EPTI'm not nearly as famous as Sean, but I feel the same way about computer gaming as he does: it was an integral part of my life growing up, and I definitely wouldn’t be the same person without it.
Society is changing – it seems that online games and gaming in general is more accepted. With the advent of things like MLG, and online gaming tournaments, people are more immersed in the world of gaming. This is a great thing. Gaming is now more accepted and less stigmatized than it ever has been before. The “mental image” of a gamer has now changed (or is in the process of changing, I hope) from a naked nerd in his Mom’s basement to White-Ra holding up a trophy, or TLO with his epic man-beard. Or even NesTea winning the GSL, in all his nerd-manliness.
These transformations of cultural interpretation of gamers are good for all of us – whether you consider yourself a casual SC2 player, or a hardcore raider in WoW. I don’t know about everyone else, so I’ll only speak for myself. I’m a college student with medical school aspirations. I work in a lab about 25 hours a week, on top of my school work. I don’t have as much time to game as I used to – I now only dabble in Everquest 2 and occasionally hop online to play SC2 with some friends (broke master Z in season 4, now I’m somewhere in Diamond Q.Q). I’M A GAMER. But the point of this blog was to share with you guys the story of how MMOs and gaming impacted my life. If requested, I’ll post an entire essay on how I feel about cultural interpretation of everyday “gamers” and how I believe that’s changing. I’m sure it wouldn’t take me long to write one.
Since I was 6, I would play games on our REALLY old PC. I’m talking games like Centipede, minesweeper, all that old stuff. It was fun, but I was only allowed to play for a few minutes a day, being like 7 years old and all. Using the computer at 6 years old in 1996 wasn’t really something most kids did – they expected us to be outside or playing with friends. I would much rather have been perfecting my spider-shooting.
I think my initial addiction to games began with a 2D starship-shooter game . You moved with the arrow keys and shot with the space bar. It was almost identical to the SC2 “Lost Viking” arcade game. I don’t recall what my high score was, but DAMN was I good at that game (in my little seven year old mind).
At ten years old, I remember every time my mother and I would go to Target, I would stand and look at games in the game isle while she shopped. I usually would try to get her to buy me something before we left, usually to no avail. I still remember when Rollercoaster Tycoon dropped (don’t quite remember the year), but I would lay in bed before going to sleep and think up cool coaster names, so when I got the game I could already have names in place for my awesome roller coasters. Total. Nerd.
When I was 10 years old, I spotted a game in the game isle that I absolutely had to have. It was Everquest: Shadows of Luclin. At the time, it was on sale for $20, but I didn’t realize that it was an expansion, and required the rest of the games to play. (They had since released a trilogy, Velius, Kunark were the other two expansions). My mom allowed me to buy the game (It was rated Teen, that was huge for me, I was only ten years old.) When I got home I immediately installed it, only to find that I needed the other expansions first. I was distraught. My mother and I went back to Target the next week to return it. I then bought the Everquest Trilogy. (A $50 value, my mother was not pleased that this game was more expensive than the one we returned. Oh well).
I took the game home and installed it. I was so excited. I couldn’t wait to make one of those lizard things and go around the world killing stuff. It was going to be SOFA KING AWESOME. But then something crazy happened. I had to make an account? They wanted a credit card? Oh, no. I read the back of the box. What the hell does “subscription required” even mean?
My mom was even more taken back than I was. She just paid for the game. What do you mean she has to pay $12 a month so I can continue to play it? That’s just ridiculous. Regardless, my dad signed me up. (Computer science major at Toledo, he knew what was up). I made a Half Elf Ranger at first. I hope some of you have an idea what I’m talking about. I started in Surefall Glade, a little zone which I actually found quite easy to navigate. When I finally found my way out of the zone, the first thing I encountered was a HUGE FUCKING BAT. My 10 year old mind says, KILL IT! Even though the bat was a “red con”, which essentially (I later learned) it was going to kick the fucking shit out of me. It did. Over and over. After about an hour of dying, respawning and trying to kill this bat, I ran downstairs for dinner and told my parents I hated this game.
My mom responded, “Well, good, then we can return it and cancel that dumb subscription.”
At the time, that seemed fine to me. Nobody gave me any encouragement to keep trying, it was all about cancelling the subscription and getting it all over with. I think maybe a week went by before I gave the game another shot. I made an Iksar Beastlord, and I named him Lizardlot. (It’s like Lancelot, with a Lizard instead of a Lance, cute huh? I would later learn that a Lot Lizard is a truck stop prostitute, thanks to some jerk on the internet who wanted to befoul my young mind.) For me, at 10 years old, this game was BALLS hard. If you died in Everquest, you didn’t get a little experience debt, you didn’t get a little debuff that said you had died and had to wait 5 minutes before you were back to full strength.
Nah. After level 10, you LOST experience.
This means you could lose levels you had spent hours gaining. To level from 20-30 in Everquest might take 3 weeks of playing 2-3 hours a day. One death means you lost about 25 minutes of gameplay. Oh, yeah, and you lost all of your stuff, too. Your gear stayed on your body wherever you died. If you could get back to your body and loot it, it was all good. But say you died in the middle of a huge group of angry monsters. Too bad, you’re naked. Better get someone to help you grab it all, or you risk dying again!
That was the beginning of my Everquest adventure. I played the game all through middle school, even dragging in my now best-friend to the game. He’s now totally into graphic design, and wants to work on MMOs himself. He was a great hockey player in Middle School, but now found a life passion through me and through EverQuest. Pretty sweet, huh?
But there are a few experiences in EverQuest that I think truly changed me. It might take me all day to type this out, so I hope some of you are still following me. My Beastlord finally hit level 65. It was a great, great day for me. I can remember getting down on the floor and literally doing the worm. At 12 years old, I was so freaking excited to have hit the max level. My buddy was over with me, and we have some great stories about playing EQ together, and leveling little alts. Our friendship really grew over having such a common interest. (Ask him what it was like to play EQ on dial-up internet, in the only computer he had in his house. ROFL)
Anyone who knows anything about Everquest raids will know what I’m talking about. At 12 years old, I joined a hardcore raiding guild on Fennin Ro called Mithril Age. Nobody in the guild was ever aware that I was only 12 years old. I had developed such good typing skills by this point that I could type almost as quickly as my dad, without looking at the keyboard. I avoided making any reference to my outside life, like what my mom had made me for lunch. I knew these kinds of things would be looked down upon and I would probably be kicked out of the guild. I did my best to act like an adult.
We would raid from about 8pm to 12am every single night. The only problem was, I was in middle school, and my bedtime was 10pm. My online “girlfriend”, a girl who was about 14 years old and who’s parents were much less strict, would “box” my character, or load me up on a separate client and tell my character to auto attack and send in his pet. (Beastlords didn’t have much of a role in raids aside from DPS). These raids consisted of ~100 people. Not like your 24 man WoW raids, this was a HUGE affair. Raid bosses would hit the tank for almost all of his health, meaning you had to have your healers on a Complete Heal rotation, where one would hit right after the other to ensure that the tank didn’t die. Boss mechanics were incredibly difficult. Think coordinating 24 people is hard? Try 100. Imagine how many AFK breaks you would have to take between bosses. Raiding in this game was unreal difficult.
WoW might be pretty easy nowadays. Shit, I dabble in EQ2 nowadays and that shit is pretty easy, too. Hell, SOE had to compete with Blizzard’s fan base of WoW boys. But Original, 2001 EQ (and I’m sure 1999 EQ) was BALLS hard. It was hard for a 10 year old to figure out what the hell was going on, but after awhile, I loved this game. I became so attached to my character, that I would think about what I was going to do in Everquest while I was in school. Some might call this an addiction, but I was a member of student council, I was an avid tennis player, and I was getting a 4.0 in school. Other than giving me experience and positively impacting my life, my love for the game was not impacting me in any other way.
But one afternoon, something happened that I’m sure I’ll never forget. Along with my online girlfriend, I had shared my account information with two brothers from Peru. These guys were great friends of ours, and we had their account information as well. We would occasionally play each other’s characters for fun, and had a great time. Well, one afternoon I logged in and found Lizardlot, a level 1 naked Beastlord.
I was shocked – I couldn’t figure out what the hell had happened. I logged in and found Darkkiller (I will never forget the name) online. I sent him a tell, “What the hell, man?!” He responded, “Oh, I was bored, so I deleted all of your shit and remade your character so they couldn’t restore him.”
What. The. Hell. I couldn’t believe it. My friend online had betrayed me, because he was BORED? I sent SOE a panicked email looking something like this.:
Hi,
OMGMYFRIENDDELETEDMYCHARACTERANDMADEHIMAGAIN
NOW I CANT REMAKE OH MY GOD MY STUFF PLESE HELP
JUSTIN
I ran downstairs crying. My mom didn’t understand. It was just a game, why was there a crying thirteen year old in her kitchen? Listen. You might tell me yeah, I was addicted to a GAME. It wasn’t REAL. But I was twelve or thirteen years old. I had put a lot of time and effort into this character. He was a work of art, you might say. It’s like taking a painting an artist has worked on for two years, and tearing it to pieces. Ya think he might be upset?
Eventually SOE got this all worked out, and I got my character back. I couldn’t have been happier. But there were several lessons learned from EverQuest and every experience I had in the game. Even though I had a lot of online interaction with people, I had matured beyond my years. I could carry on conversations with adults, because I was used to acting like one. I knew the kinds of things they didn’t care about, or didn’t want to hear, so I avoided those topics. I didn’t talk about EverQuest to everyone at school, either. I was a social kid with a lot of interests. That carried on into High School and when I began playing WoW and Everquest 2. All this time, my best-friend from fifth grade followed me to each MMO I played. We played MMOs together from fifth grade until probably late high school when our interests were so different we didn’t see each other much, aside from the occasional LAN or hang out session. (If you’re reading this, text me bro, time to catch up)
I apologize for making this so long. I’m waiting on a reaction in lab, and I didn’t expect to carry the story out this far. I made it to max level as a Feral Druid / Shadow Priest in Vanilla WoW. I used to raid on my Priest, and remembered how much easier the mechanics were in Molten Core than they used to be in the Plane of Valor, or even the Plane of War (ugh). IF YOURE THE FUCKING BOMB, GTFO THE RAID BRO.
I was 14, hadn’t yet gone through puberty, and I remember the first time I logged into Ventrilo.
Mana says, “Oh great, we’ve got another girl in the guild!”
I was super embarrassed. I refused to speak again on Ventrilo, but I would always listen during raids. (yeah, at 14 I had the voice of a 12 year old girl, no big deal wanna fight about it?)
I got into a huge fight with my online girlfriend around the second year I was playing WoW. I don’t remember what it was about. But she logged into my account and deleted all of my stuff, and then deleted my character. I remember logging in and seeing my stuff gone. It didn’t even rattle me. I wasn’t upset, I just wanted to know why she had done it. Basically, I emailed WoW service and they told me I had to obtain enough cash equal to the amount of gear that had been sold, since the stuff was sold and then mailed away to a random character which no longer existed. My online GF (or ex GF, at this point) denied any part in the activity, although she was the only other one who had my information. What a bitch.
EQ2 just wasn’t quite the same. WoW was fun (I loved PvP), but it was never the same. I played WoW until Cataclysm came out, then I quit. I don’t plan to return, but I’m sure it’s still a pretty good game.
MMOs were and are still a huge part of my life. Everquest’s community was something I KNOW can never be replaced. There was just this FEELING when I was playing EverQuest. I know my buddy knows what I’m talking about. It was like a release of dopamine in my brain that just made me so happy. I get that every now and again on EverQuest 2, but its just not the same anymore. I really miss everyone that I played with on Fennin Ro, especially those from Mithril Age. As for my online girlfriend, I have a real one now and it’s much better than online (teehee). I love my EverQuest 2, even though I just dabble now on a Beastlord (Fureur, Butcherblock Server) for anyone who is interested. Heh heh.
I play on a tennis team in college now, but I’m nowhere near as good as I could’ve been had I dedicated all of my free time to tennis in high school. My mom still digs at me for this, saying things like “That could have been you!” As we’re watching Nadal win the French open. Sometimes she takes it a little too far, and my Dad has to tell her to back off. She tries to make me feel like I wasted my life away playing these games in high school. The truth is, I wouldn’t be who I am today if it weren’t for games like Everquest and WoW shaping me when I was most malleable. I’m certainly glad I’m not growing up with games like WoW right now though, I’d probably be the most annoying little troll imaginable. That’s a thought for another day though I supposed, but I can’t believe what’s become of our MMO communities. They’ve regressed from the days of UO and EverQuest, maybe that’s because the communities are so large and you no longer require a small tight knit group of smart people to finish content? (/dig)
I appreciate all those who took the time to read this. I know I left out a few events that probably have had an impact on who I am and where my aspirations came from, but I blame EverQuest for my love of Fantasy, I even wrote a term paper on the Lord of the Rings (read all three books, wrote over 60 pages double spaced, even though it was my teacher’s favorite set of novels, pretty gutsy!).
Thanks for reading all, I’m Wolverine.321 on Starcraft 2 NA server, though I don’t get on much anymore.
Have a nice day, TL!
