Ladies and gentlemen, I am a lifetime computer gamer.

Specifically, I am a computer gamer, though my gaming experience does also extend to card and dice games, puzzles, games of logic, DVD games (such as Scene It!), board games and more (but these are not the focus of this article). It started with our first game console which was brought home when I was about four or five, if memory serves me. No, we didn't have a PlayStation or X-Box. We didn't even have a Nintendo. No, I'm far more 'oldschool' than that. We had an Atari 2600.

The Atari Days...

We first had games such as Pong, Pac-Man and Frogger. Then the Atari 800 and 800XL came out, which were more computer-like with a floppy disk drive and a keyboard. More games were added, such as Donkey Kong, Joust and Q-Bert. Arcade-style games kept me and my family amused for hours on end. We had 'joysticks' to play these games on, which were essentially game controllers, except that they were these black boxes you'd hold in your hand with a single stick jutting out of the middle and a red 'fire button' on the top, left hand corner of the box. When I first saw a controller for a Nintendo, I remember feeling confused by all the buttons. The most fancy joystick we had for the Atari had three buttons. One in each top corner of the box you held, depending on if you were a righty or lefty, and one on the top of the stick for flight simulators. That was it!

From arcade games, I graduated into something called 'adventure games'. These had storylines and challenge the player to solve riddles, perform quests or tasks and use their best judgement to solve the games. As I was already a huge fan of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book series, these types of games truly appealed to me because I chose what happened in the story. If I entered the house, one storyline happened. If I went down into the spooky forest, another storyline popped up. Each session was different. One of the most famous of these games from this time period was called Zork. The details are a bit fuzzy for me now, about 20+ years later, but I do recall the text informing me that it all started with me standing before a little white house. (These first adventure games were all text-based, fyi.)

"It is very dark. You will likely be eaten by a grue."

I could then type a series of commands to enter the aforementioned house and examine various objects and even pick up some of these objects to put in my 'inventory'. This inventory got quite large and I couldn't understand how I had enough pocket space for everything, but that didn't stop me from playing! Inevitably, however, I would always be lead to the basement of the house which, like a bad horror flick, was always dark. Very dark. In fact, the description if memory serves me was, "It is very dark. You will likely be eaten by a grue."

No one ever seemed to know what a grue was, exactly, but it sounded terrifying!

In fact, I 'got eaten by a grue' more times than I'd care to admit until I found the flashlight elsewhere in the house. Apparently, although grues love the taste of adventurers, they can't stand the light and were kept at bay with the trusty light-source.

There were many sequels to Zork and even a text adventure game based on the Douglas Adams book (one of my favourites!) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

"You stay out of this! You're dead!"

(Play the game here: http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html )

I never managed to get very far, as I would either get run over by a bulldozer which was trying to clear a path for a new highway bypass, or got blown up with the rest of the Earth by the Vogon Fleet to make way for an intergalactic bypass. (Guess I should have ordered the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster to ease the transition, hm?) And amusingly enough, if I tried to type any command other than QUIT or RESTART, I would be told by the game, "You stay out of this! You're dead!"

Eventually, the movie The Dark Crystal inspired a new game of the same name in a new type of adventure game: the graphic adventure. Well, it wasn't the first of its kind but it was one of the most advanced of this kind at the time. It still told a story and text was still a large part of the game, but there was theme music that wasn't hokey arcade game music and there were impressive images to help illustrate what your character would be seeing and experiencing. Sure, the images were still images, but it was replacing the strictly text-based adventures with something a little more 'eye candy' in nature.

The PC Revolution

Once we got our first PC, the variety, quality and quantity of the available games improved and increased nearly exponentially.

Adventure games were no longer still images with text explaining the story, but involved more animation and even action-based interaction, rather than typing in commands. One game stood out among the rest in this genre for the longest time: Myst. This was apparently inspired by Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island (which I have, sadly, never read) and the graphics were so beautiful and awe-inspiring that this game really set a new standard for games which came out after it.

I finished the game in two weeks.

Myst was a first-person adventure game, where instead of controlling an 'avatar' or 'character' through a series of screens, you viewed the Myst 'ages' or worlds as though through your own eyes. I was mesmerized by this. The storyline was a mystery to the player, who gets dumped into this realm without any explanation as to why they are there or how they can get 'home'. Only by discovering the story of the Myst world and ages did the player learn their purpose for being summoned there, as well as how to get back home, which is the ultimate goal -- you were stuck there until you solved the giant puzzle.

A series of puzzles, tasks and games of logic (or sometimes elimination) were set before the player to not only stumble across (yes, you needed to find them first) but to also solve and complete. Each puzzle was a building block to the resolution and eventually all the pieces of the puzzle could be put together. I knew people who spent months and months working on playing the game, trying to solve each task, staying up late one too many nights, and so on.

I finished the game in two weeks.

I was riveted. I received the game for Christmas and did nothing else through my holidays than play this game (well, and bathe, eat and sleep, of course! No stinky Kellys here!). I fully immersed myself in this world because it was eye- and brain-candy. This was more my speed.

Playing Socially & Interactive Storytelling, Old School Style

Eventually, my gaming experienced changed yet again and took a turn back to my 'roots' of gaming. In 1993, I started my first year of university here at McMaster and was set up with my very first internet account. Back then, Windows 95 hadn't come out just yet and everything was done in DOS. We didn't have Internet Explorer or Outlook. We had Lynx (all text) and Pine (some of you will remember Pine). But we also had something called Telnet. Some of you know what this is and some of you don't. For the benefit of those who don't, telnet is an internet protocol which allows you to connect your machine to another machine on the internet, essentially. You log directly into that machine and have access to whatever the machine administrator allows you access to. In a nutshell. I'm sure it's more complicated than that and the I.T. department is likely wincing at me (sorry!), but that's the general gist.

With Telnet, I found that I could gain access to machines on the internet that had games set up for public use. These were text-based games. (Remember Zork and The Hitchhiker's Guide?) But what was special about these games was that nothing was scripted by the computer and multiple people could be playing in the same environment as you at the same time.

Back up to the next column...

...(think: interactive storytelling)...

The generic term for these is a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon or Domain). The games I tuned into were actually MUSHes (Multi-User Shared Hallucination) which were geared more toward a real story than just a 'dungeon crawl' where you go and kill monsters for loot. Imagine a series of chat rooms linked together, each with a description of a room or place of some sort, that you could walk through in a logical order. Then imagine 10-100 people all roaming through this area together, looking to role-play (think: interactive storytelling). This is what a MUSH is all about. It takes the elements of the old text adventure games, mixes them with tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons or Vampire: the Masquerade (I was already starting to play games like these with friends) and then allows anyone in the world to login and play. How fun!

I started on a game called Dark Metal MUSH which was a slightly futuristic setting in the L.A.-Anaheim-Tijuana area where vampires, werewolves, fae-folk and mages (wizards, essentially) were a very real possibility and people knew of their existence. Wow! How exciting is that?? You would 'roll up' a character with a bunch of statistics, write up a general background history for the character and slap a description on your character 'object' in the game, then once you were approved by the staff, you could roam around the areas and play with whomever you wanted. After playing there for five years, I branched out into other games and other genres. I 'retired' from online World of Darkness games (i.e. Vampire: the Masquerade) and branched out further. Currently, I am actively involved in an X-Men themed MUSH (X-Men: Retribution -- telnet to xmr.dune.net:4567) and am helping in the development of an Arthurian Legends game and an original themed sci-fi game. In addition to these, I also run a resource centre for these MUSH games (since 1998 -- Online Gaming Resource MUX -- www.ogrmux.com).

Social Gaming in Graphics Mode

Eventually, graphic adventure games came back into my life with games such as NeverWinter Nights and DiabloII which could be played standalone or with friends over a network. I never played over the networks because my connection was too slow or my machine didn't have enough memory or a good enough video card or whatever the reasons were at the time. These were third-person games where you controlled an avatar or character through a world where you had to complete quests and tasks, even if it was just running out into an area and killing off as many monsters as you could. These involved some amount of skill or you'd find your character quickly overcome and quite dead. When you'd resurrect in a 'safe zone', all of the items you had in your inventory and often your gold which you had looted would be gone, though if you ran back to your character's corpse, you could quickly 'loot' all these items back if you were quick about it. It was a pain and often meant many deaths as you tried to run past the denizens of evil who killed your character in the first place.

More recently, I have gotten myself sucked quite thoroughly into World of Warcraft (WoW), which is probably the most popular MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) in the world with something like 8 million players world-wide. Let me tell you: this game rocks them all when it comes to others in the graphical RPG or adventure games genre. Why? Because it combines so many facets that I loved about the older games from my childhood and teen years and even into my adult years.

For one, the graphics are pretty darned amazing. The scenery alone is gorgeously done and are worthy of being used as desktop backgrounds on any computer, if you ask me. You can just see the love that the creators and game designers poured into this thing. From the changing of the weather (sometimes it snows, sometimes it rains and sometimes, there are sandstorms, depending on where you are) to the puffs of breath your character breathes out while standing idle in a cold zone, the attention to detail is just phenomenal.

"This is my BOOMSTICK!"

Each race and gender has its own dance style, for example. Gnomes' dancing are fashioned off of the way Mini-Me dances in Austin Powers. The female and male Blood Elves dance like Brittney Spears and Napoleon Dynamite, respectively. Each race and gender have their own set of jokes and flirtatious comments that they can make. References to movies, literature and other pop culture just thrives throughout the game, including salutes to the character Ash in Army of Darkness (one of the dwarven mortar team yells out "This is my BOOMSTICK!"), to South Park (a sword made up for the tv show was recently added into the game) and even to Wimpy from Popeye ("I'd gladly pay you Tuesday for a Hamburger today!"). So these things make it a lot of fun.

This game is also all about storylines. There are players who played the standalone games of Warcraft I, II and III who just squeal with excitement when they find bits and pieces in the World of Warcraft game that reference some lore which hearkens back to an event that happened in the old games. There are huge, overarching storylines as well as smaller ones which are usually conveyed through the quests that players may take part in. Books can be found throughout the game with tidbits of knowledge about the history and legends of the world of Azeroth (where Warcraft is set), as well as that of its races.

Besides the graphics and the story, there is also action for those of us who like that sort of thing. You can go out and defeat 'mobs' (any aggressive creature that is run by the game) or you can participate in PvP (player versus player) fighting for various rewards. For those who want a break from the action, there are professions that your characters can learn and skill-up, not to mention the social aspect of the game. And for those who really want to delve into the lore of the game, there are 'RP' servers, where people can actually role-play as their characters while playing the game -- I'll admit that after having tried this out a bit, I think I'm still quite far off from being fully comfortable with role-playing on WoW. Perhaps down the road, my mind might change.

Why gaming?

Why gaming? Why fishing or playing pool? Why collecting stamps? Why War of 1812 recreations?

Why not?

Gaming has offered me countless hours of entertainment and relaxation, as well as stress relief. My hand-eye coordination has certainly benefited from the years of gaming (I not only passed my driver’s test on the first try, but passed with flying colours!). My husband also marvels at my ‘mad multitasking skills’, which are another direct result from my years of gaming.

And throughout it all, I was encouraged to read. I won’t attribute learning to read with my gaming experience because I was reading well before the Atari came home, but I will attribute the enhancement and encouragement of reading to the computer gaming. Whether it’s reading the quests and chat screens in WoW or just reading the instructions on how to play Pac-Man, there is reading involved in almost every single game out there.

I recognize that it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but I just can’t get enough of it and think that gaming has certainly contributed to the person I am today!

Kelly is a library assistant at McMaster University who enjoys spending her spare time watching sci-fi, fantasy and horror movies with her husband, reading books of the same genre, sketching "odd things" (as some family members have called them) and, of course, playing video games.

At the time of this article, her greatest gaming achievement to date is getting her main WoW character, a Night-Elf Warrior, up to level 55, just three levels shy of reaching the new area called the Outlands on the game. She hopes to reach level 58 in the coming weeks. Her secondary character, a Blood Elf mage, now runs her own guild on the Horde side and is up to level 36 in a matter of two months.

It should be noted that this is the full, unedited version of the article of the same name which was printed in the March 2007 issue of Library Connections at McMaster University. She heavily edited this version down in order to better fit as an article in a newsletter (otherwise the newsletter would have been three times as thick as it usually is!).

© 2007 K. Penfold, all rights reserved.