Everyone around my age has an online multiplayer game that they played (or still play) all throughout their childhood, and even into adulthood should it be (un)lucky enough to last that long. It may not be the most entertaining, but you most likely have stuck to it all these years for a myriad of reasons. Some of us have spent too much on microtransactions to completely divest yourself from it no matter how predatory the practice became; some of us were too attached to the community and/or friend group to leave both them and the game behind; some of us just really enjoyed the gameplay and got too good at it to devote more time into other, maybe better games. Whatever the case may be, we have dedicated hundreds, if not thousands, of hours into it, and only through circumstances that we as players didn't consent to (say, end of service) have we stopped playing them. I call these games the Bildungsroman Games, or games that have inadvertently affected how we view the world due to how much time we have spent in them during our formative years.
Alliance of Valiant Arms, or AVA for short, is my Bildungsroman Game. From 2009 to its shutdown in 2018, I have played this game for many hours nearly every day, and I would like to share my experience and how it affected my view on life as an adult. This part will just be an introduction to the game and its core aspects. Future parts are going to focus on single topics pertaining to the game.
AVA's closed beta was in 2007, but it was released in North America, Europe, and South America in 2009 through the Free-to-Play game publisher ijji. It is a first-person shooter the likes of Counter-Strike and the core game modes were Demolition (search & destroy, bomb equivalents), Escort (attackers have to escort a tank through the map with various checkpoints) and Annihilation (TDM). Eventually, the game would provide more game modes such as the unique PvE co-op mode complete with in-game lore and unique completion rewards, zombie mode, extraction (take objective in the middle of the map as attacker and escape by reaching defender base), , and even a Battle Royale mode. ijji would merge with a German F2P publisher aeriagames with only a handful of ijji's titles continuing service, and aeriagames would send AVA off to Enmasse Games where the game as I knew it ended. After its end-of-service, the game's developer RedDuck tried to revive it under the name AVA: DogTag by self-publishing it under Steam where it didn't make it out of closed beta. RedDuck would try again with another South Korean developer Dragonfly Games and re-released the current AVA on Steam that you can still play today.
I remember seeing AVA in a PCGamer magazine. The cover of that issue featured an EU soldier (loose lore of AVA is that the Neo-Russian Federation invades EU-aligned Europe) armed with a G3A3 glaring at the reader, and the headline was "AVA: The Free to Play Call of Duty 4 Killer?" It looked very promising: the game was created in Unreal Engine 3 and looked better than retail games, the weapons were shiny and cool, and it screamed modernity. At the time, I was heavily into another FPS that ijji hosted called Soldier Front, which was essentially a CS 1.6 clone that had a hardcap of 32fps and looked terrible even with a graphics overhaul. My church friends were very competitive with Soldier Front, but AVA did not interest them. By the time AVA was fully released, I was the only person in my church youth group who played it.
I was always the youngest person when it involved any Korean social situations. I was the youngest cousin in my mom's side, who I interacted the most with when I lived in South Korea. When I went to the church in Ohio, I was the youngest kid in the youth group who weren't infants. We played all the same videogames after church when we hung out, and I just tagged along with everyone else. Me choosing to play AVA instead of the dying Soldier Front in 2009 was a point in which I suppose my sense of independence started to form. I was starting to become "not like the others," and AVA was also at the time, a game that was "not like the others."
For that, I think it's best to stop it here and get more into it in part 2, where I will talk about its mechanics and skill involved to be okay at the game, and how that ties into adapting into a completely new environment both in-game and in real life as an immigrant. Thanks for reading this part all the way through :)