Lots of people (as in 12 million) enjoy playing WOW. It’s fun whether you’re leveling a new character or already a seasoned level 80 running high-level instances. More importantly, many people log in to play because it’s where their friends are, whether they’re in clans or just have random online acquaintances they like to keep in touch with.
I was having that experience ten years ago through pure text.
I first found Nilgiri, a dikuMUD, when I was about ten years old. zMud and Telnet were mysteries to me at the time, and Nilgiri was the only MUD I could play because it had a Java web client that made it easy to log in and start playing. Those immortal first words, “By what name do you wish to be known?” had me hooked from the start. My first character was a cleric. I made the mistake of jumping down a well outside my guildhall and falling into the sewers, where I was promptly attacked by a baby bat and almost died when it kept chasing me. I abused my newbie privileges and spammed everyone for help, was promptly escorted out of the sewers by a friendly player and told not to go jumping down any more wells until I was at least level 10. Thus began the epic chapter of my life where Nil became my newfound fascination and stayed that way for the next six years.
Playing video games in elementary school back in the mid 90s was totally dorky. I had lucked out and found this place full of cool people to talk to, combined with the addictive nature of leveling my character into a bad ass. Discovering new areas and the monsters and new items therein was like crack. I remember when my girl scout troop would come over to my house (my mom was the leader of our troop) and they’d want to play this one game I had where you could dress up dolls and decorate environments with “stickers.” And that was fine, they thought that was fun and cool. But I immediately realized that loading up Nil and showing it to them, much less trying to explain how it worked and why I found it fun, would be similar to teaching my grandma how to play a FPS with the 360 controller. I could just imagine their responses. “Who plays a game without pictures?” or “You have to type to be able to do anything?”
So Nil sort of stayed my little secret for a long time, all the way into junior high a few years later. One day my neighbor came over and asked what game it was that I was always playing. I started telling him about Nil, feeling sort of dumb, and surprisingly enough he totally got into it with me. He would log on at his house and I’d be logged in at mine and we’d go romping around killing crap together for hours.
I have so many memorable experiences playing Nil I could easily fill a novel. There was the time when a high level player loaned me an awesome sword, which was shortly stolen off my dead corpse by another high level player; hunting newts in Newtonia and taking out Sir Isaac Newton for the very first time (he had a nasty arsenal of spells); receiving a very powerful item as a gift and then trading it away for something stupid because I didn’t realize how rare it was (I seriously still feel bad about this one). It’s almost obnoxious how many memories you can collect from playing a game for that long.
Although all of my various characters start to blur together, my main character that most people would remember me by was a druid named Starmyst. I got into all sorts of adventures with her, such as being one of the first druid PCs in the entire game (the druid class was added a few years after I first began playing), being the first player to have an in-game pet that followed me around (a white tiger named Kaelas), being invited to join the Friendly clan (we helped new players, a startling full circle to the very first time I jumped down that well) and eventually being nominated to become an Immortal in the game world.
A friend asked me recently why I didn’t get into WOW, since he thought it sounded like a game I would’ve liked. I replied, I know I would like it. I would probably have a blast and meet some cool people. But I know that the whole time, in the back of my head, I would be comparing it to Nilgiri, and that doesn’t quite seem fair — not to WOW because my bar has already been set so high from playing Nil for so long, and not fair to Nil because walls of text really can’t compete with graphical prettiness and all the polish inherent in newer games.
In time, I know I will sit down and play WOW and make it a point to enjoy it as a fresh experience. I could get as hooked on the game as I was on Nil, but now that I have priorities to my education and various other responsibilities I doubt I’d be able to make enough time for it. Perhaps the deeper issue that lurks within this apparent stubbornness is my unwillingness to possibly tarnish such fond childhood memories with the game knowledge I have now as an adult. Eventually, I don’t think I’ll feel as compelled to protect my memories of Nil. But for now, I’m not quite ready to replace those adventures with new ones.
