I didn’t grow up playing paper-and-pencil games. I grew up before those kinds of things existed. I even pre-date the Society for Creative Anachronism. Back in the ancient days of my youth, we didn’t have the Internet or cable television. We had only…the power of our minds!
We read a lot in those dark ages. My sister and I used to play a game wherein we each had a book and one of us would read aloud a random sentence. Then, the other of us would read a random sentence from the book she had open, striving to quickly locate a random sentence on the page that might provide a good laugh. We also created our own plays (a difficult task, given that there were only two of us and we had to serve as both actors and audience) and wrote newsletters. Ah, such simple days!
From that sort of literary entertainment, we eventually gravitated toward text-based games. The experience was very similar to our random sentence game. You never knew what someone might come up with in response to something you wrote!
I loved roleplaying. In particular, I liked having two characters on separate accounts that I could play with at the same time. With text games, one didn’t need two high end computers to hydra. I could alt-tab very quickly, and with typing gusts of up to 95 WPM, my characters often carried on lengthy conversations with each other, each using a distinct in-character “voice.” At one time, I went adventuring with a friend of mine; he had no idea until I told him that both the bard and the ranger in the group were me.
I often miss that aspect of playing games, as nowdays I’m just as likely as anyone else to be using macros for everything.
To play multiple characters in a graphical game, I need more than just good alt-tab skills. I have to have a custom user interface, maybe several rows of macros and a cheat sheet. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of roleplaying, either. Players are focused on whatever it is that they’re going to received from the adventure, whether it’s an item or more experience. Even on a roleplaying server, there are frequent out of character discussions on the open channels.
Games seem much more complex now and require different skills than the old text games. I miss being inspired by a coastal cliff description where I’d type out, “I love the view from here,” and someone else would see the same words but could imagine different landscape than mine.
Roleplaying allowed me to be someone else (or several someone elses) for a while. It was an escape from the mundane world and my regular life. I miss it.
Categories:
