Quick sketches of some of the many characters I’ve portrayed in real-time online roleplaying (on OtherSpace and elsewhere) over the years:
Month: November 2013
Long time hooked…
Zork was my gateway drug.
Using a relatively basic command parser, this text-only computer adventure game by Infocom allowed a single player to explore a grid of rooms, solving puzzles and gathering treasure, all the while trying to avoid being devoured by a grue in dark chambers.
I had no idea when I first played Zork, back in the 1980s, that my explorations of the Great Underground Empire would lead to my work on OtherSpace.
But Zork and other Infocom games undeniably served as the basic foundation for what would become my pet project for the past 15 years (and counting).
In the mid-1990s, I played a MUD (multi-user dimension) for the first time. It was called Infinity. Like Zork, it was text-based, with a grid of rooms and puzzles to solve. The difference, however, was that I could interact with other players from around the world in the same virtual space.
I enjoyed the diversion while the novelty lasted.
Ultimately, though, I found myself drawn instead to another multi-player text-based game called TOS TrekMUSE. This game, inspired by Star Trek‘s original series with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, didn’t have built-in puzzles to solve. It required players to submit a character biography that proved they grasped the theme. It had a coded space system, so players who joined Starfleet might be assigned as crew to virtual starships, such as the Yorktown and the Excelsior.
You had one job to do…
Few things get my eye twitching like I’m Chief Inspector Dreyfus in “The Pink Panther” than a lead in a newspaper article like this:
“Fifty people gathered together at GreenSpacePark on Saturday for the Shiny Happy Music Festival.”
It’s not that an opening sentence such as this is technically wrong. The problem instead is that it’s a cop-out that cheats the reader (and the writer) of whatever the actual story might be.
Men Without Hats, Men With Vision
Here’s a goofy essay that I wrote on the web back in 2003. Saving it here for posterity:
In 1983, the United States was under the grip of a brutal dictator with a penchant for jellybeans and happy-go-lucky quips about nuclear annihilation in close proximity to live microphones. Betamax videocassette recorders were the rage. And an upstart network called MTV dared to make a go of showing music videos around-the-clock.
Yes, indeed, the fertile media in that cultural petri dish proved perfect for the adulation due a band known as Men Without Hats and their classic musical missive, The Safety Dance.