The first time I played Ragnarok Online was in 2005. A year earlier, a friend had flooded my mind with stories about a kind of PC game the two of us had never seen before, where you could become a thief after passing an exam that involved stealing mushrooms. It took a year for my parents to buy a computer that could run the game, and for me to convince my dad that paying a subscription to play it on the family PC was a good idea. 21 years after I first heard about the game, I returned to Ragnarok Online with the steel resolve to play it for a month straight. Reader, I have done so. I have also learned that, in the modern online gaming scene, we are more alone than together.

Developed by Gravity, Ragnarok Online is an MMORPG that was initially released only in South Korea in 2002, arriving in Brazil — where I live — in 2004. It's a fairly grindy game in which the main goal is to kill monsters to level up your character and unlock stronger classes. There's both PvP and PvE content, as well as a fairly aggressive monetization system. Since its release, Ragnarok has received multiple updates, but Brazil only recently got episode 17.2, which was launched in 2019. Even so, the Brazilian player base is solid enough for Gravity to organize events with content creators to reach new audiences and even create an official LATAM server 24 years after the game's official release.

Reading about the opening of the first LATAM server and watching content creators putting together guides about classes that are old enough to have finished college, I found myself interested in the experience of playing a game that feels so displaced in time. As an experiment to see what it could tell me about myself and about gaming, I decided to play at least 30 minutes of Ragnarok Online for 30 days.

I........

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