My first exposure to MMOs began shortly after I arrived at college. I met Mike in one of my introductory classes; we became friends and bonded over computer games. He lived in the area; I was four or five hours from home. We played Warcraft II against each other via the modem – high-speed internet was just being installed throughout America, and in my freshman year few dorms or homes had it.
Mike eventually dropped out of college, but we kept in touch. During one of my visits, he introduced me to this game he was playing: Ultima Online. I watched him play – the idea that thousands of players were all playing together was compelling. It was new, and it was awesome – like nothing I’d seen before. Oh, sure, I’d played BBS games before – but you rarely encountered another player in real-time when you were all running around on a PC in someone’s basement.
Something kept me from jumping on it, though – it might have been the fact that it looked a lot like Ultima VIII, which I had recently played, and which impressed me not at all (not an uncommon sentiment – thanks a lot, EA). It wasn’t until Mike introduced me to his next MMO that I really jumped in with both feet.
He gave me a disk for a “beta test” – the first I’d heard of such a thing – and he gave me his login. It was an MMO, like Ultima Online, but it was in full 3D, like a first-person shooter. I had loved Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and others in the genre, so I had to jump on it, despite the monthly fee. EverQuest was my first MMO, and I was there right at launch.
In general, I loved it. I made friends, joined a guild called “The Silver Circle.” Neither the WoW nor the EQ2 guilds of that name are the same, from what I can tell – whatever primitive guild page or forum we had in those early days of the internet is now long gone, and the only record of a guildmate whose handle I can recall is Starrhawk, listed in this old EverQuest post here.
Eventually, I tired of the grinding. I had always loved exploring and seeing new things; the game barred you from most of that by placing difficult enemies everywhere. On top of that, it was crowded, and resembled an amusement park with long lines to “camp” the best equipment. I moved on to Asheron’s Call, and Earth & Beyond, but by 2002 I realized that I wasn’t having as much fun with these games. The novelty had worn off, they were sucking up a lot of time, and I was missing out on Real Life.
I actually logged in to the “classic” EQ simulator, Project 1999, a few years back, to re-experience the old days. I played it a lot; my wife was getting ticked at how much it occupied my attention. I started to realize, too, that the reason I was playing it was because I was feeling kind of depressed and wanted to “turn back the clock” and relive the late 1990s for a spell.
It made me wonder whether college itself hadn’t made me somewhat depressed – living in a dreary, cloudy city in New England, away from all my high school friends, coming from a private Christian school and living side-by-side for the first time in my life with thousands of hedonists. Maybe I spent so many hours in front of the computer screen because I wasn’t feeling all that great, and MMOs were an easy retreat – a way to forget the things that troubled me.
Today, I view my brief outing with MMOs as a sign that I wasn’t mentally healthy. I’m happy simply reading the occasional article from people that do play them, like Wilhelm Arcturus and Aywren Sojourner, and don’t think I’ll ever go back to playing MMOs again. I’d far rather set up some limited adventures – like a Minecraft server, or playing through the original Baldur’s Gate – with people I know, or want to get to know better. Even better, these days I like to sit around a table and play with folks in real life. Maybe it’s not that way with everyone – I am sure those who still play MMOs enjoy such games responsibly. I simply found it tough to limit my gaming time to prevent it from crowding out the rest of the enjoyable things in life when I was playing them…so for the last 15+ years, I’ve tried to avoid them.