Quest on the violet line

Travelling on the metro is like an MMO RPG (Massively multiplayer online role-playing games), or at least that’s what it feels like in my opinion. 

6^th September 2018, we were to meet at gate number seven and take a long three hour trip. As a regular commuter nothing seemed new, it was just a repetition of my daily routine except this time it was in a designated class trip. Were asked to do two things observe and take notes. As easy as it seems, I found out incidents are hard to come by when you travel in a big group, not that I wanted any, thought it would add more colour to my work.  That’s not to say there was nothing to write about, sure the escalator incident was interesting but I neither have the eloquence or imagination to write a 1500 piece about an escalator which stopped in the middle of its operation. But Of course the escalator incident did not go wasted. Watching people get off the escalator made me want to write about how order is restored when people get on an escalator and how this order is broken when they get off the escalator.

And here I am writing about an MMO RPG. The thought didn’t come immediately it gradually crept into my mind as I  got bored observing … now I can say for sure what we did on the 6^th of September was definitely a quest.  The basic of an MMO RPG is its multiplayer online platform where players can assume the role of a character, often in a fantasy or science fiction world. That being said the trip on the metro definitely resembled a fantasy RPG. The professor being the guild master handing out quest and giving tutorials at gate number seven, to the player registration at the security check.

I usually make a joke when travelling with friends, saying, “See you on the other side” I do that when I swipe my card first at the gate. At first it was just a joke; but when I travelled with the sole purpose of observing, the gates seemed almost scary. Once you exit the gate you can see your friend on the other side but you are unable to exit through the same gate if you so wish to return; much like an MMO RPG where you can observe the status of a friend or someone in your guild, to see whether that person is online or not. The MMO RPG being less scary as you are allowed to exit the way you came in.

To me swiping the card at the gate is a sign that a player has logged in, what comes after the gate is the server or the World Wide Web where all players gather. Before we actually started we were given the mandatory tutorial and the main quest, the quest being “observe and write a 1500 blog piece”. Our game master/ guild master played the role of the silent guide as we embarked on this quest, only speaking when necessary. The first obstacle was getting all the guild members on the same channel, which is across the gates and on the other side. Once everyone was safely across we had the option of manually crossing to the new land by taking the stairs or teleporting by getting on the escalator, I chose the latter though I faced another problem, a bug, the elusive leaking ceiling but I was able to clear that level safety with my guild members .

The second phase was following the map, in our case the violet line. That was where our real quest would start though not before facing the first boss. 

The violet line was pretty easy to spot and everything seemed to be moving smoothly, but suddenly the escalator taking us underground halted midway almost throwing us off, that was the first boss, the first encounter and something I don’t like to remember because I don’t like heights and the escalator stopping definitely gave me a scare; after that I decided to stay away from teleporting escalators and travel manually, at least till I got to the first destination, three of my guild members probably  shared my sentiment and we climbed down manually just to be safe.

I don’t know about most people but to me getting on the metro is one of the most crucial points, I consider this the climax. The climax because the commuters have overcomed the danger of getting their leg stuck in the small gap between the platform and the metro. And I don’t know how many people observed but on our particular quest only three people including me looked down to see if they had safety crossed the gap. If you think about it the gap is more dangerous than we can imagine, it is an endless black hole where light cannot penetrate and once you get stuck you can say bye bye to your leg. But it’s not all that bad, I for one felt like I had crossed worlds by overcoming this gap, a feat I forget in my monotonous routine.

But going back to the quest, the guild members split up once we got on the silver bullet, I call it that because it’s mostly silver inside as is most of the other metros in Delhi. I was also lucky enough to find a seat, a rarity because the silver bullet is mostly pack with adventurers during rush hour. If I were to compare the metro to a place in the MMO world it would be a guild, the place where time stops once you close the doors, a place where people are constantly getting in and getting off. A place where you can gather information and meet new people. Thus the silver bullet was the perfect place for us to proceed with the quest of observing, I sat down with a guild member and started talking about my adventures while the others moved to other compartments to continue observing.

While I said the metro resembled a guild if you look at another angle it also resembles a town, a place with many gates to other worlds. My quest allowed me to view new lands through its windows, sometimes it was underground, and more than half of the time it moved above the city. Many strangely shaped buildings flashed by so did green military tents and even a small hill. But you can only stay so long in one place, once we reached the last destination, something I almost missed because of day dreaming, our game master/ guild master gave us the second part of the quest, “to go back to the place we started at by once again travelling on the violet line”. Let me tell you we were in the last leg, our energy had steadily run out and the journey back was mostly us looking for some food, too bad we couldn’t find any.

The ride back was a countdown, it started at thirty two, thirty one, thirty… with each station the light on the map turned green.  It was like clearing levels in a dungeon ,the map indicated the number of floors and the green light signalled the number of floors the players had cleared. Some of my co passengers were luckier as they got off at twenty or at least that’s what I liked to imagine. Then there was also the guy in the stripped blue shirt who rode all the way the last station, almost missing his stop because he had dozed off; luckily it was the last stop and the end of our adventure.

Getting off would signal the end of our adventure, when we first started I compared or journey to a quest an adventure in a fantasy MMO RPG, when we dispersed the similarities would end. Unlike single or multiplayer games MMO RPG allows multiple users to interact on various platforms, much like the metro which allows people living all over Delhi to come together willingly or unwillingly. Though I wouldn’t say the metro is amazing, there are still other means of transportation, but one cannot deny its connectivity, like an earthworm it burrows its way across the city connecting different people. The irony is that like an online game where players around the world come together, as a human living in a big metropolitan city what happens to the next person is something I will never know. Like the guy in the striped shirt travelling thirty two stations with me, he will just be the guy who sat across me on 6^th September and I will probably be remembered as the girl who sat across him or he may not remember at all. In the end it does not matter because once I swipe my card I can log off and so can the guy in the striped shirt.