All your base are belong to us

As much as I hate to reveal my ugly past, I feel that it would offer the best material for my digital narrative. One of my earliest memories with the digital world was a green screen that depicted a rugged, even scorched landscape. Single 8-bit pixels would show a line from which a pixel would shoot to the other side of the screen at the opposing tank that would subsequently fire back at my line. The object of the game was to hit the other line with my pixel before their pixel hit mine. Eventually I figured out that it was a simple matter of trajectory and it was through this game that I learned my multiplication tables to 12 in preschool. Around the same time, my dad introduced me to the Atari gaming system.

The Atari was a pre-Nintendo home gaming system that included games like boxing, depth charge, and a host of other primitive games previously only found in arcades. The joystick was natural to me until I was invited to a friend’s house that had a funny gray box called a “Nintendo.” The Nintendo had an orange gun hooked up to it. My friend’s mother must have seen me eyeing the gun because she asked if I wanted to play. In all its grainy, pixilated glory, I killed duck after duck, even the fast one. Later years would lead me to the running pad on the Nintendo and later to the first gaming system given to me by my parents, the Super Nintendo. A few years later my brother and I were given a Sony Playstation, the newest in gaming innovation. It played black-backed discs called CDs that were barely becoming mainstream. Our computer had a CD drive but in order to use the CDs we had to put them into a case and then put it in the computer.

About the same time that the CD became mainstream, the internet was introduced to me. My dad was way into technology. I remember for a fifth grade project I went to an online encyclopedia and copied information into the geography section. That was the first and only time that I ever plagiarized. I really didn’t think it was bad at the time. I needed to put down information and there it was. The teacher wasn’t savvy enough to catch it and it was only afterwards that my parents scolded me. At least I learned my lesson early. But I should get back to video games.

The first experience that I had with gaming as it is now thought of today was with the early real-time strategy (RTS) Warcraft II. Now, in my defense, this was not the Warcraft that is an online epidemic today. At best, this game was a bunch of bitmaps that moved around the screen. You built up a base (either good or evil), trained units, upgraded them, and then went to war with the enemy. It was fun on its own, but as I found later, even better with friends. During my seventh-grade year, a group of friends got together after school and played Warcraft II, not separately, but against one another. I wondered how this was possible. The lab was set up on the same network and allowed for human players to play against or allied with friends. This was incredible. Instead of playing against an albeit competent, but wholly uncreative AI, playing a peer provided a connection that was previously absent in gaming previous to this moment. With my bus leaving after school, I was only able to play on special occasions, but I always wanted more, which I eventually would.

Two years after my Warcraft experience, I began to play an upgraded version of an old favorite called Age of Empires (you guessed it) II. I first played it as a “trial” that I downloaded from the internet. I later purchased the whole game and effectively “beat the game” on every mode possible; until I found the new online mode that is. The first time I went online I made a new name for myself. Unbenownst to me, I was forming my digital identity forever. I called myself “ace_elite.” I had recently seen a Discovery channel special on snipers that shot the ace of spades after training and the best units in the game were labeled “elite,” so it only made sense to combined the two coolest things in my life. This became my email address, username, and callsign for anything that I experienced in the digital world and the “ace” still hangs around in some ways today.

Online play opened me up to an international experience. I played the game with real people all over the world. I was introduced to new ideas, new cultures, and a new vocabulary. I knew all the swear words. But through gaming I learned how to use them. Words like noob, ping, and lag became regularly used in my online vocabulary.