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I first got into MUDs in 1995 or 96. Finding an article on them in Internet World magazine, I used my friend's older brother's university shell account to telnet in. And the first two I tried were very different. The first was FurryMUCK, and I used it for a bit before realizing that people were very into their fursonas and all the roleplaying meant something more to them than me. And the second was Dark Castle, a DikuMUD that in retrospect represented everything I now dislike in an online game: open PK, clans that demanded you treat your char like a second job, a mostly-absent group of imms (immortals, admins). But it also had, now lost to the web, an incredible starting guide put together by a more design- and high-minded player. It was a website that was half story, half tutorial. I fell in love, decided I'd keep at it. I even wrote and maintained a newbie guide of my own, and uploaded it to my ISP website. It probably got zero hits. Search sucked in those days, and nobody outside of my high school knew about my home page. I was the only MUDder. But I made it with love and I was proud of it. For all the usual reasons, I can't link it here.
So I kept at it, for a few months anyway. I struggled with my anti-paladin (race: long forgotten), unable to make any sort of progress. I'd try to kill low-level gnomes in the gnomish village. Level 50 PCs would just come up and waste me in a single hit for funsies. Griefers before that was a word. It was a weird time. I've got other stories, too: there was a clan that was made up of people from my hometown, a bizarre coincidence given I grew up in a city of a couple hundred thousand. When they found out that I was from there too, they invited me out to a party where I was told there'd be free mushrooms.
I was fourteen at the time. Wisely, I didn't go.
After those months passed I decided I was done with grind. I stopped mudding for a bit, then a couple of years later, went looking for other MUDs, wanting to get back in. Tried a few that didn't take. But at the start of grade twelve, in 1998, I looked at the MUDs listed in MUSHclient, the client I was using in Windows at the time. The first one listed was Achaea. I bounced off it. Too high-minded, too much RP and nobody online. Boring. So I tried the second one listed. It was called Aardwolf.
Over on Antenna this morning, I saw this entry by jecxyo, and felt it hard:
jecxyo: Almost 30 years of mudding and I still suck
I went to college and forgot my account. I created a new one in 2004 and went with a similar build. I played off and on. Being a game I could access from telnet it meant that I could play anywhere. In the computer lab between classes, on my phone. It was social. I often times just logged in to chat with people and not really play at all. I'd drop the game for a while and find it again, spend a few weekends just grinding away.
I have two characters on Aardwolf. The first is the one I created in 1998; the second I created about seven years later, when I was living on my own out east. My main and my alt.
Here are some stats from my alt's description in the "sc" (score) command - base class paladin, currently a psionicist - and "T0 R3", in Aardwolf parlance (tier 0, or "untiered"; third "mort", or class playthrough on a particular tier):
| Strength : [ 52/30 ] | Race : Ratling | Practices : [ 592] | | Intelligence: [ 56/36 ] | Class : Paladin | Trains : [ 355] | | Wisdom : [ 49/31 ] | Sub : Knight | Trivia : [ 161] | | Dexterity : [ 52/31 ] | Gender: Male | Quest points : [ 19399] | | Constitution: [ 54/35 ] | Level : 1 | Quest time : [ 28] | | Luck : [ 62/35 ] | Total : 403 | Goals done : [ 1] |
In the interest of not creating a link between my online identities, the alt is unnamed. But I've been playing him since 2005, when I was living out east, in a relationship turned long distance, living with a roommate but otherwise very alone. My main char was sitting at superhero (level 201); I had maxed equipment and was enjoying just sitting and doing quests and occasional high-level activities. I played some FFXI, but it wasn't enough. I needed something else to do.
So I started my alt. His name was a variant on Merriman, a character from Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising". Why? I'm not entirely sure, just that something in the name spoke to me, some memory of the character from the books I read when I was nine or ten. So I made my own version of it, similar but slightly different. This character would be a paladin (my main was a thief). In my head, a lonely, armoured figure carrying a sword. I started to play.
Every day out east I spent hours commuting to and from school. I came home to a quiet roommate, a young, scruffy guy just out of high school who didn't work, didn't want to work, and just collected welfare. He paid his share of the rent. He didn't have much money for food but neither did I, so we'd make big batches of stuff - rice, chili, pots of tea - and split it. He had a desktop up in his bedroom, talked to people on MySpace, hit up young women on a gothy website whose name exists somewhere in my memory, but not within reach. And I sat in my bedroom, doing assignments for my coursework, calling my then-girlfriend (now-wife) every evening. In the background, TinyFugue, a curses-based client. I'd periodically alt-tab. Quest on main, level on alt.
Aardwolf is a funny game: started by a Floridian called Lasher in the mid 90s, it's your classic hack-and-slash MUD, just with more. There are 201 levels per class: you then do another class, and when you're done all the classes, you start again, with some incremental perks and bonuses. There are hundreds of areas. There's PvP but not by default. And Aardwolf (or to its players, just "aard") allows for a variety of playstyles. You can grind your way to the "end" (T9R7 and repeat T9 endlessly); you can sit at level 1 of your first mort, quest endlessly, and never advance (supernewbieing); and a variety of other styles. With my main, I eventually hit T0R7 sat at superhero ever since. That was in 2006, I think; it was a while ago. Anyway, I'm still there, improving my hit points, mana, and moves very, very slowly, now at around 50k a piece. My alt's now sitting as well, a paladin/mage/psionicist supernewbie, questing and questing and questing.
I'll be honest: I stopped playing the game almost two decades ago, in terms of levelling and advancing and all the things the strongest players assume you're supposed to do. Realizing that being competitive would necessarily involve hours of grinding every day, at a minimum, that I'd never keep up with the people whose entire lives was optimizing their chars in a text based game, I essentially withdrew, freezing both chars in time. My main sits at R7 L201, questing; my alt sits at R3 L1, questing. Every day I log on, get my daily blessing (a few quests of double quest points, plus some extra bonuses I may or may not take advantage of). I quest, wait at least 30 minutes, quest again. Get a hundred or so quest points a day. I save up for wishes or mastery bonuses. These cost thousands, or tens of thousands, of quest points apiece. I grind and grind, not because it's fun, but because it's there. Over time, the cadences have become ingrained. But there's occasionally variety. Sometimes I chat with old friends, ones I've known for decades. There's a calm in this.
I've played Aardwolf for twenty-five years in September. I stopped properly playing eighteen years ago, ignoring the grind of levels and groups, the whole get-to-superhero, remort, do-it-all-again. But I still play, daily. I collect a few quest points. Once or twice a year I buy a wish, or a couple points of mastery. It's slow as hell, but that's a good thing. The game's there for me. The quests are there for me. I know where everything is. There's a familiarity in it. It's like walking around my house in the dark.
I've been logging in to Aardwolf longer than any other community. Decades longer than Twitter, than the forums and personal websites of the journalling years, than Usenet, than BBSs. Who would have thought that a text-based game would become a a long constant in my life. But there's a small joy in it. I like questing. Saving for a year and buying a dumb skill that has no bearing on anything in any part of my life. I've got friends there I still talk to. The friendships aren't always deep, but they're steady. Every so often we stop to talk, catch up a bit. What we've been doing, what's changed since the last time. School, jobs, kids. In at least one case, prison. In the meantime, we run a few quests. Other people grind out a bunch of levels. And life goes on.