My #1 Favorite Game Of All Time…
And now my Number One All-Time Favorite Game. Get ready, it’s not a game you’ll find on any console, hell it’s not even made or produced by a third-party publisher! Not the company I work for, not anybody, and it’s the best goddamn game I ever played, and you know what, in a way, you could say it was a licensed game. It’s based off of a movie/television franchise that’s now endured for 40 years and inspired any number of people into the field of science and engineering for the betterment of humanity. This was my World of Warcraft, my Evercrack. I played it straight for eight years, spent a ton of money on it (okay, my folks did), looked forward to it more than anything, and had more thrills than any other game I’ve ever played. And, I got quite a lot out of it in return.
Oh plus, I’m a huge fucking Trekkie. That’s right, it’s a Star Trek game, but it could easily be any other television drama you can think of, and there were other ones based on the X-Files, Star Wars, Babylon 5, and even Sherlock Holmes in it’s heyday. I’m sure this type of game is still going on in some of the backalleys of IRC and various other chatrooms around the Internet. Maybe there are versions of this game based on 24, Lost, and Battlestar Galactica.
Anti-climatically, this game doesn’t even have a proper name, not a jazzy one either. So we’ll just call it this…
1. Chatroom Roleplaying Game. We also called it a “sim” as in a simulation not as in the other game that goes by the word “sim.” How’s this game work? Like a stripped down version of Dungeons and Dragons. No complex rules; no dice; none of that bullshit – I could never stand it anyway. But to each his own. For our Star Trek themed game, players were recruited in (Starfleet) Academy sessions where they would learn the basics of the game — how to denote actions, dialogue, and follow a chain of command to immerse into the game world. There wasn’t much to know and having fandom in Star Trek was a huge plus, but unnecessary. Once graduated and on a “ship,” you’d meet at a regular designated night during the week and roleplay for an hour or more. You’d start out as an Ensign in a department of your choice and you’d work your way up to Lieutenant Commander. The Commanding Officer (CO) and Executive Officer (XO) were special positions for the game masters (or dungeon masters for you D&D’ers) — on AOL the game masters were people who were trained by AOL much like there are guides on EQ that are trained by SoE, but really, for our game, anyone with good enough experience and a strong imagination could lead their own ship. That’s the technical side of the game.
The story side goes like this: The CO would lay out a mission and everyone would have their part to play. As individual players your character interacted and formed a tangled web of human relations with other characters. This might lead to two people writing short stories together, and if they really liked one another, you might see them on different ships playing different characters but writing with one another. Sometimes it lead to more. In my case, I made a great deal of friends all around the country and every so often I still keep in touch. Yes, at the same time, you do meet your share of weirdos and drama queens, and they amply show their true colors.
So, how do you get promoted or moved up to the next experience level in this game? It’s not based on gaining X number of experience points or collecting a bunch of wigdets or what-have-you to prove you’re better than anyone else. It was partially social politics, but being the fair- and merit-minded seeking person I am, I’d like to say that you were promoted based on how creative you were — as I often times was, and when I ran my own ship/game, that’s how I promoted my players.
On an aside, this is also why I can’t stand the Final Fantasy “roleplaying games” that Square-Enix churns out. They aren’t roleplaying games, because, you don’t play a role. You don’t play a role as in you don’t act out the character or interact in any human intelligible way. Those games are really just Microsoft Excel spreadsheets dressed with pretty 3D graphics that take 80 hours to finish. They really ought to just make movies, but after watching Advent Children and Spirits Within, maybe they shouldn’t.
I suppose in the modern gaming world a guild would be the same thing as one of our roleplaying leagues. If so, the first guild I was in was called Starfleet Online and it was hosted by America Online. Back in the day, that was the best Internetz you could get, and we paid a subscription to it for ages just so I could play this game. Later, Paramount didn’t like us using the word “Starfleet” and due to copyright infringement AOL community leaders had the name changed to “Spacefleet Online.” I later joined another group called Celestial Prime Alliance because my friends were in that “guild.”
“This game gave me more than anything I could have ever spent my time playing.” Remember I said that in the opening lines of this post? Aside from meeting a decent bunch of people, that I would have otherwise never met, I also developed my creative writing skills. I wrote a lot of stories — not the emo shit that flies on livejournal, but I really tried to write what I thought were fun and cool sci-fi stories. I even ran a few of the game sessions myself. My ship was called the USS Intrepid — I inherited it from another guy that created it and left. I’d like to think that in the end, I did a fair job and learned something about wrangling people and sharing other points of views.
So, why did I quit this awesome game? I outgrew it (sadly). With Star Trek’s popularity waning, the new recruits weren’t as dexterous in their imaginative ability or writing. We ended up getting a lot of writers that replaced Star Trek’s upbeat view of humanity with teen angst and drama queen shenanigans. We all had an emo tear in the end – okay, I was really pissed and flamed the shit out of the kids with reckless abandon. No regrets on that either, and eventually I left, and my friend, the Admiral of the Celestial Prime Alliance group, abdicated sometime after that leaving the ships to fend for themselves in the wild of teh Internets.
In terms of greatness, that era of game playing is long dead now that we can have 3D graphics for everything. Turn your imagination off and buy a Geforce 8800 GTX and enjoy the generic run of the mill Lord-of-the-Rings games we’ll be getting from now to eternity.
