Feb 11, 2016, 11:47 AM
I'd guess probably Life on the Screen, by Sherry Turkle. That's the first that leaps to mind, anyway, and I'm pretty sure the others I think of are post '97.
How did you discover text-based gaming?
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@ThugHeaven
I just got tired of doing the same missions over and over and over again for no effect on MMO's. MU*s got my attention because the world changed and evolved as the players tried to one up each other... and inevitably got cocky, overstepped and got slapped down over and over. At least that cycle was more entertaining and left one with stories that not everyone had. -
My reason is totally weird.
I was a freshman in college and my English writing professor decided to make the basic first year writing class have a 'theme' and the 'theme' was like, Man/Cyborg, does our relationship to technology make us one with it? (It's 1997 here for context) There were random lists of choices for the second research paper and one was 'virtual societies' and I picked that, having no idea what it was but it sounded cool. Apparently my professor was in large part referring to MUDs so I made chars on some roleplaying ones and interviewed people with what I'm sure were some weird ass questions, and played just enough to be the most clueless newbie because I was not just 'how do you do X here' but 'what even is this, what is the point?'. The people were super nice, even the head admin of one. Turned in paper, a few months later got dumped by boyfriend, was grouchy and didn't feel like getting drunk at parties where he'd also be. Stayed home and thought "Hey I remember that place you could like hang around and pretend to be a dryad on a quest or something, maybe I will do it for -fun-." Been text gaming since.
Like Jane Goodall, only I became an ape.
Also I swear I read a hard copy library book about MUDs in specific, but it couldn't have been the Richard Bartle because that wasn't out until early 2000s so WHAT DID I READ, I still wonder. It had descriptions of characters, and discussed as a phenomenon men playing females and attempted to analyze the reasons. I have wondered for years what book it could be, but no clue. Paper obviously long gone, it would be a hilarious read now. I did get an A!
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I'd guess probably Life on the Screen, by Sherry Turkle. That's the first that leaps to mind, anyway, and I'm pretty sure the others I think of are post '97.
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@Ninjakitten Maybe I'd know it if I saw it again. I'll look one day. Not today! But thanks for potentially solving my mystery. I believe the thesis of the book was that everyone involved was crazypants. I contrasted that with the happy normal people I talked to and came up with some kind of 'different strokes for different folks" conclusion that was totally A worthy. Unlike my next paper which had to compare Dadaist art with the fear of the Cyborg during that period in time. That was a D, but admittedly I kind of gave up after 2 pages and phoned in the other 14.
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@Gingerlily
If it's not, poke me and I'll check my bookshelves and old files. If it references MU* and it's published before about 2006, chances are pretty decent it's in there somewhere.
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@Ninjakitten I recall vaguely that without its sleeve the cover was blank and yellowy-tan. It was only 15 years ago so my memory of that should be pre-ty solid, plus I was never wasted during those precious developmental years to confuse one book with another.
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I was always the chick that people yelled at for trying to read and listen to npc's while on a new quest/instance. Everybody else would be running around knowing what to do and I'd still be standing there listening to the first npc.
I also don't like grind for loot games, so something like Destiny I just couldn't get into. Playing the same level over and over just to get the orange pistol of doom? Nah I'm good, imma just play the story mode, then send it back to gamefly.
If mu* were to figure out a way to advertise themselves better. There's probably a whole generation of potential players out there.
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@Gingerlily said:
Also I swear I read a hard copy library book about MUDs in specific, but it couldn't have been the Richard Bartle because that wasn't out until early 2000s so WHAT DID I READ, I still wonder.
I feel like these things were part of academic discussion back in those days, though I never read about them in an actual text book. But my freshman year computer science teacher in my first year of uni, in 2000, did a whole day on chat interfaces and talked about MUDs in some detail. Universities were still a natural pipeline into these kinds of games (I didn't do much MU*ing in the computer lab but I knew people who did), so I guess it's not surprisingly they were Things some teachers knew about as well as students.
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I did some roleplaying in CompuServe's CB Simulator back in the early 90's and played around with Barren Realms Elite and LORD on a local BBS. Once my tiny Iowa town got an ISP I discovered ArmageddonMUD via a place called ISCABBS.
Discovered MUSHing when I was poking around on the web after starting to play VtM in a tabletop group.
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@Staked said:
I did some roleplaying in CompuServe's CB Simulator
I hope this is like a Jack Burton simulator, please tell me it was a bunch of people all pretending to be Jack Burton jawing on while driving trucks!
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@Staked Alright! Someone else that grew up in tiny Iowa town!! fistbump
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@SG Torn between answering.... "Who?" and this....
Remember, when some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like that: "Have ya paid your dues, Jack?" "Yessir, the check is in the mail."
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@SG said:
@Staked said:
I did some roleplaying in CompuServe's CB Simulator
I hope this is like a Jack Burton simulator, please tell me it was a bunch of people all pretending to be Jack Burton jawing on while driving trucks!
Ha. I wish. It was CompuServe's version of IRC.
@Miss-Demeanor said:
@Staked Alright! Someone else that grew up in tiny Iowa town!! fistbump
fistbump Southeast Iowa for the win!
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I didn't have any real computer access (except for occasionally looking at a few things on a friend's Prodigy account while in high school) until I was in college, and my freshman roommate introduced me to the world of online RP.
That would have been Uncanny X-Mush in late 1995, and I'm afraid to say it's been a large part of my life ever since. I never thought it would last as long as it has, but I still enjoy the make-believe worlds and doing something creative with others as part of them.
You just don't want to see how bad and simplistic my early RP was. I sure don't. We all had to start somewhere, though. Through all of this, I've never done any LARPing, never really been into MUDs or places that are more automated through coded commands in comparison to coming up with things to do with other players.
Over the years I've kept thousands of logs, and I have some stuff that goes back to as early as probably 1996 thanks to the old shell/telnet/whatever account I had in college. The most annoying part of that is all the added text characters that preface every line when I saved logs to a couple disks.
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@ThugHeaven
First off your name is hilarious for being the girl that actually reads the plot line.I'm just glad I'm not the only one that did that though. I read EVERYTHING. Like a compulsion. Even the item descs. People hate that... and I'm just in this for the story.
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I wrote fanfiction, and someone suggested this thing called a "MUCK" where you could chat in REAL TIME instead of via email. Since we were doing a collaboration, seemed like a good idea.
Roleplaying became far more fun than fanfiction. Thus, here I am.
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When I was eight or nine years old, I found the Red Dragon Inn and thought it was the coolest thing ever. I met a girl about my age through some embarrassingly bad RP and she introduced me to Dragonrealms, which wasn't really RP and was pretty obtuse but I was a confused queer girl with my first E-crush and not about to give up.
Somehow she got lost in the shuffle but I stuck with the game. A couple years back someone invited me to TR and that was that.
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My first foray into anything MU- was when I was 16. I found a place called TigerMUCK which was, yes, a furry MUCK, but the owner - someone who is probably one of the most decent people I've ever met- had a very strict policy of enforcing a PG rating and no fooling around anywhere near minors. He was pretty uncompromising about that, too, which resulted in a rather very friendly and non-threatening environment. This didn't exactly prepare me for what other furry places were like- I decided to look at the other MU*s and went straight for FurryMUCK under the assumption that bigger was better.
It went about as well as it could be expected:
... long story short, a few years later I decided to venture out of TigerMUCK again, this time for Discworld MUD, and I absolutely loved it. Having my first taste of full-on RP, I moved quickly to other MU*s- there was an X-Men one I can't really remember the name of, and a few others- but it didn't really last too long. I had to move to another country (this one) to pursue my degree in music, and for many years my social life and past-times were very thin on the ground between rehearsals, classes, lessons, practice room hours, more rehearsals and trying to get a handle on this college thing everybody was talking about.
I didn't stop roleplaying at the time, though, but the pace of RP that I needed was a much slower one than the real-time MU*. So I joined the Napping Cat's Dream forum. The roleplay spun out of the Master Zen Dao Meow webcomic, which was a rather whimsical and trippy comic dealing with eastern philosophy. The place lasted for ten years, outliving the comic by several of those, but it was neat because the comic creator/artist and the admins (who incarnated characters from the comic) would regularly engage the forum members in roleplay and discussions, and members who contributed to the community/rp/discussions in significant ways would eventually be deemed 'psychedelic avatars' and receive avatar cards of their characters, fully illustrated by the comic artists. It was a rather homey place for many of us, and when it closed its doors in 2009 many of us felt a little homeless, RP-wise.
After I graduated and started building up experience before a Masters degree, I got sucked into Second Life- mostly because of its music community at the time. I toodled around SL for years doing the concert thing and hanging out with Mel Cheeky and Frogg and Jaycatt and co, and then I got recruited to be a faction leader for a roleplay sim there. A Final Fantasy VII one. I even did the special effects for their combat system. But after two years of that, I decided to call it quits. It would be a few years later, when I started my Masters degree, that I decided to poke around mudconnector and look for some MUs- and that's how I stumbled upon HeroMU* and, later, CoMUX.
So, long story short...
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I was crushed when my high school/college/post college group dissolved to start jobs, move across the country, disappear altogether, etc. Somehow I stumbled on to MUDs and played a few but found them not to my liking at all. I remember getting my feet kind of wet at Invid Invasion MUX and not knowing enough about behind the scenes kind of admin things going on that players were generally doormats to the awesomeness of the staff's PC's.
Things improved a lot (sarcasm) when I shifted over to the WoD and got into Texas Twilight and just as I thought the place might be somewhat sane it went crazy with.... Harry and Cat I think it was, starting their own MU* set in... Florida? Start Your Engines: Indianapolis by Night was in there and I had fun in the Sabbat sphere until that blew up as well. Something about polyamorous wiccans or something. Actually staffed on the Dragonlance MU* that was pre-Catacysm. Ansalon Dreams I think it was called and it blew up as well. By then I'd run out of steam because survival rates of friendship after multiple MU* meltdowns is kind of small.
Looking back at it I think my MU* radar was attuned to getting into a place right as it was going critical. I guess the beginning was around 1996 or 1997. I think maybe Amberyl's List came up in a search and I started researching how to connect. -
My middle school boyfriend was staff on Shadowrun: Seattle, back in the days when 'ethernet' was novel. (I don't think the other staff knew they had a 13 year-old running their decker sphere, which is kind of funny in retrospect.) He eventually convinced me to make a character on the game, and to his credit, never used his staffbit to help me out. I was hooked on the creative writing aspect of it, and I purple-prosed my way around the game, being all achingly beautiful and unfathomably deadly, until college. Now I just bum around various games lamenting that everywhere with a population is WoD.