I Had My First Kiss in GemStone III | Hacker News Reader

I Had My First Kiss in GemStone III

gizmodo.com

65 pointsbenbreen19 comments

I met my first girlfriend in Dekaron (AKA 2moons, an mmorpg) when I was a kid, in 2007ish. I met her in a map for mid-leveled players. We played together in a party, talked a bit, she let me know she was a girl, and she accepted my proposition to be my girlfriend. Then I let her go AFK and leech experience off of me while I was grinding. 3 hours later, it hit me she might not have been a girl, and she was still AFK.

I unfriended that username and never saw them again. Definitely fun while it lasted.

Haha, I used to use this method to pickup MUD chicks. Except I left the grinding to my scripts and tried to convince the girl to cyber in another channel. Pretty sure most of them were dudes.

I ended up meeting many people from networked rpgs over the years, including some actual women, and formed several life long friendships.

I met my wife in EverQuest almost 20 years ago. I still have a lot of friends who I met from Ultima Online and a few from World of Warcraft (I stopped MMOs around that time) - also one of my friends is someone I met on a local BBS in about 1994.

I knew them exclusively online, a few I've met in person a few times, others we've only ever interacted online for the better part of 20 years.

As the world gets smaller, I think this kind of thing will become more common. I think the borders were smaller 20-30 years ago online, and now there is a bit of nationalism/tribalism separating folks, in part because so much of online interaction is now a "service" and not just a newsgroup, special or general interest forum, or IRC.

I think if some of the decentralized systems become more usable/popular we might start to see these adhoc communities form and disappear more organically online, but probably not.

My wife and I will have been married 10 years in a week, and we met in EverQuest. Unfortunately, I don't keep in contact with anyone else we hung out with back then.

I've tried to go back, to EQ or other MMOs, and they're much harder to get a group of friends from now. You used to see the same people in your server, sometimes meeting them multiple times as you leveled through the game. They became known to you and even friends. The changes to make the game more open to solo players and with more instancing you just don't run into the same people more than once anymore.

Depends. WoW Classic brought a fair bit of that feeling back. The server I play on has a lower population and that helps I'm sure.

Mention of UO brings back memories! Sadly, I lost touch with everyone from the ~10 years I spent playing that game. Definitely remember people meeting/marrying through that game.

The COVID lockdown definitely made me think more about the sense of community and belonging we developed with those games/guilds. Somehow in-person interaction seemed harder when you are a teenager. The limited sensory experience of typing and using mouse inputs versus even speaking seems to have made it less threatening or inhibiting. Maybe that’s why I don’t actually feel as trapped as many people have reported feeling.

This article resonates with me, time to get nostalgic.

I grew up on the 90s internet, MUDs, MOOs, IRC, etc. Anything where I could have real time text based conversations with people.

I was also privileged with an easy way to travel and parents who did not really monitor what I was up to. I went all over the US meeting people I met online.

I met the person who eventfully became my wife on a MUD. She lived on the east coast and I was in the Midwest. Without this network we'd have never met. We've been together for 24 years now.

I worked at Simutronics fresh out of high school. (They made GemStone.) I was surprised to see this pop up.

It was a cool group of devs. There was one person in particular, Andy Finkenstadt, who patiently taught me a great deal. Oh yes, and Bryan Cool had the coolest name of all. (He was also a master graphics programmer.)

I met my wife while working there (she lived down the street, and we somehow discovered that fact from a random AOL conversation) so in a roundabout way I fell in love via the GemStone ecosystem, I suppose.

I recall my time on Gemstone with more fondness than probably any other significant part of my childhood. I certainly loved that game more than anything else I've ever played. I don't even consider it a game, really.

It is why I learned software engineering.

I've gone back and created characters a few times, but I've never really hung around long enough to develop relationships or any desire to advance in the game. Guess I'm addicted to real life now :)

I learned how to manage a server, troubleshoot a rotten codebase that decades of amateurs had tortured into something approximating a game, and manage a community from running a MUD. My life would be very different if I hadn't gotten obsessed with them!

GemStone III and DragonRealms taught me to type when I was very young. It was pick and hunt, because I had no formal guidance, but my father at the time had witnessed my playing and commented that I had surpassed his secretary on sheer speed.

Very fond memories of those games.

Gemstone is still around! It's still fun and has a large ongoing community: http://play.net/gs4

> Those games can appeal a lot to queer kids and kids who are questioning their identities

And everyone else who doesn't think any more of it than controlling a character they created.

There are a lot of people that have a hard time understanding that. I distinctly remember being on a committee with much older computer scientists and mathmeticians who were "exploring" the concept of using Second Life - instead of just doing it like everyone else - and their primary hangup and fear was that people could use avatars that weren't their same sex or look like them. A complete red herring to the utility of the platform.

It's like they completely missed that everyone had already played fighting games where you have to beat the game with every character to unlock things. That there was a whole population that wasn't making a statement whatsoever.

Had something like that. It was a RTL-Show called Tutti Frutti...but still, a really "romantic" moment :)

You used to be able to get this on satellite TV in the UK.

I was a teenager and could see that their was this foreign language TV show where women would occasionally get topless.

I had no idea what was actually going on, or what the goal of the show was.

>or what the goal of the show was

I have absolutely no clue even when it was in "MY" Language.

>where women would occasionally get topless.

But i knew that was my goal of watching it :)

Maybe the italians knew what the goal was?

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colpo_grosso_(programma_televi...

I still think about people I met in games 20 years ago that I will never know, or could hope to know, again.

It's one good thing I can say about online games, whatever that is.

Are MMOs just 90% a forum for socializing and 10% game? If so, that probably explains why I never could get into them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com