After the experience we had traveling through Europe with teenagers, it’s probably a wonder I ever left my house with them again. But I did, because I love them, and because we had planned this trip too far in advance to cancel. So, about two weeks after we got home, we boarded a plane. This time, however, we stayed domestic . . . sort of. We headed to Vegas for a long weekend celebrating one of our favorite destinations: Eorzea. Never heard of it? That’s okay, because it’s not a physical location.

Eorzea is the name of the main land mass inhabited by characters in the video game Final Fantasy XIV (FF14), a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) created by Square Enix. We flew to Vegas to attend their fan convention celebrating the new game expansion that will be released in Summer of 2024. We had been to a previous convention in 2018 and loved it, but the convention after that had been cancelled because of Covid. So this was the first time in five years the fans were able to get together, in person, to celebrate a game we love.

Though we’ve only been playing Final Fantasy XIV for about ten years, my husband and my history with the series of games began in the early 90s, when we were still dating. Not all fourteen of the games were released for the U.S. in English, but we played Final Fantasy III, IV, VII, IX, X, and XIII on a variety of consoles (mostly incarnations of the Sony Playstation).

These, along with games from the Legend of Zelda series, were how we’d spend our joint leisure time during college/graduate school for me and medical school/internship/residency for him. I loved escaping with him to these beautiful and bucolic fantasy worlds where we’d become the hero who would save the day.

These were all, however, console games. We’d put in a cartridge or a CD or a DVD and it was just my husband and I in the game, figuring out the puzzles and planning strategy. In contrast, FF14 is an online game, and it took us a little bit of courage to take a step into that world. We had heard of MMORPGs before, most famously World of Warcraft and Everquest (even the Final Fantasy folks developed XI, which one can still play today). We avoided them all like the plague for years for a variety of reasons: they seemed too time-intensive for people in graduate education, they required a subscription fee which just wasn’t in the budget, and most of all because *gasp* we would have to interact with real people. On the Internet. Who were strangers. We had enough social pressure to deal with on the day-to-day. We didn’t need it in our down time.

On New Year’s Eve of 2014, all of that changed. I had just gotten my husband a Playstation 4 for Christmas, and one of the big draws was this new Final Fantasy game. Our kids were in 4th and 2nd grade, so the hard work of small-child-tending was over, and since the game was rated for teens, we figured they could be part of the fun as long as they were well-supervised. So, we joined the game and created our avatar as a family. Since three of us were definite girly-girls, and my husband had no way of fighting us, we decided the character would be a pink-haired kitty girl. We named her “Gracie Blessing” after our new kittens, Grace and Blessing. We decided to play as a magic user, and thus entered Eorzea–a world where we have spent way more hours than I want to admit to over the past almost-ten years.

The question so many people ask us at this point in our story is: Why? Why do we choose to spend our time in a game? We could be doing so many other things–traveling, learning a language, volunteering, exercising, reading books, watching movies, writing, creating, being out and about with people. And my answer: we do all of those things in real life, too, but we also do a lot of. them all in Eorzea.

Final Fantasy XIV is not a game the way PacMan and Donkey Kong and Candy Crush are games. There aren’t levels to clear. The play is not repetitive. It also doesn’t get progressively harder unless a player wants it to. There are stories of people who play Final Fantasy XIV in their multi-generational homes, whose parents see them playing and fall in love with one aspect of the game–crafting, or gathering, or playing Mah Jong–and get online to play for that reason. There are folks who love to really role-play, creating online personas and playing as that persona all the time. There are players who want the challenge of really advanced, hard, game-fighting content which involves both strategy and dexterity. And then there are players who love the story, like to casually play while they chat with friends, and unwind by running a character through some really beautiful settings. That’s me and my husband.

To be honest, in earlier Final Fantasy games–the ones on console–the story aspect was kind of hit-or-miss. They would start out strong, but by the last quarter of the game I could tell that Square must have run out its translation budget because the story became harder and harder to understand. Most stories in those console games had to do with a hero who doesn’t know who he is, or where he comes from, figuring out he has some kind of tragic backstory that brought him to this place where he has to save the world. My husband and I would wait for the line that read something like, “Who am I? Who are my parents?” It became an inside joke for us any time something was getting repetitive or unclear.

Final Fantasy XIV‘s story is different. It is essentially a five-book-long series (about to be six), combining reading, movies, interpersonal interactions, and creative activities (like decorating a house and making furnishings). There are so many different types of characters in the game that in some ways we do learn new languages (there is one group of creatures who speak entirely in synonyms. It has done wonders for my girls’ vocabulary skills). And the story–oh the story! It has made me laugh, cheer, fall in love, and openly weep. We adventure, we love, we lose, we move on–and to me, the central question the game is trying to answer is: What is life’s’s purpose? And its answer: to serve, to love, to live, and to do what we can to make the lives around us better. And also, yeah, to imagine ourselves in beautiful spaces where we look really cool.

And so this is why we so often visit Eorzea and spend so much time there–the same reasons people go to movies, read books, learn languages, travel, create, and go out with friends. We explore what it is to be alive, to ponder the big questions with like-minded people, to think, to love, to serve, and to make the lives around us better. And then, sometimes, we take that virtual world and try to bring it into the real one in our jobs, our hobbies, and our face-to-face interactions with others. This game, like so many (and unlike so many others), has the promise to make us into better people. And we celebrated that in Las Vegas.

The Square convention planners had great ideas. They tried to re-create six different areas of the game in real space, with real people, giving convention attendees live-action quests in areas of the convention center where we had to solve puzzles. Six different spaces fans could go to play games, take photos, and simply pretend to be in the game.

Not only did we have a blast taking photos in a virtual world become real, we made sure to meet up with our online friends for a variety of breakfasts and dinners. In the past almost ten years these people who live as far away as Australia and as near as one hour from home have become real, tried-and-true friends. My husband and I never pretended to be anyone but who we are in game–two busy adults, with two sweet kids, who play the game to unwind. We have talked with our online friends about real life almost as often as we talked about game life. And so in Vegas we reveled in the chance to meet each other face-to-face, rather than avatar-to-avatar. It brought the game to a whole other level. Even the kids had a blast interacting with folks dressed up as characters, interacting with the online-based environments, playing new parts of the game, and meeting people who they grew up talking to online.

Granted, the trip had its downsides, as well. If we thought Rome was hot at 107 degrees, in Vegas it reached 114. Standing outside in a breeze felt like being in front of an enormous hairdryer. Within 60 seconds of being outside we’d be desperately thirsty. On the bright side, every place had air conditioning, but in the convention center it got so cold we’d have to go outside (albeit for 60 seconds) to get warm. The convention center really didn’t have the best food choices, so we were either sick to our stomachs or starving for a good portion of the convention program. And on top of that, the youngest and I caught Covid, which manifested after we returned from the trip just in time for the start of school.

None of that would have happened if we’d kept Eorzea virtual instead of visiting it in Vegas.

But in the end, just like our trip to Europe, it was absolutely worth it. We have lived through so much real life shunted into virtual spaces (Zoom meetings, anyone?), it was a joy to move something virtual into face-to-face spaces. At least it was for an extrovert like me. And while, as in Europe, I could have done without the heat, the illness, and the discomfort of different surroundings, it is an experience I will never forget–and one that I probably will try to repeat in two years time, when the next expansion is in development.