Expanding Prince Herald's Unfinished Kingdom
Time passes, and things change… the world in which The Kingdom was created has long since slid further into a landscape controlled and dominated in two entirely different formats of reality. The real world itself steps closer and closer to a climate change catastrophe while The Kingdom itself has never been as big or expansive or amazingly varied as it is now. With the population of the world slowing its increase [perhaps as the human race plays more and more PHUK instead of having real sex], the total population hovers around nine billion people offline…
A tenth of that total—nine hundred million people—now thinks of The Kingdom as their first home, not their second. The need to translate The Kingdom into other languages had never been a selling point, and now it was completely irrelevant. Though Moderators exist from each country of the world within the game, being able to speak the same language as someone from somewhere else in the real world has become unnecessary. Whereas the game had once modified a Player's speech to be replaced with the voice of the Character they played, PHUK had taken this technology to the next level. It was now possible for translations of one language into another to be created on-the-fly both to one Player's ears and from another Player's mouth with such sophistication that the lip-syncing never misses a beat.
Inside The Kingdom, the last hurdles that prevented any one person from playing their Character to the hilt was whittled down to a singular issue of good old-fashioned cultural differences… and as the virtual world and real world bleed more and more into each other, even those are becoming a thing of the past. Regardless of race, class, size, color, species, powers, number of limbs, or any other way people might divide themselves… every one now plays on an almost entirely level field.
Having said that, The Kingdom is perpetually Unfinished. Though running out of physical space to house everyone is only a real concern for the real world, there still becomes the issue of sterilization in the online world. Years earlier, Cross-Tellurian Fault began negotiations with different other companies to provide In-Game versions of their products as a way for users to personalize their different Avatars and promote a brand within The Kingdom. A short time later, talks began with different major brands to allow existing products to exist in The Kingdom based on known television shows, movie series, video games, books, pen and paper games, and the like.
Today's PHUKing RPG has no limits, save one's own imagination.
Today's Kingdom exists as some kind of Crossover. Different settings, people, and places always had a place within The Kingdom… but these days you can find transporter accidents that can send you Mirror-Mirror-style into a Star Trek setting. World of Warcraft now itself runs on a modified PHUK engine and allows users of The Kingdom to end up in the universe through unconventional means. There's Call of Duty branding to war scenarios and even an opportunity to meet the real Master Chief (so to speak), not to mention Band of Brothers, Medal of Honor, and Army of Two as other sources.
The commercial branding still exists from iPhone to Game Boy to Dell, Pepsi, Sony, DC, Marvel, and even Welch's grape juice. Now, add to that just about every setting from Twilight to Ice Age to The Matrix… most everything a consumer had ever wanted to be a part of now has some kind of representation within The Kingdom… Cross-Tellurian gets nothing more than the cost to cover their servers while brands get free advertising, micro-transactions, and consumers get full interactive fandoms of their favorite stories, settings, and situations.
One tenth of the world plays in The Kingdom now… that means one in every ten people standing in line at the supermarket, electronic store, bank, or crappy minimum wage job go home and make themselves into whatever they want. Heck, some people never even leave The Kingdom anymore, their Extended Immersion Homes being little more than a fancy closet on life support (which really helps with the over-population of the real world). Since a person can work inside of The Kingdom, get real money into their bank account in the real world, and use In-Game assets to pay for rent online… there is little reason to ever exists in the drab and dull world outside.
Plenty of people still exists as human beings, though, for it is difficult to completely ignore human nature… and just because they choose to live there doesn't mean that things are perfect. The Kingdom has as good a chance to have a major city sacked by powerful Raid as it does to have a simple mugging in a dark alleyway. Periodically a zombie outbreak covers the land only to have people restored to health or otherwise begin living on the other side of death within The Kingdom. Things are always moving, always changing…
Places, settings, people, and random other things… everything can be altered by something else, no magic needed. The digital world makes everything real, with reality itself seeming like some sort of bored daydream by comparison. With everything as a definable one or zero, the alteration of one thing into the next is not only possible, but easily doable (form a coding standpoint)… and with access to all the ideas that human culture can come up with, well… being limited by one's imagination doesn't seem like as big a hurdle as it once was.
What story will you tell?
Since anyone within The Kingdom might appear as any living being or sentient creature… it is important to remember that they may, in fact, be nothing like their real life counterpart. Even a dog in a yard might be a kid enjoying himself in the simple life. An old man may wonder what it's like to be in high school again, or a young woman might wonder what it's like to play the fourth gender of some alien race. The sky is the limit and the only real worry is someday having to see the real light of day once again.
Woe be the cityscape that encounters a blackout, or the coastal region that wakes up all its citizens so that they might avoid death by a natural disaster… some people might just rather die than leave their favored reality. Addiction? Maybe… but by now it's an accepted social insanity. The Kingdom just is… and no one can stop it.