my words go here, my brain goes missing
The View From the Top
I could write a long similar article about reasons I had up and left virtual worlds like that. So I might as well, I'm on Adderall after all.
Lets start from my own beginning of text-based BBS doors that one would play on a Bulletin Board System (BBS) usually running off of an a Amiga, Commodore, or PC clone and a single telephone line. At home, on my lowly Tandy PC that I had conned my parents [which took several months of whining] into getting me for "academic" reasons, I'd wardial with my top of the notch 2400 baud modem to find these phone numbers hooked up to computers, hoping that some of them were public, or semi-private, or even invite only, and register on all of them I could. Unfortunately, war dialing now is illegal for silly reasons in most states unfortunately, but sometimes I still like to pull out a DOS terminal and terminal program and let the computer war dial all night -- there's all kinds of interesting phone numbers you can find.
Registering back then was a big deal, not like it is on the internet now where you fill out a form and get to lie. Most of the owners of the BBS in question would actually *follow up* and call you back and verify your information -- so every Operator on every BBS you register on has all your real information, a scary thing which I found out later. I remember one time I was registering on a new BBS, I believe it was called The Sanitarium, and I was getting line noise (which happens when the phone line is picked up or there is static in the line from rain or snow, etc.,), so you see a bunch of #@~AVCD#@! (nonsense characters from the line noise, like imagine hearing your neighbor on the phone, but seeing it as random indecipherable text on an amber monitor) and finally after your modem has given up the fight whistling and screaming you see the dreaded NO CARRIER on the screen (which means you've been disconnected). Unfortunately the Operator can see exactly what you were typing, and I was typing god fucking dammit fucking fuck stop fucking fuck, or something of the sort (memory is a little fuzzy, but there was a lot of fucking involved), and behold 5 minutes later I receive a scolding phone call from the Operator (we called owners of BBS' Operators), lecturing me on how if I wanted the privilege of being on his board I'd have to follow his policy of no cursing. I obliged and he talked to my parents explaining what I had done, thankfully he still let me have access. moving onto the larger world of the internet and connecting to long distance out of the way BBS in Norway and Sweden and all sorts of places where I could barely decipher what I was reading, all for the thrill of playing in another world with different people. Before long I was lying about my age (some Operators are a little more lax than others and didn't stick with the fax in a copy of your driver's license and I sought those Operators out) and getting onto adult boards and being a mischievous preteen downloading naughty material, of course, when I wasn't involved in playing Legend of the Red Dragon or TradeWars 2002. Or the end all of end all games on BBS MajorMUD on a local BBS called Metropolis Big 12 (check out the Google Searches for Metropolis BBS, the amount of people with fond memories of it is amazing, and the amount of names I recognize is also a bit eerie. Metropolis Big 12 even had not one, but two! local numbers right here in Longmont, plus it had phone numbers in all the other college towns (the big 12 athletic college schools in this part of the USA for those of you not living here are: Baylor, Colorado, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech) so at times there were almost 50 or so people online at once! It was the first time I had the experience of chatting, by the way, the coolest people to talk to (as a young 14-17 year old during this time [it was a long and torrid affair of modems and the early internet], were by far the ones from Texas, they weren't quite as dull as the others). It was scary as hell. It was was amazing no longer was I limited to single phone line BBS' playing games and using up all my turns and having to wait an entire other day to see what everyone else had done in the game and then agonize over what I was going to do with my 10 or so turns I had that day. Now, I could play MajorMUD for hours on end, for as long as I wanted. I would spend hours and hours figuring out the puzzles in the game, and meticulously making maps out of graph paper, annotating them with loving detail. Here's some online ASCII maps for example, but I made mine on graph paper with much more detail. Frequently I'd bring my entire computer over to my best friend's house and we'd both lie on the floor the entire night long drinking caffeine and terrorizing other players, no one else had the advantage of being able to communicate with each other person to person except us. As long as I had enough money to keep paying for the credits to stay online I'd be on there every second of my spare time, letting my grades, social life, and hygiene suffer. If my memory is right $300 paid with a credit card gave me enough credits to be online for 40 hours. Those 40 hours all went into playing, and I could easily use up those 40 hours in a single week. At the worst of the addiction, I wrote scripts for the DOS based program I used to connect to different BBS, so that I wouldn't even have to be at the computer to play; I'd just keep racking up the experience and money and further distancing myself in the rankings from everyone else. I wasted so much money in such a small amount of time. But, I was the best, on the top, and envied by everyone. It's kind of a nice feeling isn't it? Although, I don't think my parents felt that way after receiving their credit card bills. Thankfully that early in time, it was fairly trivial to generate fake credit card numbers that validated and charge the money to other people. So I was an addict and a bad person then, but wouldn't a crack addict do the same if given the chance and technological know how?
After a while, the thrill of only having the competition of a few hundred people lost interest to me and I stopped playing MajorMUD, and I had also been banned for hacking into an opponents account and deleting their character; coincidentally i was never caught for credit card fraud. I did have a friend caught for check fraud, but I told them from the start that they shouldn't use checks to defraud a company. What can I say, competition is fierce and I cheated in every legal and illegal way possible, if the 2nd best in the game has a password of 'orange' (yes, it was orange) and orange is listed in their public profile as their favorite color, how does one not reasonable expect someone not to try to type it in. I'm a curious person, of course I'm going to stare at a login screen and type words for hours until I manage to get lucky. It's how life works, you keep trying and failing, but eventually you get something happy and unexpected. So, I rationalize it as it not being my fault. It's like you leaving the front door unlocked with a note saying the key is under the flowerpot and not expecting your next door neighbor to be polite and respect that the note is for your friend coming over, and not take a peek inside for themselves out of curiosity. All I did was something a little more fuzzy in the illegal department, I don't think they had laws to really prosecute me at the time, so all that happened was I received a phone call from their legal department threatening some undefined action if I ever was caught calling there again. That really didn't scare me, it's hard to scare someone who isn't 18 yet, and someone who likes to get in trouble, so I called there again. Many times. I was smarter though, falsifying my information with other people's addresses and making sure I was home at the time to answer the follow-up calls, so that I did indeed seem legitimate and not that other evil person. None of this is the behavior of a deviant person or an addicted game and chat addict, of course not, and if you keep saying it to yourself it starts to sound true. Plus, it's really funny to laugh at years later. The charm of the place did slowly wear off, having to stay vigilant and pretend to be someone else wasn't fun at all, I couldn't keep the same friends, those cute and totally impossible to understand college girls I had met in chat that teased me in all kinds of sexual ways that I am still very clueless about, I couldn't talk to the same way. I couldn't play my game as the character I was, starting over was a chore and I realized the only reason I kept on playing was for the status, not for the fun.
I moved onto different, more devious and angry things. A local BBS, right here based in Boulder, called Liquid Sky, had 4 incoming phone lines! That's a big deal for a local BBS, they almost all only have 1, which is operated off their parent's real voice phone line until the kid gets screamed at enough, but no, this place was a luxury and it had 4 lines. I could talk to anyone else dialed in at the time. Coincidentally this is where I met Caylina, the first girl I really ever had a crush on and started to date. Unfortunately, she was a bit depressed and crazy, and decided to have a mental break down in the kitchen of her house in front of her mother and confess she wanted to marry me and have my children, which sent her parents running like headless chickens and before I knew it she had seen a shrink, been put on Paxil, and was forbidden to talk to me. A few months later I received a letter saying that she had been shipped off to New York and couldn't ever see me again. That devastated me for a very, very, long time. Sometimes, I still cry about it. The only real good thing I can say is, the first antidepressant I was put on, was the same one that Caylina was put on, and that makes me smile for some idiotic and charming reason. I guess you can tell how much I miss her, and all the idiotic poetry I wrote after we lost contact -- I was 15 and 3/4 at that time, one of the few times I can recall how old I was when something in my life happened. Another thing that happened on Liquid Sky a while later was I was fiddling around late at night trying to telnet into random .gov IP's, and had managed to get into a few because they never changed the default root password so I snagged all the /etc/passwd files to crack later for fun. The next day I got an email from the Operator that was sent to every registered member asking for a confession or he'd turn over all the BBS records to the FBI, so I was scared and said I did it and it was an accident and made up an elaborate lie basically saying I didn't know I wasn't supposed to type a name and password when it asked me for one. Anyone can make that mistake.
I moved onto the Internet right when it was starting to slowly, ever so slowly get more popular. I could get online through Big 12, read the old Fidonet groups on the older generation BBS even (if the owner shelled out enough money), and on Big 12 I could read real Usenet, and I could even hop into this weird thing called IRC. IRC back then was a great deal more chaotic, EFNet was pretty much the only place in existence, net splits every 10 minutes it seemed, Eggdrop bots in every channel, Bouncer bots all over, it was pretty hectic and was more of a battlefield than a medium for chat. In IRC I learned all about internet slang, especially "A/S/L" (age, sex, location?), and "want to cyber" (cyber being a prefix used to connect the subsequent word loosely to the world of computers or the Internet or sex over a computer, and the oh so common question from other guys (I'm not a girl dammit, I don't care if my nickname looks welsh and girly!) "how big are your boobs?". I also solidified my knowledge of different emoticons like the simple :) to the more complex ones like: <°)))>< (a goldfish), <=======}==O (I used this interchangeable with a sword, penis and a syringe. It was very multipurpose.), @-,-'-,-- (girl's really fell for these roses!). IRC was a good learning and social experience for me, as I was still very shy at the time. Until I found an obsessed 19 year old freshman sex fiend who was into molesting (nicely) online young innocent people like me (I blame her solely for my sexual perversion and corruption), I certainly blame her for my rather abnormal (compared to other people), love for blowjobs, because it was the only thing in the world PoshPuffs (her IRC nickname, who later explained that it as an allusion to tissues, I sure blushed then.) wanted to talk to me about, and I'm the obliging kind of person. After the charm of IRC and Usenet started to wear off, I got a real ISP provider with my very own Unix shell account. I was so excited, I could write bash scripts, I could annoy the hell out of other clueless users logged in who barely knew a single Unix command. I could read my email in Pine, I could compose text in Pico, I could be hardcore and write in Vi [which came in handy in college by amazing professors when my brain did not explode during that part of UNIX classes]. I could telnet and FTP to everywhere in the world trying to guess passwords and user names. I could use Gopher and wonder what the point was in WWW, when you could get exactly what you wanted without waiting for stupid colored text and pictures to load (at this point I had upgraded to a 14.4 baud modem, and even still the WWW was agonizing slow). I could be snobbish and look down on people who used Emacs. I could even use make to compile my own programs written in C. I remember the first time I got the source for tintin++ (the über, at the time, MUD client program) to compile.
That was one of the happiest days of my life. From there I went hopping around the world, telneting to wherever I could to find that perfect MUD. I found it on Sojourn and played for about 6 months I'd say. Then, like drama in real life, the administrators of Sojourn had a fight and they split up; or at least I think this is when I started to play. I was a dwarf cleric happily killing bunnies and then the game I loved was gone. For a while. Toril always keeps on coming back to life, it's that addictive and even death threats (yes several of the founders would regularly get phone and mail death threats for various reasons, like why the hell did you ban me, etc.). I know the rough sequence of the evolution of Toril, I was there for most of the middle and latter parts of it, I missed out on the early part, not having a computer all the way back in 1990. I started playing sometime around 1996, and had the rare opportunity to adventure with the legend Aradune Mithara, who if I remember right, was a stinky half-elf ranger, but an overall friendly guy who helped me powerlevel by killing some tough buffaloes. Aradune is the online persona of Brad McQuaid who left Sojourn sometime in 1999 to help found the MMORPG Everquest. It was a pretty sad day to see such a respected player leave. Toril has been around in various names and forms for a little more than 10 years and it's strange to have witnessed all the influences it's had on the outside world. Such as Forgotten Realms. It's also interesting to take note of all the fantasy authors that have profited from further fleshing out the world, like the well known author R. A. Salvatore, and the creation of several unique iconic characters that really haven't had any equivalence in historical fantasy, but are quite similar to NPCs already present in the MUD itself.
For a while I played Everquest, during one of the times when Sojourn had dissolved and no one really knew if it was coming back, I never did get far in that game, losing interest pretty fast. But, I subsequently became a serious Asheron's Call addict the same year, 1999, and continued to play that game for 2 or 3 years before having to force myself to stop, due to dropping grades and a serious lack of a social life, but I did make a nice profit selling my soul on there (my character, persona, and horde of shiny equipment) by selling it all on eBay, making about 300% more than I had invested in the game. For a while I stayed away from MUDS and MMORPGS, but I started to play Horizons, which lasted for perhaps a year, and I took another break (after yet again making a profit from playing), and picked up World of Warcraft the day it came out. I played that for a short while too, before, yes again, selling myself on eBay for yet more money. I would of never started to play those last 3 MMORPGS if it wasn't for my exgf asking me to, as she needed someone else to play with. Does that make her the worse addict? Requiring a partner so that they don't feel guilty for wasting all that time, and well, their life? I know I wasted a lot of my life on those games, but it was fun, and I can't see myself doing something much more productive during those years of not being medicated and barely being able to step outside my own house.
Now comes the question of, do I start to play World of Warcraft again in November, when I'm expecting her to ask me to pick up the game again with her? In November, the expansion pack for the game is supposed to come out, giving addicts more to do. It's tempting to even think about, I don't even need her to want to play, I'd do it on my own just so I could avoid my own life and have a fantasy life that was better than what I have now. What I have now is, pretty much nothing. I mean I'm playing suicide games lately, anything other than that must be better. Further on in the future, Vanguard will be coming out, which is what Aradune is working on now, having disagreements with how Sony was handling Everquest, so he left to work on his own vision of what Everquest really should of been. I know I'll be there in Vanguard, I just wish someone I knew would be there too. Well, it's a fear years away, so I don't have to worry about that quite yet.
This post has been brought to you by 30mg Adderall and a very, very large Emsam overdose. Mania? No way. It only took me 8 hours to write this through all my sidetracking. I completely missed the whole point of why I was writing this and failed to communicate what I wanted to say, but if I spent this much time on something stupid I might as well click Publish.
:)
