I have never played an online RPG ever.
Same here. (And really glad to see you back here, Tracii!) Not sure i’d recognize one if it crossed my path. The stereotype seems to be that nerds are supposed to be gamers, and my nerd CV is deep and long, but gamer?: i’m Just Not.
Wrote myself into a corner writing a gamer character in one of my in-progress fatlovesex novels. A real-life cousin-once-removed and family visited for a couple days this last summer. She’s around 12, somewhere on the ADHD spectrum (everyone’s pretty sure), and has some life struggles. She’s also a gamer par excellence like i have never seen. One of the small handheld platforms, and i don’t recall which one, since i was too dazzled watching her on a team of about 4 up against another team of 4, made up of players online all over the world, running paint rollers around and painting each other into corners or killing or whatever, and trying to pick up eggs or something and rush those into a gold basket or bin. (I wrote down the name of the game but can’t find my notes on that today.) So much happening
so fast, with a bunch of
Booyah! and other social cues between team players. I watched something like 6 game rounds, and she was MVP on a couple.
There are levels of skills going on there beyond mere hand-eye coordination. I sure hope there’s not another real-life shooting/physical violence war ever (or in my lifetime at least), but if there is, i’d hope for her and people like her—with proper military training—to be in charge of the remote digital weaponry.
Last video game i played:
Crystal Quest (Wikipedia), on a Mac Plus, 1988. Unless one’s counting on-screen solitaire, in which case it’s Royal Parade, within the past year. Just read in the Wikipedia article that “
Crystal Quest is easier to play in color mode on the Macintosh version as opposed to
monochrome, as more RAM is used, causing enemies to move slower”, which i guess made me a hardcore gamer.

For those who don’t know the game, leveling up involves passing through an opening at the center top of the screen, at which point the screen redraws with the next level and game play immediately continues. This was the era when stock DOS/Win maybe? PCs could still only beep, whereas every Macintosh had a speaker rather than a buzzer/beeper, and sound circuitry. Hence sound effects were as big a deal as the (then) hi-res graphics. Crystal Quest was loaded with sound effects (of varying quality). The stock game had what was supposed to be a woman having an orgasm when the player’s ball (or whatever the cursor was supposed to be) passed through that portal to level up. It was the tackiest, ickiest, rock-bottom budget cliché porn sound imaginable (despite being decent fidelity). I found it so offensive that before the Critter Editor existed, i was in there with ResEdit exchanging a Super Chicken squawk for the feigned orgasm sound.
Not because of anything to do with sex with anyone or anything, but because my inner 9 year old found this vintage cartoon squawk funny.
Most of my Crystal Quest scores were mediocre. Far and away the best score i ever had was the day my True Love of 7 years broke up with me. Long story, but the basic idea: at the time, i truly believed she was the only human being in the history of civilization who could ever possibly love me, and she was leaving. She was going around our house packing up her stuff, and i was forlornly leaning my face on one hand, working the mouse with the other, not giving a flying fajita about anything. Shooting randomly, only half paying attention to the game, not caring. I blew through levels i had never seen before, encountering threatening creatures i’d only seen in the paper documentation, but never before on the screen.
I still have that Mac Plus, though it’s boxed up, with a newer platinum BC ROM version in its place, hooked up, seldom used. The original 1987 80 MB hard drive finally suffered a fatal head crash circa 2005 after one too many running lift-and-drops to break through its stiction issue. By that point it was so seldom used that even though the most recent backup was a year or several old, i didn’t lose any data. Chances are excellent that the/a sound-modified version of Crystal Quest is on that newer drive right now, and if i cleared enough junk out of the way and turned things on, i could play it. But likely i won’t, now that i have other priorities, like making posts like this.