Since childhood, I always dreamed of being other than myself, being a better, stronger being, in a more beautiful, nobler world. As a child, this usually involved pretending to be a wild horse (yes, girls love horses) or enacting made-up dramas and comedies with stuffed dolls,
trolls, or even Corgi and Matchbox cars. Any obect that spoke its personality to me could be a player in an impromptu, creative, dramatic experience.
I stumbled into a job at
Kesmai in 1993, one of the earliest developers of multiplayer online games, where I discovered the joys and pitfalls of alternate realities. I became a devoted player of
Legends of Kesmai, a thief named SoSneaky.
Legends grew out of Island of Kesmai, an earlier MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game), for which Compuserve customers --this was before the World Wide Web-- paid an expensive hourly rate for the privilege. It was an enhanced MUD (multi-user dungeon) that used an ASCII character generated map to enhance the mainly text-based interface. Remember that early computer monitors were monotone and did not display graphics (with the Atari and Commodore 64 as notable exceptions.
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