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Old 04-06-2011, 03:06 AM   #1
melopene
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: Birmingham, AL
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Confessions of a 15-year MUD-girl

Dear MUD friends,

I'm going to be celebrating the most unfortunate anniversary of my 29th birthday next week, and I've been thinking about life in general. In that spirit, I want to share my own story - I hope it will make any of you stop and think about your own life as a MUD player. I'm not recruiting, nor am I doing anything else to tempt you to do this or that. However, I will share more than I have ever dared to share before, even in private IMs and conversations. I'm sure there's a handful of you whose experiences mirror my own, but I thought it best to share them instead of allowing history to repeat itself once more, if possible.

With apologies for the tl;dr, but hey, it's fifteen years worth of stuff (and barely even scratching the surface)...

Also, fair warning. This pretty raw stuff, especially toward the beginning. The faint of heart and faint of butt need not read.

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Let me preface this by saying that I've always been the smart kid, as in, skip a grade in elementary school and hope nobody notices smart kid (trust me, they noticed). My few high school friends referred to me as the 'human encyclopaedia, science book, math reference, and spelling dictionary'. The non-friends mocked me as 'Tricky Vick'.

I had just turned fifteen during the summer when I discovered Modus Operandi on AOL, and I thought it was fantastic, but I couldn't figure out the commands - much less how to use those pesky communicators that kept whizzing at me. (Before you mock me, AOL was the only available dial-up at the time on the outskirts of Birmingham AL)

So, I decided to check out the other games AOL had to offer. Like Terris.

Terris was by and large the craziest game I ever played. At its peak, there were about 1100 players on at any given time. The battlemage's guild was insane, even though it was probably the smallest of them all. People were using the game to find new husbands, have hot sweaty mudsex, and I wasn't that much the wiser, being 15 and a student at one of the most sheltered Christian schools you could imagine. Oh, and there was mudsex. Being 15, and later 16, and not having any idea what the hell I was doing, I was enticed into quite a bit. In all honesty, the things I did as a teen would've (and likely should've) had a number of older men arrested on child pornography charges. This was long before the day when this might be considered predatory, so I very literally learned about the practice of sex from MUDs.

Mom eventually figured out that my sister and I were MUDing. She grilled the IMP from Terris, finding out that I'd had over 1000 hours of playtime (considering that this was over the summer, it doesn't seem so bad in retrospect). Mom never knew about the sexy-time. Sister quit. I got lectures. I was told that I was going to hell. I decided that Christianity wasn't for me if God was going to send me to hell over a -game-. I got interested in the principles of other religions (I started with the less-controversial-at-the-time-islam), but got caught reading a book about wicca. I was thrown out of the religious school. So much for the Ivy league, no matter how bored I was in class, much less all the scholarship opportunities! I ended up at directional state, and I'm still very glad for that.

College. Oh, dear. I was that twink. Not so much a twink as a girl who didn't know better, for what it's worth - I was barely 17 and never did actually have 'the talk', for the record. This guy named Darin decided to drag me onto a 'real' mud instead of Terris. The IMP had me download Zmud and wear hotpants on my character. I learned the basics of OLC on CIRCLE. I learned a lot of other things about creepy men, but not an actual lesson. Instead, I learned that slutty might be valuable in life. That attitude ended up in a few date rapes, only one which I ever even tried to report.

I spent the bulk of my freshman year MUDing from a Compaq 486/DX laptop with a docking station, back in 1998. This was considered to be super-cool at the time, despite the fact that it was a hand-me-down from BellSouth. On the weekends, I was back on the super-cool P1-133 with Win98 at home. I MUDed a lot then, almost entirely on MERC derivs. I IMMed on a game whose name I can't recall, but I know it was on the Mythran codebase. The IMP was entirely convinced that she was the reincarnation of an egyptian goddess, and had a distinct hatred for Molly (now a very successful owner of 4D).

Then I got myself a K6-3 450, a T-1, a CD burner, and Napster. Suddenly, I was the most popular girl in the entirety of the dorms at directional state, and it felt damn good. At one point, my undergraduate advisor asked me, 'Do you -REALLY- have 1200 of your favorite songs on your hard drive?' MUDs were still a weekend dalliance, but not so much an obsession, until I ended up in a dorm for one. At this point, I'd already decided that I wanted to start a MUD of my own, and was usually stoned off my gourd. I tried to start a MUD and failed miserably, though I had a rousing chorus of 12-year-olds to cheer me on.

The point of a dorm is not to break you apart from your friends, it's to force you to make them. Unfortunately, moving as a late sophomore into a room built for two but housing one isn't the way to go about that. I thought that what friends I'd made would stick around, because now I was cool and had a single. Instead, the freshman I was assigned to share a bathroom with was busted smoking ungodly amounts of pot (and not even good pot) while I was out of the country for Labor Day. I was damn near thrown out of directional state for it, but my mother hired an attorney to demonstrate to the university that it had nothing to do with me, and got me off the hook. It's been mentioned twice since then, although my family realizes my serious pothead tendencies (and shares them on occasion, though it is never spoken of nor made to be a collective event).

Terris had gone to pay-to-play, and faking a credit card number and using the name of a man at my church only worked for so long, until people realized that there were ways to verify those things. Then it went off of AOL, and was p2p only, but available through telnet or the special front-end - like GS3, but in all honesty, far more lame. A guy and I who played there grew obsessed with one another, and after months on end, I decided that I should move up to the DC suburbs to be with him. I took a year off of school, lived with a much older man, and was generally taken advantage of. At some point in this venture, I found a game (we'll call it GT) and fell into it, learning to love the lands and the people, and eventually became head builder.

Then, as all young girls do, I found that older guy had a few other girlfriends in various cities across the eastern seaboard, and decided that it was best that we parted ways (I demonstrated this to him by smashing his groceries on the sidewalk as well as his 17" monitor, which was a nice asset back then). GT and I had some great times together after I finally moved back home and started back to school. I developed three full cities for the game, all of which were fully comprehensive and included external areas and what have you.

By this point, just goofing off wasn't enough, I still wanted to -be- a character - not the 17 year old girl wearing hotpants or a staffer with a personality, but a real RP character. GT and I had a great relationship, and I had some of the deepest RP I'll ever recall there. Unfortunately, the RP was an afterthought, and it wasn't valued at all, but instead treated as a nuisance to the imp's long term vision - this, of course, becoming more and more clear after building more and more fully functional cities. And of course there was the issue of GT and the self-serving behavior, the vote bribery, and what have you. These things happen to the extent that you would fully expect said corruption from a MUD owner in the early 2000s (but hey, he had the DIKU/MERC/ROM credits in his helpfiles!)

After a while, I found out that the boy was cheating on me in a serious way, and moved home. I grew tired of the absence of real RP on GT and started playing a different game (we'll call it XiN), not too long after the 9/11 incident. When I was offered an admin position on XiN, I had already left GT over ethical issues and was ready to make things happen. I did, for a good while. For nearly four years, I poured my heart and soul into XiN, creating a new continent with a team of player-builders and developing concept after concept with its head coder, who was as enthusiastic about RP as I was.

And then I met the boy.
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