blacksmith who offered the same quest every time you talked to him. They turned in the quest, collected the rewards (three gold pieces and a healing potion that restored seventeen health points), and stood in the village square while the sun set in the game world, painting the sky in shades of orange and pink that were the most beautiful thing the game had ever rendered.

"Same time next week?" Kevin asked.

"Yeah," Michael said. "Same time."

They logged off one by one. Michael watched his friends' characters disappear from the square, one by one, until he was the only one left, standing in a digital village square at sunset, and then he too logged off and sat in his mother's basement with the television still running and the silence still present and the eleven months of his life that he would never get back, sitting quietly beside him on the couch, not speaking, not demanding anything, just being there.

He turned off the computer. He went upstairs. He sat in his mother's living room and watched a baseball game he didn't care about and ate a piece of toast his mother put on a plate in front of him without saying anything, which was the kindest thing she could have done and the saddest thing she could have done and he couldn't tell which.

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