Chapter 3: The Rule of Productivity and the Fear of Transgression

Abstract

Regicide, it appears, is the ultimate crime in real-world monarchies, thus warranting capital punishment (Foucault [1975] 1977: 12). The same holds true for digital, ludic monarchies. Of all video game monarchies, none saw more regicide attempts than Britannia—the fictional, high-fantasy country in the long-running role-playing game series Ultima (Origin Systems/Electronic Arts 1981–1999). The reasons for this were twofold. Firstly, the ruler of Britannia, Lord British, was always conceptualized as the alter ego of the series’s creator, Richard Garriott (cf. “Inside Ultima IV” 1986). With Lord British appearing in every installment of the series, his presence was a challenge for players, a chance to hurt the symbolic stand-in for the game’s creator. Secondly, the challenge of killing Lord British was always situated in the rules of the games. He was simply very hard to kill in each installment of Ultima, so figuring out a way around his elevated hit points or various invulnerabilities became part of the fun of playing the game for some players (cf. “Killing Lord British” [2009] 2019). All of this contributed to the most well-known case of regicide in the history of the Ultima series, which also demonstrates the element of uncertainty that is at the core of games. Shortly before Ultima Online—the massively multiplayer online game (MMO) in the Ultima series—was set to launch in August 1997, the developers attempted a stress test on their servers (Olivetti 2015).1 They encouraged players to log on during that time to check whether the game’s infrastructure was capable of handling large numbers of players at the same time. To increase participation in the test, Richard Garriott announced that he would be present in-game as Lord British, which offered players the chance to meet their world’s creator as a character directly controlled by Garriott. Since Ultima Online was famous for its fairly loose set of rules, which allowed players to rob or kill each other at all times, the developers usually protected their own characters through an administrative command