At first, my computer was just for computer games, different only in variety and input method (keyboard / mouse) from the video games on my TV or the Gameboy games on my Gameboy. My dad was always keen to acquire the latest games, and we would go to the computer megastore to buy them. I spent most of my time in the kids’ aisle, where I remember the games jumbled in a bin like candy at Blockbuster. My favorites were Petz, The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, and The Sims. My brother loved quiz games like Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? and a series by National Geographic. Sometimes we played games as a family; in one, we raised little troll-like creatures who hatched from eggs, and we named all of ours starting with Z: Zeke, Zachary, Zenia. My dad played his more intense games after dinner, while I watched, small enough to perch on his knee or the arm of the black leather computer chair.
The games felt incredibly lifelike to me, full of real danger and real reward. To say I was emotionally invested wouldn’t be enough. One time, Zeke got on an underwater elevator whose construction we hadn’t finished and, due to either a glitch or a bit of cruel realism, he floated away and we never saw him again. The Grues in Zork would eat you, and you’d have to start all the way over from the beginning, in the utter darkness. Once, my dad was playing a detective game, and he found the killer’s new victim, a clown, dissolved in a barrel of acid. I still remember him opening the barrel (marked with a skull and crossbones, toxic waste) and the clown’s nose and wig were floating there, a complete cartoon of course, the acid was bright green, but my brain made up for the pixelated graphics and it seemed so vivid. My dad felt really bad about it — I think he still does — but an inevitable part of growing up is being shocked by things that you never could have anticipated having to worry about. It wasn’t so long ago, or so far away, that kids were encountering actual dead bodies.
One day, my dad brought home this game that you played with other people. In the game, people were represented by customized anthropomorphic cartoons (cat heads were popular), and you walked around and talked to people and made friends. That seemed to be the goal of the game — making new friends that you didn’t know in real life (“IRL” was the term). My mom was always saying, that cartoon bombshell was probably a nerdy dude IRL. People exchanged little embellishments for their avatars, somehow gathered in the game world. At that age I was really turned on by collecting things. I would secretly play the game and pretend to be my dad, partly to collect items, partly to see if I could convince people I was him. I have a vague memory of watching him explain to his new friends that his 3rd-grade daughter had a habit of taking over his account.
Then I found a game where you could play pretends as a Redwall character, also with other people, “online.” I don’t remember how I discovered it; maybe through my cousins, who had introduced me to the Redwall series, books about anthropomorphic animals waging medieval warfare, with oddly Christian undertones.
I recall a plain black window where you typed, the likes of which I wouldn’t see again until I started my computer science classes in college. Looking back, it was simply a chatroom, but I didn’t think of it that way. It was a world, and you created your own character, who would travel around and play out their story, interacting with other people’s characters along the way. I already liked writing stories, and I was very excited to find an intersection with pretends, which I spent most of my time playing IRL: at recess, when we went ran boring errands on the weekend, all summer.
I was especially excited about the anonymity of the game. It was one of my deepest wishes at the time to be treated like a boy. Boys got to star in all the adventures in my favorite books, movies, and games. I liked to play boy characters in pretends, but then some new playmate, maybe one of my brother’s friends, would point out that I, though short-haired and cargo-shorts-wearing, was not in fact a boy. Online, this wouldn’t be a problem.
I took the Redwall game very seriously. It would go something like this:
jeremythefox enters The Inn.
The Inn would have been the name of one of the chatrooms, and I would have been Jeremy, or something like that. I loved the name Jeremy, but I insisted on pronouncing it “Jermy,” even after my parents told me it was not pronounced that way (I felt so wronged by this).
jeremythefox: Jeremy was exhausted. He’d spent the day traveling on foot across the West Meadow, and he was looking forward to a warm supper and a good night’s sleep.
maxihotbunny: Hi there Jeremy
jeremythefox: “Hi,” Jeremy said, raising a weary paw at the stranger in the corner. He couldn’t see their face, which was covered in shadows. “What brings you to the inn?”
maxihotbunny: Just passin through
maxihotbunny tickles jeremythefox
captainbearpaw (moderator): Captain Bearpaw strides into the room, making the other animals quiver in fear. “What’s the trouble here?” He calmly takes in the situation through his steely gray eyes.
maxihotbunny: jeremythefox, a/s/l?
At this point, I would probably have closed the game, quivering in fear myself. That was how it mostly went. I was always clicking the little x that made the Internet go away, afraid and confused about what was going on and what I was supposed to do, and then I was drawn back in again, trying something or somewhere new. I lived in constant apprehension that one of my parents would come and look over my shoulder, my whole private and disturbing world exposed on the screen in black and white.
When I played pretends with my friends, I was the actor/director. I spoke in a fast monotone, like I was trying to get through a script reading, while having to constantly interrupt my lines to give stage directions and character notes to the other kids (often, just my little brother). I was open to good ideas from the cast, but I always had the final say, and I always got to steal a scene when I wanted to.
Playing pretends with strangers was almost unbearably exciting, and almost unbearably anxiety-inducing at the same time. The worst thing was when someone got mad at me — I remember I would answer with “8/m/CA” and people would be like, “you’re 8?” And when I insisted, they’d say bad words at me, which I took to be them getting very, very angry. Like, ready to burst out of the screen and come after me. I quickly learned to tell people I was 13, at least — 13+ seemed to be the magic number for the Internet.
For all the people who scared me, there were also people willing to listen to me — willing to play back, at a much more sophisticated level than any of my friends. I found similar games in the form of online message boards, where you could write whole paragraphs as some magical creature or animal. It was like a passalong story, and you’d wait, days or weeks (I could barely sleep at times), for someone to reply. You played for the long term, your character development recorded in your post history, although there was some sense in which all of this was everyone just talking to themselves, so it didn’t really matter much what you said.
These games were frustrating and disturbing in their own ways. My grand designs for my characters — I spent hours workshopping their backstories — often fell by the wayside when no one replied to me, or those who did weren’t on the same page with what I’d storyboarded. When people would talk “out of character,” their unguarded ranting about their nerdy-adult problems made me uncomfortable. I’d always been good at talking to grown-ups, but I found I didn’t actually enjoy pretending to be one.
There were weird posts marked “17+.” In one message board, everyone was pretending they were wolves, and they had these “mating” threads. The allure of the taboo was intense. I would skim the words very quickly and get a strange scared, embarrassed, and excited feeling, though I really had no idea what they were talking about at all. It was like reading about the mystical rituals of a foreign culture.
I played these games off and on as a pre-teen, until I just grew out of them. I don’t remember a single event, but I do remember a growing shame — which had been there at the beginning, but now had something to do with the fact that I was too old to be doing this stuff, not too young. I’d stopped reading Redwall and the only fantasy books I still devoured were Harry Potter. If I’d wanted to be a boy, I didn’t want to be a teenaged guy or a man, on the Internet or otherwise. Instead of joining the girls who were reading their fan fiction and diary entries in the creative writing club, I started trying to write “literary” short stories, and contributed to the high school newspaper. I made friends with the people at the top of all the subjects, the mainstream nerds.
I never spoke about my pretends life on the Internet to anyone. As I got older, the Internet, this place that had been my fake world, became part of my real world. My online playthings weren’t put away in the attic like my toys, but overwritten and erased by reality, or something like it. I quickly forgot all those hours spent deciding how to represent my characters, as I focused on choosing the best photos and lines to represent my teenaged self. It wasn’t as fun, but the Internet and I had changed, and we couldn’t go Home again.
That specially delicious feeling of pretends is lost now, like the overwhelming excitement of Christmas morning — but I can still feel the ghost of it. When I left my job without knowing what to do next, I looked for signs of something I’d always been interested in. Writing had been an obsession since I could hold a crayon, and it was suddenly impossible for me to ignore the thousands and thousands of words I’d typed, voluntarily, on those internet chat rooms and message boards. I still didn’t like it, but it seemed a not-insignificant part of my past.
When I told my fiancé about my online roleplaying, I felt like I was dropping all my pretense of having been just a little bit awkward as a kid. As per usual with confessions like this, I expected my pent-up emotions would be matched by his shock and disgust, but he just listened as he would to any other story from my childhood, not particularly interested or disinterested. To him, this stuff was just one of many weird things that kids get into. What a relief.
I looked up one of the old message boards I frequented and it’s gone now. The top hit is a seemingly alt-right / 4chan wiki that I feel lucky never to have seen before. For some reason it has a ridiculously angry description of that old roleplaying site: “The general populace of this filthy rat’s nest consists of furries, basement-dwellers, and your occasional lesbian!” (And that was one of the tamer lines.) All online roleplayers are female, the wiki says, even the ones who claim to be men. It’s the kind of stuff that hurts because it gets at something true. But I’m sure there were other smart little kids who just wanted to play pretends games, who discovered the concept of furries way too young and were embarrassed and disturbed that somebody would put boobs on animals.
These places on the Internet end up becoming havens for people with too much time on their hands, which includes the usual adult suspects and, I can’t help but think, a lot of precocious kids like me. I know I turned out fine, that I didn’t encounter close to the worst of the Internet, and that it’s inevitable kids explore and find stuff that bothers them. Still, I wonder if there could be a place for dreamy kids, where they don’t have to be adults, and don’t have to carry around the feeling that something’s not right. That would be nice. But it is it too much to ask of a free Internet and smart 8 year-olds?
I wonder, too, if growing up with YouTube and social media means that kids no longer think of the Internet as a place to pretend. It certainly isn’t normal anymore for thirty-something parents to walk around anonymous chatrooms, dressed as a leopard in a suit. Yet some days I’d take that Internet, back when it was mostly a game.
I can still make it disappear by clicking x, and return to my real life. I think, I hope, we’ll always have that.