Abstract Trouble in River City: The Social Life of video games by
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| Above left: Character creation first involves selecting a gender and one of three species: nimble humans, hulking Lugians, or lizardlike Tumeroks. The player then chooses a body type, and can vary the avatar’s height, weight and skin color (above right). Further options allow the customization of hairstyles, face shapes, tattoos, and clothing (left).
Growing the character’s abilities through quests and combat is the primary activity in AC2. Combat is almost never between online players. Instead, the wide variety of creatures and critters that assail the players are directed by the computer. This combat takes place on a nearly constant basis in AC2, and cannot be avoided if the player wants to complete the game’s various tasks. But while combat is necessary to reach the various goals, it is rarely the goal in itself. In fact, monsters that appear in a player’s path are often avoided when they offer the player little other than a delay. Combat itself is fairly typical of the genre in that it involves weaponry and spells, and is of middling graphic violence. Players and monsters use swords, bows and magic staves, rather than engaging in hand-to-hand combat. The bloodshed and detail of the violence is less graphic than a first-person shooter game such as Unreal or Counterstrike, but is certainly not sanitized. Blood oozes and flies, and creatures writhe and scream when they are reduced to gory corpses. AC2 is very similar to other MMRPGs in its level of graphic violence, and is safely a representative game for the genre. Figure F. Combat. 
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