Indulge in Multiplayer Nostalgia

[Knighthart]

I often experience times where I think back on the long-term experiences I've had in specific online games, and try to piece together how much of it really made me who I am today. Multiplayer games, MMOs, Live Service games- essentially the kind of games that are more accurately "lost to the times"
That temporary aspect of it just makes it all the more emotionally impactful. The community aspect highlights the shifting nature of how people act over time- not just culturally, but personally as well, considering you were also a different person at these times. The game itself was its own culture, and you were involved. Inside jokes, dedicated slang, sharing exploits


It's just weird to think how utterly immersed I was into these games, yet I was still simultaneously interacting with the world. Compared to just nostalgia on standard games, that blend of social exposure almost prevents you from being too submerged in your own little world where you start to make your own delusions of that time period. It grounds you. Doesn't it?

I'll start.

S4 League was pretty much the game I first developed a 'competitive mindset' with. Being in a community where we constantly pushed each other to improve, striving to one-up one another by out pulling off the sickest plays. Clipping every mediocre play and sharing it thinking it was the coolest shit ever. It wasn't just how we wanted to play, there was also so much focus on trying to make the most cool looking oc as well.
Ai space was a game where my experience wasn't so reliant on socializing, but it still had its own merits. All the foreigners and japanese users were playing in the same server, so it was a pretty cultural mix. That ended up being my first foray in typing in another language, one I hardly knew at the time. But really compared to other mmos, people weren't really as talkative regardless. The extra focus on making everyone feel like the main character pretty much just incentivized everyone to play it like a single player game where you finally get to date your waifu. It wasn't challenging at all but still, the countless hours I had just lounging around with other players and their dolls were so comfy.
And probably the game most end up having core memories with, Ragnarok Online. I think I'm going to have to attribute most of my public personality having its roots of being formed there. Though it feels like any experience shared of RO are things shared around innumerous times you've heard again and again.

Lots of nostalgia for MMOs and just other general multiplayer live service games, but these three are pretty much the ones I've ended up being so deeply integrated into. To the degree of being involved in the meaningless drama, which is so charming looking back on.

I'd love to read stories of you guy's experiences, to step into your world and relive the nostalgia for these eroded games that defined an era for you.
You know, it'd be pretty cool if somehow any some of us unknowingly knew each other from them.

 

[Gorse]

I was very fortunate with online multiplayer games growing up. I didn't have any online-enabled home consoles until the PS4, and I only had access to Mac computers, but I still managed to have a ton of great multiplayer experiences through nothing more than a laptop and a prayer. Here's what took up a good chunk of my adolescence:

Team Fortress 2 is my favourite multiplayer game and favourite PC game full-stop. I jumped on the bandwagon as soon as it went F2P in 2011, and from the moment I first played a round of 2fort, I was in love. Immediately, I got all my friends to get with it, and very soon, it was our primary online hangout throughout a good portion of late-grade and high school. We were all deep into the game – we formed a competitive clan, spent time with the in-game economy, had our own "regular" server, trolled the hell out of fellow players (hey, we were 14!), and came up with a variety of unfunny injokes.

Beyond the people I knew IRL, I also made a lot of Steam friends through public servers, and spent a ton of time on YouTube reviewing strategy videos and watching parodies made in GMod. (STBlackST's were the best, but I was also partial to this and this.) I knew the lines to every Meet the Team video by heart. I bought other games just for custom hats and weapon skins. (Both Poker Night games were worth it.) The culture surrounding TF2 in the early-to-mid-2010s was just excellent, in so many different ways. Like a lot of people, I stopped playing regularly when they brought in custom matchmaking to compete with Overwatch (bad idea, Valve), but I'll always cherish the laughs this dumb war-themed hat simulator brought me and my chums when we were young.

Here's my single best video game memory: "Meet the Pyro" came out at noon on our last day of grade school. The teachers let us do whatever we wanted that day, so me and about 10 other kids were huddled around a computer, desperate to the see the video as soon as it came out. Unfortunately, YouTube was blocked, so we were searching feverishly across loads of sketchy video-mirroring sites, praying to get even a trace of it. Finally, we found one site that had the whole thing available to watch, and we all lost our fucking minds at how funny it was. We must have watched that two-minute promo at least ten times over, and spent the rest of the day laughing about it. Then, summer started, and I never saw a lot of those guys again.

Does anyone remember OMGPOP (or, if you're really cool, iminlikewithyou)? It was a "social gaming" website that came about in the late 2000s – think the Facebook gaming era. The site hosted a wide selection of mini-games in various genres – Bomberman clones, Scrabble clones, clubhouse games like darts and pool... whatever you wanted. Playing the games would grant you coins that unlocked custom skins, characters, and power-ups, and there were various chatrooms that you could meet people in.

The coolest feature, though, was that you could copy/paste a link to a game on other websites, and whoever clicked it would join instantly. As such, I spent a ton of time playing these games with my friends on a forum I was a regular at, and we all had a lot of fun together. An older girl that I was insanely in love with liked the pool game, so I played it with her for hours, eventually unlocking every customizable available for it. (Hey, I was 13!) OMGPOP is where that popular old iOS game Draw Something came from – it was on this site first, and we had lots of fun with it. By 2013 or so, the site had been bought by Zynga, who abruptly shuttered it and laid off all its employees. I'd quite enjoy it if an idea like this came back, some day. (And Marina, if you're still out there, I'm available! )

Finally, before either of the previous games, I was also very active in a browser-based MMORPG called The Kingdom of Loathing. This was a fully online, multiplayer adventure game illustrated with hand-drawn stick-figure graphics – a common internet art style in those days. You interacted with the game world by navigating through various web pages, and could do all the stuff you'd do in something like WoW – fight monsters, go on quests, play mini-games, build a little base, craft items, and work your way through the storyline. It must seem very primitive by modern standards, but browser MMOs weren't uncommon back then, and I'm pretty sure KoL was considered the market leader.

The best thing about KoL, though – by far – was the game's humour. It was a comedy MMO, and everything, from item descriptions to battle messages to quest outlines, had a snarky, tongue-in-cheek sense of playfulness. I adored with this game's tone – the sense of smart, multi-layered wit was exactly what I wanted in my adolescence, and I'd spend hours upon hours reading pretty much every piece of text the game would allow me to. Like Knighthart in this thread's OP, this game heavily influenced the person I'd become as I grew up (online and off), and I'm grateful for it. If you ever wondered why I always type in full sentences, it's because of KoL – to speak to other players in-game, you had to pass a spelling/grammar/punctuation test with a perfect score. If I were king of the world, that would be mandatory for everyone.

As with TF2, I was also heavily involved in the culture surrounding this game – the community had loads of in-jokes to enjoy, and the developers themselves created some very funny, entertaining side-projects, like a full internet radio station and a general discussion podcast hosted by the game's creators. KoL was popular before the smartphone age, and it never really had a huge player base, so everyone was pretty close, and it wasn't hard to meet community figures directly. (One of whom gave me a personal invitation to his exclusive clan. ) For a few years, I was a somewhat common face in the game's chatroom, which gave me my first exposure to talking with other people online. An adventurer was me, indeed!

These games weren't the only multiplayer experiences I had online – I also had an internet-enabled DS, 3DS, and PSP – but they were the ones that shaped me, and gave me the most fun I've had with video games yet.