so this past couple of months or so now i’ve been playing dr again(dragonrealms). it’s great to be back. for those that don’t know, it’s an online text-based role-playing game(rpg). it’s open-ended, and very complex. since getting back to the country and getting a job and the rest, i tried world of warcraft(which was fun) and matrix online(which also was fun but that none of my friends tried). both were enjoyable but had nowhere near the level of complexity of dr, and graphically speaking, my imagination still beats WoW and MxO. i’ve always said when a game comes out that is visually good enough to give my imagination a run for its money i’ll play. i gave WoW and MxO a try for just that reason; they didn’t hold water though.

i started playing dr back at the beginning of high school when i was using the mac my mom had gotten from her school to get my hands on free aol accounts. these accounts were free insofar as i only used them for three or four days and then never again. as soon as one needed to end i would get another; this was when i discovered dr. the charges were hourly at the time but the accounts i had didn’t have to pay. i started rolling up characters in dr and playing them for three or four days, then getting a new account and having to roll up a new character again. this went on for a few months and i began talking about it at school. one of my other friends, blakeley, had found it at about the same time but we hadn’t realized the truth about each other. soon it was a constant topic of conversation

without getting into the specifics of the game itself(as in when i first realized my favorite guild), sometime late in 96 i think it was, dr stopped charging by the hour. so one of my friends, adam, who had tried dr a little and had joined in our discussions, let me use his family’s legit aol account at night to play dr, once his family was done. at last i had the chance to play one character consistently; if i hadn’t been in love before, i was now.

near the end of high school dr moved to the web, no longer being a part of aol. i had to once more watch the death of a character whose fate was out of my control. my parents hated that i played dr, which was a problem. i didn’t have a credit card or checks so i suddenly couldn’t play. i had met several more dr kids at school by now, including gavin, and having to sit through study halls listening to them talk about things going on that i was missing drove me crazy. so i started signing up for the free 1-month trials and playing a character, then killing it.

only once i got to college was i finally able to start an account and keep it. i went through three different accounts in my first two years of college, stopping and restarting for various reasons. then, sometime in early 2000, tirakseen came to being. i had learned the ropes of dealing with the need to take a break, but also the importance of keeping one character. i had made and lost many acquaintances in dr because of changing characters so often, and each time i took a break and came back i couldn’t believe i had deleted the previous character(once i was losing characters of my own volition).

tirakseen now is a composite of handfuls of characters that i played over the years, and it’s great to get back to him. he’s one of the few sand elf characters i know of in dr. i logged in multiple times while i was in morocco but never really got to play due to the sporadic nature of the internet there(and it’s crazy slowness). the funny thing about being back, once again, is noticing the difference in the message board personalities. the first thing i think i noticed was that soim was gone, then that two particular personalities were posting all the time who i didn’t even remember. now, 2 months later, i think i’ve pieced together that they’re a little bit younger, dr-wise, than me, one within a year, one more than a year. maybe they both had similar situations as me, no consistent character for a long time, who knows. big personalities on the message boards come and go(and i’m referring to my guild’s specific message boards not the entire game’s)and it’s funny seeing the current ‘trendsetters’ or whatnot. wonder how long they’ll last.

in closing, soim left to play WoW apparently. i think he’ll be back.

peace

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