By default, in basically every MMORPG, your character is an eager co-worker in your objectives. You press W to go forward, and your character begins doing a steady half-jog half-run toward whatever is directly forward, which may very well be a wall, and she will not stop or slow down as you moosh her against the wall. You’re just mooshing her face-first into the wall, but she is in it to win it, and she is gonna get mooshed into the wall. Why are you doing this? What kind of monster are you? Are you the kind of heartless creature who flips that tortoise over like in Blade Runner? Dude!

Anyway, basically ever MMORPG has also offered players some form of alternative movement when your default-speed power jog just isn’t up to the task. So today, I am paying tribute to all of the many ways that MMORPGs have encouraged people to move, from the days of Ultima Online straight to the present. Now, you might be wondering how this matters or what it says about games as a whole, and to that I say, let’s get to the first entry!

1. Running

Instead of just the usual fixed-speed jog, there’s always the option to really book it for a little while. This can take the form of dashing, sprinting, hustling, or explicitly running. Some games, such as The Secret World, force you to use a no-cost personal ability to always move just a little faster even though there’s never a reason to turn it off, making its very existence a complete waste of time. Other games, like World of Warcraft, let only certain characters do it. Rogues can sprint, sure, but every other class just looks at the Rogue using his “move faster” ability by running and thinks, “Well, there’s no way I can do that, just gotta be built different.”

2. Jumping

In some earlier MMORPGs, jumping was not something you could do because games weren’t really programmed with a functional Z-axis, but these days jumping is a whole thing. And eventually you get jumping puzzles and people jumping on mailboxes and just standing around jumping in place because it’s easier to communicate via /jump than actually talking. Or you level Dragoon. Nobody wins!

3. Mounted travel

Imagine the first human who saw a horse and said, “I bet I can ride on that thing.” Imagine the first horse that suddenly had a human on his back saying, “Go over there,” and then being the horse that said, “Well, fine, I guess this is my life now.” The importance of figuring out how to horse your way through the world cannot be overstated in human history. Of course, MMOs don’t stop with horses; my character can ride motorcycles, giant birds, alligators, dragons, ancient robots, and even a floating egg. And those aren’t even the weird ones!

4. Boats

Now, in some games and certain circumstances, boats can work very much like mounts. That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about cases where you step onto a shared form of travel with other people and you all ride the boat or airship or train or whatever. It’s public transit!

This is also a convention that has somehow become less common over the years; like, it feels like shared boat rides just aren’t as much of a thing any more. Less need for everyone to stand on a boat, I guess.

5. Walking

You’d think that every game lets you do this, but not all of them do! Some games explicitly do not let you just walk around. You either run or you stand still. This has always felt weird to me, but even City of Heroes didn’t launch with the ability to toggle on a walking animation. Now, in fairness, there are very few actual gameplay situations in which just walking from place to place is advantageous or adds something new mechanically, but it does help for roleplaying and just general verisimilitude. Real people walk places. It’s even our default mode of travel!

6. Teleporting

This really covers a whole lot of different forms of fast travel. In some games, this is explicitly referred to as teleportation. How do you teleport across the world in Final Fantasy XIV? Through the use of teleportation magic. By contrast, traveling to fast travel points in Guild Wars 2 isn’t really called teleportation most of the time, and in my mind both that game and its predecessor have used fast travel as a sort of catch-all header for “it doesn’t matter how your character gets there diegetically, it’s just quick and nothing interesting happened along the way.” In practical terms, though, you’re going from place A to place B with minimal time, and that’s functionally teleporting. Like what everyone can apparently do for no reason in later season of Game of Thrones, I guess?

7. Flying

There’s something just definitional about being able to fly. Some of this is probably that it’s the hardest feeling out of usual travel forms to replicate while still feeling like something. Like, in real life you can run or ride a horse or a boat, and you can’t teleport, but teleporting just feels like “oh, I’m here now,” so it’s not really notable. Flight, though, is something we can imagine being able to do but cannot really accomplish beyond, like, owning a helicopter. Plus, it makes jumping look like a sucker’s game, so that’s fun too.

8. Travel powers

You might argue that technically flying can fall under the same header as travel powers (it certainly does in terms of CoH), but here I’m actually referring to a broader suite of abilities that let you travel in a non-conventional fashion, from super-jumping to super-running to super-digging-underground-and-tunneling-like-you-are-Bugs-Bunny. A whole suite of weird ways to get from point A to point B – because if your MMORPG doesn’t let me super-pogo my way across a map, what are you even doing with your game design?

Making something internally consistent? That’s for nerds. I want a superior pogo stick.

9. Swimming

Human beings figured out swimming pretty quickly, which is good for us as a species. After all, there is a lot of water on this planet, and before we figured out boats, surfboards, or Sea-Doo dealerships, we needed some way to get across all of it. Some developers have had a rough time with it for a while, but usually eventually we get the option to swim in all that water, maybe even under it, and we can all enjoy being extremely damp.

Also, every time I bring up swimming, MOP’s Bree, and I grimace about the number of Victorian people who drowned because they fell into a lake and their dozen-layered outfit got wet and heavy and basically trapped them. That isn’t relevant, it’s just morbidly awful. (It’s true! Also women not being allowed to learn how to swim. It’s a whole thing. Learn how to swim, friendos. Not just in video games. -Bree)

10. Dancing

Dancing is an alternative kind of movement! You might argue that it is not a kind of movement that gets you anywhere, and to that I say: You are wrong because if you do it right, it brings you to funkytown.

Everyone likes a good list, and we are no different! Perfect Ten takes an MMO topic and divvies it up into 10 delicious, entertaining, and often informative segments for your snacking pleasure. Got a good idea for a list? Email us at justin@massivelyop.com or eliot@massivelyop.com with the subject line “Perfect Ten.”