I’ve spent the past eight months working on a passion project and within the next few days it will be available for purchase on Amazon—always an exhilarating feeling!
Braving Britannia: Tales of Life, Love, and Adventure in Ultima Online is a nonfiction book featuring 35 interviews with players, volunteers, and the game’s developers over 320 pages as I sought to answer the question, “What do you do in a game where you can do anything?”
Released in 1997, the fantasy game Ultima Online is regarded by many as “the grandfather of massively multiplayer online games” (paving the way for titles like EverQuest, World of Warcraft, and EVE Online) and it’s a game that captured my attention from 1998 until 2003, when I played it religiously.
Having worked as a video game writer for the past few years, I came to realize how formative my own experience with Ultima Online was for me and how much it influenced how I look at video games, and how I approach writing them. The fact that you could meet with complete strangers, adventure through dungeons, and in effect, tell your own stories is something that I look for in every game I play.
While I knew what I had done and experienced in the game, but I wondered what other people did when they logged in. So, I put on my journalist hat and set out to find them. Over eight months I interviewed dozens of players as well as members of the game’s development team to find out what Ultima Online meant to them, what they did within the virtual world of Britannia, and how it changed their lives.
In short, the stories I gathered are absolutely amazing. Even if you’ve never heard of the game, if you have an interest in video game history, or just like to read life-changing human stories, I hope you’ll consider checking it out.
Braving Britannia will soon be available in paperback and Kindle formats.
Wes Locher 
Congratulations, sir!