Gamer Geek Speak

My evolution into an online game player happened pretty organically. I wanted to take a trip down memory lane and pay homage to some of my favorite games that shaped me.

As a young lass we were introduced to console game-playing on systems like Odyssey, Atari and the Commodore 64. After college, in favor of not having to upgrade my system every year, I extended my game life to maybe 3 years by switching to PC games.

From Console to PC

 

 

At first it was single-player real-time strategy games like Age of Empires and its expansions, Command and Conquer, and my all time favorite Dungeon Keeper 2. Something about slapping my imps around, and the minions hitting it big in the casino I built for them while the song Disco Inferno plays in celebration, brings a warm glow to my heart.

After a while of playing all kinds of single-player games; RPGs (Role Playing Games), FPSs (First Person Shooters) and RTSs (Real Time Strategies), I found I could beat these games in like a weekend time frame. No matter what the content; protecting my station from aliens, going on a postal rampage, or having an adventure where I grew from an unimposing nobody half-elf into a fully grown warrior priestess, became formula, boring and I could finish it in no time.

By this time, I had married a computer geek and we had bought our first house. Since he worked with computers, he had access to a ton of computer equipment. We decided to make our basement into a computer play room we called "the war room." We made counter space and filled the area with little stations which contained a monitor, keyboard and mouse. Then invited all our geeky friends over. All they needed to bring was their box. They'd hook up and plug in and we started enjoying playing games on LAN (Local Area Network or for real laymen: we all hooked up to each other in our basement).

The first one we tried was the RPG Neverwinter Nights, which turned out to be a catastrophe because well, teamwork was just not everybody's forte. So we switched over to a little FPS we had previously beat on single-player mode, but were very fond of Unreal Tounament. After all the late nights staying up with my oldest when he was a baby and chasing him around like a chicken with my head cut off, it was kind of cathartic and satisfying to hide around the corners in the game and hear "HEADSHOT" as I took him out.

When we had played all the scenarios and got bored with Unreal, we switched up to Battlefield 1942, which was kind of the same, only this one had a cool WWII setting and interactive vehicles. My favorite tactic was jumping in a jeep or vehicle and running over as many people as I could, deep into enemy territory; a truly suicidal mission which earned me the nickname "Achmed." But no worries folks, this is not real life; I safely respawned back at my home base.

Eventually, the amount of people playing together got fewer and fewer, and game night lost its luster, but I gotta tell you... I longed for getting into games with real people. Playing together or against your friends is fun.

Enter the MMORPG

 

 

A bunch of my former LAN playing game-mates started playing the EverQuest2 online game, and I was drawn to the idea of playing a game with other people, but with a name like EVERquest I hesitated, if only but for a brief minute, before I decided to try it out. I wasn't wrong in my hesitation; just like I thought, I was hooked and I played it for 5 years. This was hardly the kind of game I was used to playing, that I could complete in a weekend. It had it all…other people to play with, challenging storyline, and goals to reach that wouldn't be achieved too easily. Sometimes it seemed that I would never be done with it….and lamented that I couldn't spend the rest of my life playing a video game. That would be just crazy. But still I played. In that time I met tons of people from around the globe and have made lasting relationships that exist outside of the game.

After 5 years, I had finally really done it all in that game. Gotten the best gear, played with the best players, completed all the expansions, beat the hardest bosses. So that even when a new expansion came out with more areas to play, gear to get, and bosses to kill, it finally became repetitive and boring. Friends came and left the game just like "real life," as we MMO players are fond of calling it. Since quitting EQ2, I have switched to other MMOs like Warhammer, which tosses a mix of PVP (Player vs Player) that EQ2 didn't have. I am excited about trying the newest MMO Aion with its release this month, but so far nothing is holding my interest the way my first MMO did, so I don't have high hopes.