When I was thirteen, I had your stereotypical “thirteen year-old” experience. Nowadays, they call that the “hasn’t quite finished puberty” but is “owning you and swearing badly on COD4” phase. Back in the 90s, there were these online forums called bulletin-board systems (or BBS). You wouldn’t connect to them through the Internet, but through a modem and a text-based terminal software. On one such BBS was a game called Legend of the Red Dragon. Now, if you’ve never heard of it (which I assume you haven’t), it was a text based multiplayer RPG. The goal was to get strong enough to fight a dragon. Once someone defeated the dragon ten total times, they won the game and everything reset.
Every day, you could log in and perform your daily quests. To accomplish this, you went out into the virtual forest and looked for something to kill. You could do this 30 times a day, and were often rewarded with experience points and gold. If you killed other players who were playing the game, you would win half their experience (and they would lose it). There was another interesting dynamic as well: You could get married to other players. I distinctly recall this one instance where I married one of the higher ranking players on the server, and then killed her while she was offline so I could gain her experience. Yup, I was all about the power. And an asshole. But hey, I was only “thirteen” …
This is where it gets rather dark for me. I had an obsession. I had to login to the server and complete my quests as soon as possible everyday. This meant that I was sitting there at midnight, ready to login and play the quests. As this was before the modern Internet, the BBS only had access to two phone lines, so only two people could login at any point in time. I would often dial over and over again waiting for the busy signal to go away until the early morning hours. Eventually, I figured out you could dial into one of the system administrator’s (known as the Sysop’s) alternate phone lines. When it transitioned to the answering machine, it would kick off one of the people connected to the BBS. I would simply hang up and dial back in. This worked great for a few weeks or months (I can’t recall exactly).
The Sysop found out and banned me promptly. I was able to see the ban message the next time I logged in. Right next to the logout button was a button to message the Sysop. Being the “thirteen” year-old that I was, I did the responsible thing and hit the logou… Okay. That’s not how this happened and you know it. I sent the administrator a scathing, profanity induced work of teenage art. He then snail-mailed a copy of the letter to my parents. I was grounded for a month.
This event shaped my life in an unexpected way. I had experienced this obsession with competition and realized that I did not like that quality of myself. I didn’t like the type of person that it turned me into. So, I mustered all my immense emotional maturity and did the obviously healthy thing: I vowed never to play any game that doesn’t end ever again. I also became adverse to direct competition. I decided to bury the character flaw in my mind and not evolve. The problem is that real-life and interacting with other people can be seen as a game that doesn’t end, and in some respects is a competition as well. Dating is an extremely good example of something that falls into this category. You are under the fog of war and you make decisions every day that you cannot take back. Mingling and being involved in social experiences can also be seen as another example.
As a previously avid video-gamer, I’m much more of a fan of the save point. You make a decision and you try it. If it doesn’t work out, then just restart from where you saved. For the next two decades, I avoided any games that didn’t generally end or have save points. This included first-person multiplayer games as well as MMORPGs (once they became popular). I also avoided dating and socially competitive activities like board games. I rationalized this behavior with myself by saying that I was just avoiding all the drama that everyone else was needlessly subjecting themselves to. As the years went by, I noticed the same obsessive behavior in my family members. To a certain extent, this can be healthy behavior. Someone with a passion can be called obsessed depending on how positive or negative that act affects their life. Obviously there’s a difference between someone obsessed with finding the cure for cancer and shaping their lives around that goal and someone stuck in Ironforge for six years.
The games aren’t the problem though. It’s me. I’ve spent the past 20 years avoiding these types of activities because I believed I couldn’t control myself. Because of my avoidance, I felt as if I was enlightened. What really happened is that I’ve been running away from a part of my character that I believed I could never control. Making mistakes and learning from them leads to a feeling of emotional vulnerability that I’ve been unwilling to face. As a result, I’ve missed out on life experiences that would have taught me how to cope and deal with the emotions and situations appropriately. I feel as though I’m behind on life experiences again, and I feel terrible.
Perhaps I’m someone who isn’t capable of controlling those impulses. But, I’ll never find out if I hold back that part of me any longer. I don’t know if I can change 20 years of programming, but I’m not going to sit back and bottle it in anymore. I’m going to be myself, and I’m going to make the mistakes that need to be made, and I’m going to learn to be whole again.