This is part one of a three-part blog diving into the ways I was shaped and molded by the internet into the weirdo I am today.
I warned y'all.
Without sounding hyperbolic, it's safe to assume that the internet (especially in the last 10 or so years with social media being as popular as it is) has had a significant impact on everybody's life. And I mean EVERYBODY. Even in areas where it's not as easily accessed as others, just the sheer existence of it has molded the way people view the world. But that's a whole entire separate discussion for another time, this particular post the impact it had on this dude right here.
It all started around 2002. I was about 11 years old and still too young to truly grasp how much everything in the world was rapidly changing from the events of 9/11. My main concern at that point in my life was that our family was about to finally obtain a new computer to replace our old rugged Window 95's running machine. I had a lot of memories with it. Playing, what up until recently I thought was an obscure game, called "3D Dinosaur Adventure", which I had come to learn recently was something nearly ever child raised in the 90's with a computer had played at some point. I'd sometimes even be able to sneak up at night and play some "Leisure Suit Larry", even though the tacky humor went above my head. Needless to say, even at such a young age, I had realized something about PC gaming just seemed more "sophisticated" and "adult" than my Sega Genesis or PS1.
The person who was helping us build this new computer was a boyfriend of my mom's friend. He was always "that cool older dude" to me, he played tons of games and had a real nice PC himself that I had watched him play Unreal and Half-LIfe on. He was coming over to talk to my grandparents about what sort of budget they were working with. I would always find a way to run into the middle of the conversations and highlight how important it was that it could run the latest games. Eventually, I got through to them through pure headache inducing insistence that only a 11-year old hyper active kid is capable of. They asked how much more it would cost to get me what I wanted, and apparently it was reasonable enough...
I was incredibly intimidated by this thing. It's worth noting that our old rig never had internet access, my only real brush with the "World Wide Web" was from going to my great grandmother's and using her dial-up hooked PC to play Neopets and look up guides on whatever game I was stuck on at the time. This thing that we had was hooked up to the cable line, so everything was so FAST. I could bring up any page in no time flat, even if it HAD IMAGES ON IT. This was mind-blowing stuff to me.
Actual picture of me.
In a month or so's time, I was doing it all. Downloading demos, reading game reviews, playing Runescape after nearly a year of having to enviously listen to my friends at the lunch table talk about their various characters. I was in seventh heaven and it wasn't before too long that I had started learning more about these so called "gaming forums". I knew very little about how they worked, only that it was a gathering of other fellow gamers such as myself talking about the latest games and what was around the corner. I always felt a sense of guilt reading through certain posts that were filled to the brim with cussing and name calling. Yet, it also intrigued me, the back and forth arguing between people over who's consoles were better was surreal to me, because it seemed like no feelings were hurt, like they were almost doing it for sport or something.
As a such a nervous and odd kid, I was the target of multiple bullies throughout my early school years. It didn't take much to set my sensitive self off and cause me to go into a sort of anxiety induced panic. It got to the point where I became extremely introverted and kept an extremely small social circle. Shortly after I turned 13, with my hormones starting to run rampant on me, I got the sudden urge to be more expressive. I finally created an account on the brand new gaming site, 1up.
1up was owned by one of the biggest gaming magazine publishers of the time, Ziff Davis. It drew many people because of this and quickly became the most popular forums for video games. I had gone under a fake name with my profile out of fear of being "stalked" or "hacked" being the naive teen I was. It wasn't before too long after that, after many awkward and nightmarish grammar filled posts, I had finally garnered a sort of reputation. I was sort of one of the "little brothers" of the community, considering the average poster was somewhere in the age bracket of 15-30. Even though I could be obnoxious and clueless, I had started making friends who I'd go on to connect with and even actually talk to through the online games we'd all agree to buy. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had a group of people I could comfortably talk to that wasn't just limited to my best friend and his younger brother.
After a few years, without me even realizing it, my internet persona had bled into my actual personality. I was more confident and witty. My humor was more clever and unique to people in school because I had become so accustomed to the sort of things that older crowds found funny. All the quirks that made me a target for bullying became endearing. While I was hesitant of this newfound popularity, I accepted it nonetheless.
It's nearly impossible for me to imagine what I would be like without having had these experiences. The amount of confidence I gained from being able to talk to thousands of others behind a brightly lit screen had been absorbed by me to the point that it helped me overcome the social hurdles I had before. As silly and corny as it may seem, I sincerely believe I would not be the person I am today without this weird thing we all sort of take for granted now. So, thank ya Al Gore for inviting the internet. ; )