Back in my day....BBS's, College Systems and early subscription services

Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL, precursors to what you kid’s now call “The Internets”. There was a day... so long ago that it is now a time of legends, where Dragon’s prowled looking for Marathon bars and soda came in tin cans and glass bottles... that one made a choice for your “online entertainment” and it weren’t free.

Some of us will remember “BBS’s”, Bulletin board systems.... these were simple systems that you dialed into ( yes I said dialed into) and were able to read some mail lists. People would never believe that people would run “Role Playing Games” and even Strategy games via this archaic method but believe me they did. You did not have the ability to send email everywhere in the world.... you were restricted to “subscribers” to the service.

( I wonder what teenagers would think if they were shown how we used to have to call a phone number, listen for a carrier signal that slam the handset down onto a Modem)

There were the systems run by Universities, I remember the Delta System, that i was introduced to in our schools career center on a 300 baud Dec writer and the PLATO system at the university. PLATO was a joy for me, on Friday’s they would have UDgaming where you could (with permission) play a wide range of games ( Moria and Battlestar were my favorite) on the amber screens of the PLATO terminals.

Then came the new wave of Subscription services...the AOL’s, the Prodigy’s and others that were a glimpse of what was to come. I still remember playing “Neverwinter Nights” on AOL... No Not that one, a much older version, Compuserve had a Squad Leader game that I never got to work on any computer i used. Now these services weren't free, you paid per hour and there were usually “peak usage” time “non peak” price scales that could add up in the olde days.

One of the services I belonged to was “Sierra Online” ( which would become the Imagination Network), this was a gamesentric system that enabled you to play Red Baron and other games against other players online and I spent many a hour playing there Fantasy game. Of course, the Bulletin boards were still big draws and again they did not extend beyond the boarders of the system... but it was cool, the way I imagine old maid was cool when it first came out.

I wonder if kids in the USA are even able to grasp the concept of a world before the world wide web. I can still remember the days the services began to disappear, some tried to hang on ( AOL still exists) and we took our first steps into a world joined electronically.

Gaming Girls....

Girls in Gaming? back in the day, the 80’s and 90’s you just didnt see it that much. Gaming in those days, days of playing in your parents basements, 2 litre bottles of soda and huge bags of potato chips and jalapeno cheese dip, was largely the realm of the the great unwashed masses of males.

I do remember one girl, Jennifer Grotogears, who, not only being a DR Who fan, was the first female gamer my age i knew, but besides her, no other girl played in our games. Don’t get me wrong, at the Cons and here and there a few brave pioneers of the girlish kind made their presence known. some matched their male counterparts in there class restriction against cleanliness and could spew geek lingo better then most but they were a minority.

Every now and then you have a player that would force (or be forced by ) their girlfriend to play... always a disaster, usually derailing the game and she would disappear as soon as they broke up. Then there were the girl who showed up and every gamer tried to pick them up, GM’s showered them with gifts a favors... “I’m a 2nd level moron” says the male gamer “Oh I’m 100th level demi-god” says the girl. Nothing could destroy a campaign like a single girl gamer... not by anything she did, but by all the young bucks trying to gain her affection.

I still remember standing on the top floor of the Baltimore convention center, watching the reaction as a fairly attractive gaming girl walked by below, every guy would turn and gawk, she was the shark in a sea of guppies. I used to get a kick out of the guys trying to pick them up.... Guys wearing t-shirts the heralded their favorite class, dice pouches firmly fastened to their belts and who had the grooming standard of a homeless man... tried to wow these rare creatures with tales of dungeons past and of loot they had acquired.

Things are different now, though geek guys still outnumber geek girls, the numbers have certainly changed. The last group I ran, girls actually outnumbered guys. There was once a super bad social stigma to being a gamer, at least with RPG players, I don’t know if that still applies now a days. I was once ask “are you a satan worshipper” and the news had stories of kids killing themselves when their characters died.... I think we are passed that now.