The Server Has No Mods Left
We're all playing a broken game where the developers have gone dark
My first memory of the internet as anything other than a backlit encyclopedia is a national news clip about two World of Warcraft players who met in-game and got married in costume.
This was an outlandish idea then, but in the twenty years since, our world has become an online role-playing game that is only incidentally, and perhaps unnecessarily, physically embodied.
Consider the orc marriage. Two people with no shared place, family, or history fall in love entirely inside a game, playing characters built around traits they admired but didn’t possess. Then they meet, alter their bodies to match those characters, and that alone is enough for national news.
Today it’s hard to think of a marriage that doesn’t start this way. What modern groom doesn’t first fall in love with his bride through inhumanly polished Instagram posts that bear only a passing resemblance to her? What bride doesn’t fall for a groom who shifts from bad-boy pickup lines he could never say in real life to pictures of small animals captioned “us”? What wedding exists primarily for the participants rather than the photographs?
My suggestion is that the MMORPG-ing of our society is not exclusive to democratization of orc/mage romance dynamics, but is a useful and expansive frame in which to understand the global condition. If we think of our world as digitally mediated first and only incidentally physical, a lot of outcomes that used to look insane start to make sense.
Consider first our physical bodies. Over the last 15 years we’ve developed and democratized Skyrim character creator-like options that allow us to mold, shift, and radically change our physical appearance and performance. Nearly 40% of high-income Americans have had a cosmetic procedure, let alone taken a peptide for cosmetic outcomes, or altered an Instagram photo towards aesthetic ends.
Alongside this has come a casual disregard for history in favor of narrative. Americans, whose lineage is usually an untraceable mix of ethnic and cultural identities, can now happily select a single ethnic or national heritage and adopt whatever traits and class struggles best fit their chosen expression. You are now “Italian” because you serve meatballs on Sunday, or “Greek” because you tan well (myself included, at best 25%).
By turning identity into something selectable, we have also turned it into a mechanism for self-assigned status in an intra-class struggle that one opts into. The contemporary news cycle presents almost every conflict in a compressed schema of victim and victimizer, oppressed and oppressor; the individual is invited to choose not only a heritage but a position on this spectrum that you chose and play out.
You can see this disregard for history at the tribal and societal scale too. We’re now perfectly willing to ignore chronology and contradiction in order to play out “campaigns” of ideas that serve our ends. The facts matter less than the outcomes. In this sense, our world has become a long-running Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
The things we do in our flesh-and-blood bodies have also become digital-first. A hike doesn’t count unless it comes with a Strava record. Group-training gyms project scoreboards on the walls like video game leaderboards. Even churches now gamify attendance and prayer streaks. We’re willing to ignore discontinuity at the societal level to keep the campaign going, but at the individual level we refuse to accept anything that isn’t intensely quantified.
In actual MMORPGs, this regime is tolerable because there is still a visible author. There are PvP zones and safe towns, rules against griefing, and moderators who can reset the instance or ban an account. You can opt into combat, or log off. There are places where you cannot be attacked.
However, in our world, the mods feel increasingly absent. The PvP flag might as well be permanently on. Former safe zones—schools, offices, churches, neighborhoods—have become primary arenas of conflict, with every interaction carrying the latent possibility of being recorded, uploaded, and tried before a global audience. The result is a world that retains the mechanics of a game but has lost the sense that anyone is meaningfully in charge of the server.
Under those conditions, vigilante justice becomes less an aberration and more a systemic feature. TikTok spam of “beat up the creep,” “expose the scammer,” “harass the harasser” are attempts to reassert it from below. If the official systems will not punish griefers, then mob violence, doxxings, and reputational executions will.
At the same time, we have moved from a subscription world to a free-to-play one. The marginal cost of generating a new identity (another account, another profile, another shell entity) has fallen effectively to zero. Bots and alts proliferate. Any attempt at norm enforcement immediately confronts a structural fact: there are too many players per moderator, and too many disposable identities per person. Bans become symbolic.
Once a game goes free-to-play under weak moderation, the culture of play shifts. Cheating, exploiting, and rerolling are no longer edge cases; they are baseline assumptions. Resources concentrate in the hands of those most willing to abuse the meta. We see analogous patterns offline: legal, financial, and social “exploits” are pursued until they are formally patched, at which point attention shifts to the next loophole. The practical ethic is simple: if the system is obviously broken, you are a sucker for not playing it to the hilt.
The economic consequences follow the same logic. In a broken MMORPG economy, the in-game currency drifts away from any stable reference point; gold farming, duplication glitches, and whale spending unpeg prices from underlying use. Our world exhibits its own version of this: attention, status, even money itself feel increasingly unanchored from any shared measure of value. What matters is not what something is “worth” in a historical or moral sense, but how many hits, tokens, or basis points it can be transmuted into this week.
The characteristic mood of such a world is the same one that haunts the forums of any collapsing game: a mixture of resignation and entitlement. Everyone plays on, abusing the remaining mechanics as aggressively as they can, while simultaneously insisting that the developers should step in and restore order. Devs please fix. In the meantime, the rational player assumes that the mods are not coming back, the rules will not be evenly applied, and that the only truly indefensible position is to keep following norms that no longer bind anyone else.