Royal Road, Making The World A Better Place

Adding to the game the feature of altering an avatars appearance wasn't easy and was the cause of many quarrels between the programmers and the creative teams. After many arguments and nearly fatal office pranks, both teams agreed to leave the decision to the games master A.I.

Since the A.I was programmed to have only the best intentions towards the game the creators decided to trust it. They gave it a few days to run whatever incredibly complex calculations it needed, making sure to keep it from overheating as it tried to predict every possible future of the game concerning the said feature and eventually the word "Implement" appeared on its main monitor. The programmers who were overjoyed decided to throw a party to celebrate the news. This party lasted a week, because, being very dedicated and now highly motivated programmers, after a few drinks most of them sat down to work on what they considered was a cool part of the games code. The others programmers soon joined them and together they had a coding marathon that was fueled by very cheap liquor and very expensive black caviar, given to them as a present by a very fat higher up.

When the programmers finally awoke from their drunken slumber they understood that they were a week behind schedule. In their hurry no-one bothered to check the lines of code they wrote and their drunken work was inputted into the game, thus successfully adding some of the best "easter eggs" and hidden secrets ever seen in video game history. Some say that it is these lines of code that made "Royal Road" what it is today.

Thanks to the programmers, who on average were worse looking than the creative minds behind the game and didn't want to bother with acne and a quickly reseeding hairline, players can alter the way they look inside the game.

When the game was first launched no-one new about this feature except for those who worked on the game. However a few months into the game, more and more people discovered the said feature and this discovery caused weird things to happen to the game play.

Suddenly almost all high level players had become gorgeous. Men and women, who looked better than most super models, were suddenly taking over the game. A sudden alienation was created of, so called, ugly players because of this. Parties no longer accepted bad looking players as they considered them to be "noobs" who didn't know anything about the game.

Nonetheless, the knowledge of this feature became wide spread making ugly players a very rare sight, most usually seen amongst beginners to the game. This caused an enormous amount of real-life misunderstandings and an astronomic rise in plastic surgeries. It seemed like the amount of bad blind-dates and the money in plastic surgeons bank accounts would continue to rise indefinitely.

More and more people were joining the game while the number of suicides amongst professional models was rising at an alarming rate.

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Thankfully, about half a year after the games launch, order was restored thanks to a player who named himself "Quasimodo".

This player chose to look, as his name suggested, like a deformed hunchback. He used the fact that others bullied ugly players, as they considered them weak, and would surprise them with his strength and high level skills. Many other players jumped on the bandwagon and used this method to level up their characters incredibly fast by beating unsuspecting players.

Soon enough no-one could no longer tell how strong a player was by his physical appearance. And so, with no need to hide what they looked like, most people changed their avatars to their real-life appearance. Although things like red, gold and different colored eyes, white hair, weird hair styles and strangely colored skin were still things players enjoyed to play around with.

Nowadays, a year into the game, there are numberless articles and studies that claim that "Royal Road" had managed to create a better world where people no longer judge others by their looks. There are also numberless articles and studies that say that the evolution from "survival of the strongest" to "survival of the smartest" to, what now seems to be, "survival of those who have the most free-time on their hands" will bring an end to the human race. More so, they also claim that by focusing entirely on the gaming aspect of technology man-kind has brought itself to a halt.

Since "Royal Road" is considered, by some of the greatest minds in the world, to be the perfect game, there are those who say that no future progress will be made in the field as no future progress can be made. Because the game is the perfect game, all possible progress has been made which means than future progress is impossible as there is nothing to progress.

However this could be an excuse by those who are supposed to be making future progress and much rather play the game instead.

A golden age began in "Royal Road" where physical looks didn't matter and stereotypes were demolished.

A world where fame inside a game corresponded to your fame in real-life and where commercials use avatars of high level players instead of professional models. Yet most importantly, and some claim this had the greatest impact on why the world is becoming a nicer place with no more wars and almost no crime, grandfathers and grandmothers could now smack around their grandchildren and if needed defeat them in a sword-fight on occasions where the grandchildren misbehaved or said something rood.

Still, one problem remained, and that was that in many players, an almost irrational fear of facial pimples was left. But hopefully, as more and more elderly folk start playing "Royal Road" this too will eventually be corrected and no longer will strong players cower at the sight of acute acne. "The Royal Post", January 22, 2037.

Daniel N. Amerson.