The Beginning of (my) Gaming

To write a blog about myself and not include something about my gaming would be as remiss as writing a relationship blog and never mentioning I was female. However, to write about a topic that became so vast in my life, one should start at the beginning, and so here it is.

I was born in 1971, I can remember the Iran hostage affair as the "moment of silence" it would bring into my second-grade day's life. I, therefore, remember all the big things of the eighties as childhood memories, having finished out the decade by graduating high school in 1990, as if to perfectly coincide my leaving childhood with leaving that decade, so yeah, I had an atari.

We got it when I was in fifth grade, or perhaps a bit before. I enjoyed it, and played many games both that my father bought or I would occasionally trade, library loaning style, with my freinds. I remember several favorites, but the real winner for me was called Adventure. My avatar was a cube, but I got to fight dragons and unlock castles. The fault was after a while, the game became old--something I could do in my sleep. It's world was static, not randomly generated, so it was pretty much the same everytime.

I also enjoyed racing games, and as a side note must say I sort of miss the simplicity of them. You got a poorly represented car, then you tried to go fast without wrecking. The physics of those games were stupidly simple, but I sort long for the days when I could just load up and race. Now, I must spend time tweaking my suspension and engine and whatnot before ever getting to a track. I asked for more realism, now I want less--isn't that just the way. Remember when a football game asked you before a play, 'run, pass, punt?' Now I can control every man on my team, and I both love and hate Madden's NFL for giving me what I wanted and making me work at it.

We did get a computer somewhere in the middle of the decade, but we got an IBM pc, which at the time and for my age group was lame. (it was in fact more adaptable and powerful that my friend's comodores and apples,) but getting games for it wasn't all that easy. It was a work comp, not a gaming comp. Remember there wasn't a best buy and gamestop on every corner, the comp gaming had yet to boom, and my allowance was something like 50 cents a week. So I played a lot of text only star trek and castle wolfenstien (oh yes, there was one before the fps, btw.) but otherwise spent my time learning to program in basic drawing kitty cats that would move across the screen.

We didn't have a nintendo, but most of my friend's did, and I was temporarily addicted to Mario, despite my complete lack of competence at hand-eye coordination. So I finished the decade as I came into it, not gaming.

In the early 90's my dad had been given by a workmate some computer game he wanted me to try. I repeatedly refused. I do not like the pointlessness of spending my time at the computer gaming. It's stupid. No, Dad, not interested. Ok, fine, what is this game called again? Doom? What a stupid name. ....Now enter a few weeks of solid living in my basement killing demons with cool weapons. LOVED IT! Then, after those weeks, left it.

The latter half of the nineties had me again not interested in gaming, but in 97 I married a man addicted to them. It was fine, he did that, I did other things. I then read an article about a game once panned by all critics but was the best selling game of all time until the Sims unseated it years later, Myst. Now, THAT was awesome, but it had no real replayability, and there wasn't much else like it, at least not of the same caliber, so again, I remembered I didn't like gaming.

Then the game that changed it all for me, Diablo. Diablo was different, I was a person, not a cube, and I could be several types of persons. My diablo stories are a post all their own, and maybe I'll let you in on how lame I was at it at a later date, but for now the important thing about Diablo was it set the stage for the passing fad to become a raging addiction.

One evening I got up from TV to see what hubby was doing. He was playing a game. It had people, set in a medievil sort of place, and he was sewing things to make money. He walks up to another little person and asked a question. The answer was amazing.
"Wow," I said, "that game has a very sophisticated dialog tree."
"No," he explained, "that is an actual person. That's why."

Well, that was silly, how would a person be able to contact him like that while he was playing a game? He explained the game was over the internet, and people all over the world were hooked up, doing the same sort of thing he was, and he could talk to them.
"And those clothes you are sewing...you can wear them?" I ask. He changes his little avatar's outfit.
"Whoah! it's like Barbies with swords! I soooo have to try that!"
The game was called Ultima Online, and was what is now called an MMORPG, massively multi-player online role playing game.

He warned me, as I was not the gaming type, that it was complicated and hard to learn, and required lots of time. Well, long story short, I played it for years, had three accounts, four houses, and did volunteer work for the company that ran it.

Since then, I've played many non MMORPG's. The other pieces in the Myst series, the Civilazation series, other role playing games, but my fav is still the MMORPG's. I've played and beta-tested many of them. I've played, oh let's see, Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron's Call, Dark Ages of Camelot, Sims Online, City of Heroes, Star Wars Galaxies, and a smattering of others. Some of them I can remember the worlds and my characters, but the name of the game escapes me. And currently, I am playing World of Warcraft. I've played around with Lord of the Rings Online and Guildwars, but not enough to really mention.

A couple of years ago I was on a panel at a sci-fi/fantasy gaming convention (I actually did three panels that year) on online gaming, particularly the aspect of female gaming. Female gamers are well on the rise, and have been for years, but we are still a minority in the game world.

I still think of them as Barbies with swords. As a child I loved Barbie dolls. My sister and myself would dress them up and spend hours out of our days constructing storylines for them. At least one storyline lasted for months. Our dolls didn't have weddings or tea-parties. They were warrior princesses, sometimes mages, that adventured out to save their kingdoms. It's the fun of make-believe with the social aspect of playing with others, and like I said, there's lots of swords and weaponry.

Online Gaming is often considered the province of geeky high school children and college kids bored between classes, but I have played these games with lawyers, physicists, teachers, and other professionals rangin in age from my own children (my eldest daughter started playing UO at 4) to people in their fifties, of many genders and several nationalities. I once had a guy in Singapore I used to play with all the time, and he had schooled in his youth at Oxford, and I still miss my old buddy from Everquest who could play with me in the early mornings because he lived in Australia. There was the french woman who I couldn't hardly speak with due to our only having a smattering of each other's language. Everytime I healed her she'd reply, mbc--just like we say ty, when we mean merci.

These games have nicknames, Evercrack, World of Warcrack, because of their addictiveness. South Park dedicated an entire episode to WoW. They are big business. There are people who are actually employed to play these games, because the games' money have the highest exchange rate on the planet. You can spend real life money to buy money and items in game--very irritating to those of us who play, but a reality nonetheless. You can buy characters and accounts even.

Getting to enjoy these games in your life while still enjoying your real life is a trick that took me a while to learn, and some people never do, but I'm glad I have that excapism personally.