This prompt comes at a really good (or bad) time, because I am deep right now into thinking back on the past couple of decades when my life has been lived around and within online gaming, bar the occasional break from it all.
SDWeasel at Unidentified Signal Source asks:
What’s something you’ve lost along the way that you would love to have back?
Spur of the moment? What’s on my mind right now? I’d like to have Brian “Psychochild” Green back.
Sad to share the news that Brian Green, game developer @Psychochild, passed away of natural causes in Rockville, Maryland. He was 46 years old, well known in the game developer community for running the early online multiplayer game Meridian 59 from 2001-2010. RIP, Brian.
— Elonka Dunin (@ElonkaDunin) August 12, 2020
Brian was an amazing game developer who helped define MMOs when nobody was quite sure what MMOs were. His MMO, Meridian 59, took on the issues of making a 3D game on computers with no 3D hardware before anyone else was really even thinking it was possible. EverQuest, which came a year or two later, required a 3D graphics board.
He was also extremely active in the blogging community. His insightful commentary was always welcome, always amazing.
Someone else I’d like to have back? Rob Bradwisch, AKA “Ginthalas”, an inky tank from my EverQuest guild, Crimson Eternity. He’d dropped off the face of the Earth, and then we had news that in fact he had died of a blood clot in his lung. He hadn’t even turned 30 yet. I put him in my “Befallen” tribute I built in Neverwinter Online’s Foundry.
I don’t even have any record of it. So I guess Neverwinter Online’s Foundry is something I would like to have back, too. Here’s a video of part of it, under construction.
While I was going through the archives of my old blog, I found the saved Google Buzz archives. That was a really cool tool where you could publish content and have great discussion without any trouble at all. When Buzz died, Google followed it up with Google Reader, the one tool that brought the blogging community together and made it easy to discover new friends and new communities. I was blogging before Google Reader, but Reader is what made me a blogger.
When Google killed Reader in favor of Google Plus (which they also ended up killing), it broke the community. It hasn’t been the same since.
So yeah, bring back Google Reader. And also, I miss my friends. Gone but never forgotten.
I so miss Google Reader. I also miss the wonder and awe we had throughout the 90s when everything internet and MMO were brand new. I still think about the mind-blowing experience of my first time loading into Minoc in Ultima Online in summer 1997. There still seem to be islands of wonder and awe but I have a harder and harder time finding them. In part because the world has changed in part because I’m probably a grumpy old man now.
I hear this a lot, especially when talking to the old guard of MMO players. I definitely got more excited for EQ when it came out than any other game before or since. It changed my life, and I’m not even exaggerating. There are still transformative games out there giving people the same thrill — Minecraft, Fortnite, Overwatch, Animal Crossing — and I’m reluctant to give to them all the time I gave to EQ because I value my spare time so much more now. I used to have a rule, that I would not get excited about a game unless I was willing to spend a year making it my main game. Forcing myself to take the plunge, good or bad. The first game I applied that rule to was Rift. Then, Neverwinter Online — and lately, Final Fantasy XIV. Taking games on their own terms and not trying to compare them to my EQ adventures has allowed me to build a new appreciation for newer games.