Back in the Ancient Times of the Internet

So, I was visiting my mother last week, and she’d put together a bag of stuff for me. Toys and clothes for the small, mobile one. A book she’d bought on clearance at Barnes and Noble, and another she’d borrowed from Grandma and that I could borrow from her. Some mail from people who haven’t figured out that I moved out ten years ago. A first draft copy of one of my novels.

And something I’d completely forgotten about.

You see, back when the Internet was young and we had to pay by the hour, I had very accidentally stumbled across this activity called simming. It’s essentially role-playing, but done in chatrooms. I fell into a Star Trek themed one as a young teenager, practically died from excitement, and spent my teenaged years portraying various officers on various starships.

(My first was, not surprising, essentially me, but cooler. She was part Vulcan and fenced as a hobby. By the time she was promoted to Chief Engineer over six years of playing her, I’d learned enough to age her appropriately and separate her more.)

Also completely accidentally, I ended up in command of a starship, the USS Excalibur, which I ran for five years, and retired when I went to college. And I used to save the chat logs, and my mother had found one and included it in the bag.

(It’s a bit ridiculous. Apparently we were missing most of the crew, so we decided to do a talent show instead. Highlights include Monty Python skits, juggling acts, a song from Les Mis, and two velociraptors singing the Lumberjack song.)

And, while I’d been writing since I was small, I think spending so much of my time simming as a teenager helped me with structure a lot. The captain of the starship was essentially the DM, in charge of running plot and coordinating guest characters. Every week I had to think up something for us to do that would engage everyone. I had to keep the plot moving. I had to wrangle other players who occasionally went off in their own directions, not unlike some characters. And because I had constant feedback from the crew, I learned how to change things so everything went smoothly.

It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about that time in my life. Seeing that chatlog was a nice reminder of fun, happy, formative times.