When I was in my "younger" years of childhood, the internet hadn't been invented. By the time I was old enough to get online and actually surf "the world wide web" (as it was then known), we were still using 14.4k modems and had dial-up ISPs.
It was way back then that my grandmother and grandfather let me get online and play with America Online (which was pretty much one of about three options for somewhat decent internet). One of the first things I did was get into chat rooms and, specifically, the role-playing game scene.
I'd played Dungeons & Dragons once with my aunt Nikki before, but it went horribly. I'd spent about an hour and a half writing up my character (an Elf Ranger) and investing way too much thought and emotion into my first RPG character ever. The group was running "The Temple of Elemental Evil" and was in some forest somewhere coming up on a camp of orcs when they said "Hey, look, an elf ranger!" and that's where I came in. I said I'd go scout ahead and get some recon. For being about seven years old, I thought that was a good idea.
Well, this was back during the days of THAC0 and percentile-based skills, and when I rolled a 96 (which was bad, since it had to be under the skill in question), it amounted to my character skipping loudly through dried leaves, whistling a merry tune, tripping over an exposed tree root, yelling in pain and surprise quite loudly and alerting the entire orc camp to my presence. That's when they promptly turned my character into a pin cushion in the span of about 12 seconds and I died, horribly. Coincidentally, that's also when I swore off D&D.
So I went to the other "new shiny" thing I'd discovered, the internet. Man, the second I could get onto Geocities and make my webpage, it was like Christmas. I could see the world and show them who I was with this awesome webpage I'd made! Rotating animated pictures! Backgrounds! Comic Sans! I was the man!
That's when I found a game going on in a channel called Rhy-Din (and to this day, I have no fucking clue what it meant or where it was or anything like that). It was a "kitchen-sink" Vampire: The Masquerade game where the characters were vampires and the players were acting out what those characters did, resolving tasks and combat through a dice-based system.
I could get into this!
So I convinced my dad to buy me the Vampire Players Guide because, coming from D&D, I thought that's what I needed - a guide for players. I was wrong and I had none of the rules but the internet helped me out and I kinda figured things out as I went until I could buy the big ol' fat Vampire: The Masquerade core rule book. Almost immediately, I was pulled into a world that let me be as creative as I wanted.
Even now, I remember a quote from the Player's Guide.
"Read the Vampire Golden Rule again: there are no rules. It works two ways. The Storyteller is allowed to ignore the rules of the game if they don't fit into the plans, and the player is allowed to challenge the Storyteller's imagination with creative combat. 'These rules are not so much rules as they are guidelines, and you are free to use, abuse, ignore and change them as you see fit.' There has never been a more significant rule written for a game. It allows the Storyteller to control the game without having to worry about a player screaming, 'You Can't Do That; It Says So on Page ...' and it allows the player to ask, 'How Much Damage Will He Take If I Shove His Face into The Deep Fryer?' Isn't that great?"
That right there was the stuff of movies and television. It was a stroke of brilliance. More importantly, it certainly wasn't me skipping through the forest before getting turned into a pin-cushion.
Technology advanced and I discovered IRC and more complicated webpages and flash and java and all kinds of things. I got into first-person shooters and learned how to code in more complex languages beyond HTML. We had MySpace and now we have Facebook. We had CD players and now we have mp3 players. We had "the world wide web" and now we have "the internet."
Some time ago, I'd set up a Facebook page and decided I wanted to add some interests and follow some of the writers I'd grew up reading the creations of. More recently, I decided to follow Mark Rein-Hagen, the author of Vampire: The Masquerade and essentially, one of the few masterminds behind the original World of Darkness line (which was the offspring of Ars Magica, and indeed, some pieces of Ars Magica evolved into what became the entire Storyteller System of the World of Darkness game line).
Thanks to social networking, I've been able to find some of the people that helped write and design some of the games I was playing, and it's awesome to be able to talk to people that I considered my idols back then (and even still do, simply because their indirect influence spurred my creativity more than any school or class I've ever even looked at) just because some of 'em are on Facebook. It's great to be able to talk to people that I've never even met (or heard of, in some cases) that have read my book (or short stories or whatever) and hear them tell me how much they like (or dislike) parts of it for whatever reason. Even now, it's still a thrill to have someone go "Hey, I read your book and I hope you do more" just like it's a thrill to say that to somebody else.
Ah, technology.
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